Back to school special.

When I was represented by Braunstein/Quay, artist Lisa Solomon was the gallery assistant. Later, I went to see her MFA show at Mills and fell in love with the smart way Solomon’s work meshed together ideas of domestic craft with painting and drawing. We’ve remained friends over the years.

I’ve never wanted to teacher art students. I can barely get through guest lecturing them. The whole of art education feels to me like being in one of Dante’s Circles of Hell. That said, I have a very real respect for artists who do choose to teach.

As schools are back in session I thought I would do a brief feature with an art educator. And that would be Lisa Solomon. Since 2004, Solomon -- currently an assistant professor at Cal State East Bay – has taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, CCA, and SF State.

The following is part one of two.

Lisa Solomon: I went to grad school because I was feeling as though I was becoming an art dealer and not an art maker. I worked in galleries in San Francisco for almost five years after getting my undergraduate degree. I realized that although I was really happy to learn about the business side of selling art, it was getting harder to simply make stuff.

I decided to go to grad school for a couple of reasons. I wanted to be intellectually stimulated. I had been re-reading some theory articles that had been assigned when I was an undergraduate and all of a sudden they made more sense – and were more interesting. I wanted to be challenged – I wanted to be in an environment where I was encouraged to think about and make things – where I would be forced to talk about them and where I’d hopefully be exposed to a bunch of new art and new ideas. I wanted a “real” studio – not a spare room in my house. The teaching thing was also an aspect. I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach, so I looked for programs where I knew I could be a teaching assistant – to kind of test the waters to see if it was something I wanted to do or not. It goes without saying that in this day and age it’s really hard to get a teaching gig without an MFA, but that certainly wasn’t the main reason for my wanting to go back to school.

It wasn’t until I was finished with grad school that I really felt like I could legitimately call myself an artist. That may seem naïve, but it’s true. After spending two years eating, sleeping, thinking, dreaming about your art it suddenly had this weight to it. It wasn’t just my pipe dream, or something I did in my spare time – it was wrapped up in who I was as a person.

Once I was in a classroom as a TA and was helping students in a one on one situation I realized I liked it. There’s something kind of magical that happens when you can see that light bulb go off in a student’s head. I started remembering all the moments when I was in college that professors had profound effects on me and wondered if I might be able to do the same for even a few students. When I started thinking about what I wanted to do for money once I was done with school I knew I didn’t want to go back to the gallery world. Teaching seemed like something that might be able to support me and my art. In fact I could see how it might even inspire some things in the studio. So I decided to see if there was any way I could land a teaching gig.

photo: Lisa Solomon