This article was originally printed in RVA Mag #25 in Summer of 2016. The accompanying web article can be found here.
Photo by Patrick Biedrycki
As of this past week, the beloved Dean of VCU’s School of the Arts, Joe Seipel, has retired from his 42-year relationship with the University. Seipel has served as dean for the past five years, following numerous academic teaching and leadership positions. His liberal and innovative visions of contemporary academia, especially in a society that has largely turned higher education into a business, have left a refreshing impression on the lives of thousands of students and faculty. A cherished supporter of the city’s creative communities, Seipel has been a local institution since the early 70s. As co-owner of the former Texas Wisconsin Border Café (now Bellytimber Tavern), Seipel’s hand extended to the city’s casual culture in hosting the camaraderie that resulted in various bands, partnerships, and artistic endeavors throughout the years. Congratulations Joe, we are sad to see you go, but know you won’t be far.
AH: Can you give an overview of your time at VCU?
JS: In 1974 I was hired at VCU on a one-year contract as an instructor. Back then, they hired people as “instructors”, a one year contract for up to three years. Then two years into that, they asked if I wanted to stay on as a tenure track faculty, so I did. Then I was just an instructor and assistant professor at the school in the sculpture department. I think in about 1981-82 I became chair of the sculpture department and remained chair for 17 and ½ years, and then I spent 8 ½ years as the Senior Associate Dean and Director of all the graduate programs at the School of the Arts. Then the head hunters came and asked if I was interested in looking at another position, so I ended up being the Vice President of the Savannah College of Art and Design, and I did that for two years. Then my former boss at VCU, Dean Rick Toscan, retired to everyone’s surprise. A different set of head hunters then came and asked if I would be interested in throwing my hat in the ring here, so I did, and I got the job. March was my five-year anniversary of being Dean, kind of a five-year plan.
AH: Why did you choose to leave for Savannah?
JS: Well, Rick Toscan was the Dean here, he was terrific, we were good friends, he was a great mentor… but I was just looking for a little more responsibility. I had been Senior Associate Dean for 8 ½ years, and I wondered what the next step would be since I had already gotten into this administrative trail. So when they asked me, and it was a Vice President’s position, I thought well, that would be interesting. I’d been at VCU for 42 years, so I actually retired from VCU and then went to Savannah as their Vice President… and then un-retired for the second time to come back as Dean.
AH: At that time, how would you say VCU Arts compared to SCAD?
JS: They were very different. SCAD is an art school that’s an art school. Actually, when I got down to Savannah, I didn’t expect this to happen, I missed being at a big University with all my friends in pharmacology, the engineering program, at the business school, and down at the medical center. I missed all these connections… I missed going out and have a coffee or beer and talk to people of different disciplines. Also, thinking about the opportunities you have with an art school in the middle of a comprehensive research university… you know we’ve been doing a lot of research across disciplines. It’s so much fun, quite terriffic, I think that’s where everything is moving. A lot of interesting new knowledge is happening right between disciplines, so the arts can be really vital players in that. The biggest thing I have had to do, and hopefully I have been somewhat successful at, is getting the other disciplines to understand how important it is to get the arts involved in their research early on. I’ve worked with the engineering school a long time, and there was a time when they thought that the engineers would build it, and then we smear art over the top of it, but that’s not like that at all. So, what you want to do is get in early so this whole notion of how we generate ideas, and how we allow ideas to be a little free form. So if you can get art into the research early, I think that actually changes it in the many ways researchers look at a problem. We’ve had great success on several occasions… where our students, first of all they are fearless, and secondly they don’t look at the end of a problem in a straight line. If it changes a little bit you might follow it this way, or follow it that way. They are more apt to change the way a problem is approached. So if you’re working in medicine, in engineering, or business we don’t necessarily know the specifics of that, but we can come into it with a fresh mind, and often times valuable partners in the research. We still have some silo issues here, but we are very much starting to get some porosity.
AH: Could you give a timeline or synopsis of how you’ve seen VCU develop since 1974?
JS: You almost have to look at who was leading it at the time. When I got here, there was a gentleman named Dr. Herb Burgart from about 1976 to the mid-eighties, but then Dr. Murry DePillars was the leader of the school for quite sometime. He was a real personable being, and passed away a number of years ago… he was a good friend. He loved the students, hung out with the students… he was really about building a community. Then Murray retired to all our surprise, and they did a national search for his successor, and Dr. Richard Toscan came on. Murray was much more involved with the internal community… had his arms around it. He wasn’t quite as interested in how we did in New York or other large cities. Murray was more of an incubator for the art school and surrounding community. Then, when Rick Toscan came in… he was quite involved in looking at how we faired nationally and internationally. He really pressed faculty to get out and show around the country, not to just have the faculty shows that were internal. In fact, if you showed on campus or in Richmond it was considered service, not research. So, he really wanted faculty to get out. I worked directly with him as Senior Associate Dean, and a lot of our funding went to travel to make sure our faculty got to conferences, make sure they got their work out to galleries around the country, and performances around the country. So, he was a really good mentor for me, and then I think when I took over I did a lot of the same thing. Rick had really focused on the ICA. We had had a plan for the ICA when he was there, but the architect passed away so it kind of went into a lull. Susan Roth, who was the interim Dean for a couple of years, started talking with the school’s president about it… and then when I came in, the president said that we had to get this thing going, let’s go! With his support, we have now broken ground on the ICA. A lot of fundraising went on, I did A LOT of fundraising… 34 million dollars worth. That, along with making sure our faculty had the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to follow up on their research… and also getting to a point where we understood how arts research could make a big impact both on the arts and externally to other disciplines… which has probably been our biggest push, how we moved the research end of it. Susan Roth had a lot to do with that, as does Sarah Cunningham whose going to be the director of the Arts Research Institute. Then at the Depot building, which opened in 2014, we have the creative entrepreneurship program, and the Co-Lab, a big operation there… it’s a long-term internship program where we take on projects for external companies and businesses… and then the da Vinci Center came out… so all of these things are starting to get fuzzy and wonderful, and have loose edges. That’s all been the new spirit of it, now also, trying really hard not to let the silos get in the way of our trajectory... sometimes it’s hard for people to understand. There are people who feel strongly about letting the discipline be the discipline, and the core of the discipline… and then there are people who want to see the discipline grow out and become more connected to other disciplines. I think that we actually use the word “discipline” maybe incorrectly, because what used to be painting, sculpture, kinetic imaging, dance, theatre, music… some of them have changed a lot, so maybe the new disciplines don’t fit those titles anymore… they sort of fit in-between. It’s kind of like secondary or tertiary colors, or maybe becoming a new color… and you want to have people have a grounding in something, but you know for instance in animation, we teach animation in a number of different programs so if you’re just in one of them, you miss all the expertise of the faculty in another program. So, how do we make sure that students can, especially students who want to wander a little bit and don’t want to stay right down to the core of their discipline, have a chance to do that. The big deal here is, in a world where you’re probably used to menus on your computer, we want to make sure we give students the opportunity to follow their dreams. I want students to be able to come out of here and find their passion, and be able to follow that passion… not necessarily find their passion and have to stick to some curriculum… they should be able to move and follow their passion the way they want to. In most cases we can do that. You’re stuck in a system that rewards for credits generated, and numbers of majors, so we’re trying to change the traffic, but sometimes the stop signs and the left-hand turn signals get in the way of changing the traffic. I hate to hear when a student says, “well, I’m just checking it off to get out of here”… that’s not the idea here.
AH: What is the ICA going to be bringing to VCU… to Richmond?
JS: Well, Lisa Freiman is the director, a really interesting person…. She was the United States Commissioner to the Venice Biennale four years ago, which is a very big deal. She’s energetic and ambitious. She has a new curator, Lauren Ross, and ideas to bring art from around the world here. I think it will be interesting, their first years here at the ICA, because they are going to want to develop a kind of a signature; so I think many of the shows will be built and curated here, and then travel off to other locations if they can. I know they are both interested in connecting to the city and general population. It is going to be huge for Richmond. My quote has been, “We are going to change the capital of the Confederacy to the capital of Creativity.” With the Virginia Museum the way it is, the Modlin Center for the Arts, the new performing arts center downtown, the Visual Arts Center, and now the ICA—what we can do is become a destination city for the arts, it’s really becoming a very exciting place. I mean, look at First Fridays even… it’s the largest First Friday event in the United States… you have to decide which part of town you want to hang out in because you can’t do all of them. It’s a very exciting city right now. If Richmond were stock, I’d buy it.
You know where Foo Dog is now? That used to be my sculpture studio. When I got there, there was no electricity, no running water, or anything… and that was my studio. I had that down below, and I lived up above… then, remodeled the whole place. That was a great studio. Then, I moved to the carriage house behind it, and my studio was the downstairs of that… and then I had one of the garages over on Main and Lombardy. Not choice locations when I was there as they are now. There were gunshots… it was wild… the wild west, I mean it was really wild, and I would go out with a broom every once and a while and sweep broken glass off the sidewalk. The police would just drive by because if you weren’t committing a felony at that point, they didn’t care… it was such a wild west. I remember watching my friends go out to get a six pack of beer one day leaving the back of my apartment, and they actually ran across the street dodging bullets.
AH: You mentioned being quite excited to embark on personal work again, what’s on the horizon?
JS: My head is spinning right now with the notion of going back in the studio. I have to finish some work. I have some pieces I started 20 years ago that aren’t finished, and I’ve got one really big piece specifically… it’s built, but I need to do the electronic component, but it’s big it’s 28’ long 12’ tall and 14’ deep, it has a bunch of figures in foam and about 100 gallons of polyester resin on it. I just want to get it done and finished… then sometime, we’ll see how long it will take me to get an exhibition to show some of the older work and kind of get it out of my system so I can start thinking about some new things. So the big thing right now is showing some of the older work and seeing where we go from there. I’ve got a lot. I’m like Donald Trump, I’ve got a lot of ideas.