UAA’s Department of Arts tackles financial burdens and community involvement

The Northern Light met with UAA ceramics professor Steven Godfrey in an effort to discover more about one professor’s perspective of the art culture on campus.

UAA has three galleries that support student and community artwork. Godfrey said that all three galleries are very active throughout the year.

The Student Union is home to the Hugh McPeck Gallery. The Fine Arts Building hosts the Kimura Gallery, and the Consortium Library features many pieces in the Arc Gallery.

Each gallery pertains to artists of different backgrounds in education and career. Godfrey said that the Kimura Gallery will occasionally highlight art presented by local artists but is mainly focused on both national and international artists.

The Hugh McPeck Gallery mostly features student pieces while the Arc Gallery displays Alaskan resident artwork and occasionally hosts student pieces.

Both the Arc and Kimura Gallery show three different exhibitions a year while the Hugh McPeck Gallery showcases up to six exhibitions a year.

Godfrey said that supporting Bachelor of Fine Arts students and preparing them for a career as an artist is one goal achieved through a student-led exhibition that is constructed over the student’s junior and senior year. The exhibitions are showcased in the Kimura Gallery.

Aside from the abundance of campus galleries, student artwork in the Fine Arts Building hallways are displayed and changed every month, creating a near-constant rotation of new artwork — ranging from charcoal figure drawings to clay sculpted shoes.

Godfrey said that many art professors support students by talking with local museums about the possibility of exhibiting student artwork.

Godfrey and two other professors are bringing 12 students to Europe, where they will explore local architecture, museums and culture sites in Vienna, Slovakia, Prague and Kunta Hura during the holiday season.

The trip is paid for largely by sales of student sculpture and wheel thrown work.

Despite all of the available support for art students, it’s worth asking: How has the program itself fared after the financial fluctuations of the last five years?

“Things definitely were impacted by Covid – the campus pretty much shut down. We were also suffering from major budget cuts. We lost a lot of faculty, especially in the department of art. We lost half of our faculty and so we are in the rebuilding process right now. When you’re rebuilding, there's always going to be improvement,” said Godfrey.

In an interview with Hans Hallinen, who works as a sculpture technician and coordinator for the Kimura Gallery, Hallinen shared that even small barriers to accessing arts, like needing to pay for parking, can become large hurdles in community involvement in gallery showings.

Godfrey said that because of budget cuts in 2020, the art department also lost vital educational leaders such as UAA’s art historian position.

“We haven’t had an art historian since 2020, and that’s a key component of our program – so we’re really looking forward to hiring someone who can develop new classes that are more contemporary and deal with more challenging issues. Our Art History offerings are very minimal right now, they’re bare bones,” said Godfrey.

Other positions that the art department is looking to fill include a communications design and drawing professor.

Godfrey said that renovation of the Fine Arts Building would be much appreciated as the structure was built in 1986 and is in need of “quite a bit of work.”

He also said that a budget for purchasing new equipment would be very beneficial to the arts department.

“Our department is supposedly self-sustaining right now. We have enough enrollments and the right amount of faculty where we’re right on the brink of – I think – where we break even. It probably fluctuates a little bit over the year but I think we’re doing okay right now. But it would be nice if we could get a present for breaking even and we get a big chunk of money to spend,” said Godfrey.

Godfrey said that the Fine Arts Department, along with the College of Arts and Sciences, is attempting to temporarily suspend parking fees to interested students and community members in an effort to gain a larger audience for the art department.

Similar to other UAA departments, Fine Arts is also attempting to improve upon advertising.

Godfrey said that advertising is largely based on providing information to an affiliated source and choosing who will distribute that information. Godfrey said finding the correct source and distribution could always be improved upon. Hallinen also said that communication about events is a barrier to access that the Department of Arts continues to tackle, in trying to reach both the campus and wider Alaskan community.

“Our main goal right now is to get more people on campus to visit. And the more people you get on campus to see the good things we’re offering, the more excitement there is, they’ll bring more people, more people might enroll in classes, they’ll start making good work, their good work will get exhibited, get more people excited. So it's this big circular motion,” said Godfrey.

Anyone in the UA or Anchorage community can support the arts department by simply coming to UAA and visiting the galleries.

Current and upcoming events can be found on each of the galleries’ websites.