FAYETTEVILLE -- Gerry Snyder is in his office at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville's School of Art. It's long and narrow, with a few chairs and a desk. The bookshelves are empty.
It's late July and the 65-year-old Snyder, the School of Art's executive director, can be forgiven for the Spartan state of his space. He's only been on the job since July 1, hired from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he spent five years as dean of the School of Art.
"I'm getting to where I can find my way to the office and the coffee shop," Snyder says as he takes a seat. Outside the window over his shoulder, a student in a summer drawing class works at her easel.
Snyder is the first executive director of the UA School of Art, which was created in 2017 with a $120 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, the largest ever to support or establish a school of art.
The school, which is part of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, also received $40 million from the Little Rock-based Windgate Charitable Foundation to create the Windgate Art and Design District to house new art and graphic design classrooms, labs, studios and a public gallery space in south Fayetteville.
Todd Shields is dean of the Fulbright College and Snyder's boss.
"He has a great deal of experience creating, expanding, and improving other schools of art, including direct experience with the construction of new classrooms and studios," Shields says in an email. "He is also an amazing individual who has a strong reputation of collegiality, transparency and high standards."
As a graduate student at New York University, Snyder was hired to help consolidate the school's locations to one building. He worked and taught there for nine years before taking a job in 1996 as vice president of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he helped the school separate from the museum it was associated with, create a new curriculum and move into a new facility.
After four years there, he taught at the College of Santa Fe until 2010, when he was he was named vice president of academic affairs at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
At Pratt, where the school of art and school of design had recently been split, he was hired to be the first dean of the art school.
Notice a pattern?
"I like the beginning of things, where things are being built and envisioning the future," says Snyder, who will also serve as distinguished professor of art and special adviser to the chancellor for arts integration at UA.
Dianne Bellino, Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs for the School of Art at Pratt, worked with Snyder for five years.
"He is good at both being able to lead and having everybody on the ground in the school really involved with good communication," she says. "He's confident and he's a leader, but he's also incredibly open to ideas or information. It's rare for someone to have the leaderships skills and vision but also the degree of openness."
Jane South, Chairwoman of Fine Arts at Pratt, says that Snyder "is not somebody that comes in with a set of ideas to paste on to an institution irrespective of its existing culture. He's good at looking at the lay of the land, talking with people in an open and friendly way and then constructing a vision based on consensus. And because he's such an innovative thinker he can imagine things maybe other than what they are."
He's also "got great hair," she says with laugh.
Snyder grew up in the small town of Caldwell, Idaho, with three older brothers and a younger sister. His father owned a trucking business and his mother taught second grade. He was drawing by age 4 and painting seriously at 12.
"I knew I wanted to be an artist," he says. "What I liked about art was the freedom. Reading and art work, those were my go-to places. Pick up a book, and you could go anywhere in the world. With art, you weren't even limited by story. You were just limited by scale and materials."
He was not, however, fond of the classroom, and was actually kicked out of high school.
"I wasn't a bad kid, but I went to a Quaker church and we were encouraged to speak our minds. High school isn't a good environment for that. It wasn't a good fit for me."
He spent the next decade bouncing from job to job, saving his money and trying to teach himself how to paint. He worked as a helicopter crew member fighting forest fires, on a fishing boat in Alaska and for his uncle, who owned a gas station and a home heating oil business in Rock Springs, Wyo. There was also a stretch where he managed an engineering crew on the Idaho/Wyoming state line.
What he learned while doing this kind of labor was that he was -- A: Pretty responsible and B: Good at managing people.
"I resisted that for a long time, but eventually I realized that it's probably my skill set."
His days of manual labor ended when he injured his back unloading a freight truck. He enrolled at the University of Oregon at Portland and earned a degree in painting in three years.
"I was older and really focused," he says. "I needed a better teacher than myself."
From Portland, he moved to New York and enrolled in the master's program at New York University with a focus on video art. He eventually went to work at the school with the unique title of junior research scientist, before becoming an adjunct assistant professor teaching video art, drawing and painting.
The Idaho Quaker art kid who got kicked out of high school was at the beginning of a career in academia.
That career has taken him to a part of the country that traditionally may not have been at the top of the list when the subject of art comes up.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Bentonville museum founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, has gone a long way to change that perception, as has the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.
It wasn't a huge shock that Snyder would leave Brooklyn for here, says South at Pratt.
"Arkansas is known in the art community very much because of what Crystal Bridges is establishing. There was already an awareness of the support from the Walton Foundation, and given that context, it wasn't a surprise. But we were very sorry to lose him."
Snyder sees it as a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity.
"The size of the Walton Foundation gift is big, by any standard, but to be given to art is a game-changer in many ways. It shows a commitment that is truly amazing. Together with the Windgate gift, it's exponential. It shows the importance of art."
The new School of Art -- the first and only accredited collegiate school of art in the state -- was created from the university's art department and offers degrees in art education, art history, ceramics, drawing, graphic design, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture.
The Walton Foundation gift will be used to provide financial support to students, fund outreach and public service through Crystal Bridges and other arts groups and expand graduate programs and degree offerings in art history, art education and graphic design.
"The combination of the Walton gift and the Windgate gift, it's just the perfect opportunity," he says. "It will enable us to create a school and a program of excellence that can also be a destination. In education, you're never limited by your ideas, but you are limited by your resources. This offers an opportunity to do some bold things."
There are currently just under 400 students in the school. One of Snyder's goals is to get that number up to 700 or more.
Shields says Snyder's first priority will be "to work with faculty to create a strategic plan for how to most efficiently accomplish their goals." Other priorities include expanding degree programs, recruiting students and hiring faculty, Shields says.
"This first year, my focus will be working on the strategic plan," Snyder says. "The gift needs to be managed in a way that will achieve all the goals between the university and the foundation."
He sees the school having an impact statewide, regionally and beyond.
Teaming with Crystal Bridges and The Momentary, the contemporary arts venue opening in 2020 as a satellite of Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, can help the school expand its reach.
"When I look at what they can do, if we align ourselves with that kind of thinking and vision, I think we can do a lot."
Publications, arts programming and other opportunities are possible, he says.
Margi Conrads is Director of Curatorial Affairs & Strategic Art Initiatives at Crystal Bridges.
"We're thrilled that he will be leading the school of art," she says. "We are also excited about the possibility of the museum helping the university to reach its goals."
Crystal Bridges and the school have worked together in the past, she says, and there are plans to expand that collaboration.
"There are great opportunities to collaborate on things related to the collections or to our exhibitions. In the brief conversations I've had with Gerry, he and the museum recognize that collaborations can go across many different aspects of the museum's work. There are so many different functions of the museum -- administrative, finance, education, exhibitions. There are ways that the art school and the university can connect with us through each and every department of the museum."
Having artists-in-residence, hosting visiting artists and giving students travel opportunities are also in his plans, Snyder says.
"I can't tell you how valuable that is," he says of students being able to to travel and see art firsthand. "In my own career, when I actually started looking at art in person instead of in books, it was a real eye-opener for me."
A certain amount of the Walton gift is to be used to increase the school's diversity among students and faculty.
"That was one of the things I found very compelling about the opportunity," he says.
He mentions an idea by faculty member Aaron Turner to start a center for minority photographers.
"It would bring people in and give people an opportunity to have visibility for their work and their issues and then bring in people nationally to support them."
Snyder's wife, Jeanne Arnold, is an art director for fashion photo shoots. They have a 23-year-old son, Mack, who just earned a computer science degree and plans to live in New York.
Gerry Snyder still paints every day from 9 p.m.-2 a.m.
"I don't sleep as much as I should," he says.
His work, somewhat surreal, is bright and dreamy and often reflects on modern culture. A series he worked on for over a decade shows cloud-like figures floating around fantastical landscapes. His art has been exhibited in the United States and Bulgaria and is in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe and the Pancevo Center of Contemporary Art in Pancevo, Serbia.
Two of his drawings, Clown Calendar: May and Clown Calendar: September, are just up the road in the collection at Crystal Bridges.
He is in a drawing classroom now, having his photo taken among a still-life setup.
"I ended up liking school," he says all these years after his truncated high school career. "I love the environment, where it's focused on ideas. You need a process to make things work, you need structure to make things work."
He recalls a recent conversation with a retired friend in New Mexico.
"They said, 'I miss being around young people.' But what I would miss is being around a world of ideas every single day, you know, where people are learning. That's a really unique, wonderful environment."
Style on 08/04/2019