Admission to the OFA’s figure drawing class is not as easy. According to Imber, about 30 students generally wish to take his class, but he can only admit 15. Admission is determined on a first-come, first-served basis. Nonetheless, Imber says that he has generally been able to find space for students who were very enthusiastic but late in signing up.

GOING LOW-KEY

The VES department and the OFA are united in their focus on students willing to sacrifice time and energy for a real understanding of an art. Many prospective artists, however, are not so ambitious. The Freshman Arts Advisory Board (FAAB) is a group of 15 freshmen that caters to this latter demographic. Rory Michelle Sullivan ’09, the Director for Residential Education and Arts Initiatives at the Freshman Dean’s Office, started the group last semester in order to get student feedback in establishing additional arts programming. The biggest message she heard from students who applied to be on the board was that there was a need for more low-intensity arts offerings. “A big priority that all the board decided was directing towards low-risk, low-commitment, low-pressure opportunities to just try and experiment with art,” she says.

This push for low-pressure engagement with art led the group to organize an event entitled “A FAAB Affair,” to take place tomorrow evening in the basement of Memorial Hall. The event is comprised of a series of workshops where students can come and learn crafts ranging from origami to ballroom dancing. According to Sullivan and FAAB member Kobi A. Rex ’14, the group hopes the event will interest people who are not generally involved in the arts and get them to try something new. “We want to have a bigger arts community on campus. We want to give them the ability to go low-key,” says Rex. In addition, FAAB is organizing a series of four- to eight-week workshops in subjects like figure drawing and documentary theater.

It was only last year that Harvard decided to invest the Director for Residential Education with the responsibility of getting freshmen involved in the arts. Though Sullivan is full of praise for the Harvard arts scene, she emphasizes the high demands it places on its participants and the alienation that it can have on those who just want to try something new.

“I do think it’s hard to find somewhere to just paint on a Saturday afternoon,” she says. “You can’t just go and use a Carpenter Center studio unless you’re in a VES class, and you can’t be in a VES class unless you get into a VES class and are willing to spend the time involved in a class commitment and are willing to use a space in your core schedule for arts.”

Lingford, however, disagrees that there is a large demand for low-intensity investment in the arts. “Harvard students are intense about everything,” she says. “When Harvard students are relaxing, they do it very intensely.”

TECHNICAL CONCERNS

Within the administration and faculty, then, lie several points of disagreement over the role of visual art in a liberal arts education at Havrard. These debates manifest themselves in opposing methodologies behind arts teaching itself.

For Imber, a self-proclaimed traditionalist, Harvard classes take the wrong approach to the visual arts. “A more formal education in the visual arts is ... singularly left out of the Harvard experience,” he says. “I think the perception now of students is that studio practice is not as important. It keeps being marginalized by some sort of elite of the art world.”

VES proponents tend to view arts learning in opposite terms. “We don’t really learn how to write a press release or a lot of very practical things, yet a lot of people who graduate from Harvard are able to do these things very very well, and a similar idea applies to the arts,” says Chun. “If you are interested in learning all the practical, technical stuff, there’s plenty of opportunity to do so through your own initiative.”

Regardless of pedagogy, one thing is clear. At Harvard, if you want to learn about the practice of art, opportunities exist for the motivated and amenable.

—Staff writer Chris R. Kingston can be reached at kingston@fas.harvard.edu.