AICAD teaching fellows bring new insights, experience

Three new faculty members joined the Cleveland Institute of Art this year through a teaching fellowship program that aims to help increase racial and ethnic diversity in art school faculty.

The program was developed by the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), of which CIA is a member. It offers full-time, mentored teaching positions to alumni of AICAD-affiliated schools who have recently earned their graduate degrees.

Charles Lee, who earned his MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has joined CIA’s Photography program. Laura Medina, who is teaching in Foundation and Visual Arts, recently earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Ariel Wills, who earned her MFA in Illustration at Rhode Island School of Design, joins Foundation faculty.

CIA’s participation in the program “presents us the opportunity to acknowledge our mission to cultivate creative leaders in an additional way, with faculty at the start of their careers,” says Greg Watts, CIA’s Vice President of Academic Affairs. “We speak of a sustainable economy, and if we can contribute to the training of faculty early in their careers, then everyone wins. It is important that we speak, and demonstrate in our actions, an intent to steward an inclusive community.”

CIA recently interviewed Lee, Medina and Wills about the fellowships and their own work.

Charles Lee

When Lee learned about the AICAD fellowship, he sought it out for the same reason he went after his MFA, he says. He always wanted to teach. Education runs in the family.

“My aunt was a professor, though not of art. My grandmother was a principal and a great uncle was a professor,” Lee says. “So it was always something that was kind of around me, but I’ve always also been a very creative person.”

Lee’s undergraduate degree was in business and marketing, and he spent about eight years doing that while also playing in a band with a cousin who has always been a working musician.

One day Lee told his cousin he didn’t feel like going to his marketing job anymore. When his cousin responded with, “Then don’t,” Lee asked what he would do instead. His cousin replied, “You have a brain, don’t you?”

Lee submitted his letter of resignation the next day and began to figure out what a creativity-based life would look like. He started teaching himself photography, and new possibilities began to emerge.

At age 38, Lee went to grad school, but getting there took some doing. His first attempts yielded rejections from 13 programs and a single “waitlist” response. He was not deterred. Lee analyzed what had gone wrong and realized he had counted too much on his writing abilities to get him in the door.

“I trusted myself enough to know this was what I wanted to do, so whatever it took, I was going to do it,” he says.

The research he did for his next round of applications paid off. He applied to 10 schools, received offers from six, and won a full scholarship from CCA.

Lee’s art practice is anchored in photography but also includes collage, assemblage, film, sound and text, and curation. Community, he says, is central to his work.

“We don’t do this alone,” he says. “People supported me to get me where I’m at. I had a friend, a curator, who wrote 10 letters of recommendation for me. I didn’t just come up with ideas and do them. A community of people surrounded me."

Laura Medina

AICAD’s fellowship program represents a singular opportunity, says Medina.

“It’s kind of rare to be able to teach in a full-time salary position right out of grad school,” she says. “I also really align with AICAD values around bringing diverse educators to (participating) institutions.”

Born in Colombia, Medina was 8 when she and her family moved to the U.S. and planted roots in Orlando, where they were part of an influx of Colombians. The experience stays with her.

“The creation of a little Colombia away from the original landscape is something that really interests me,” she says. “I’ve also been doing a lot of research around the practice of contemporary miniatures in Colombia, where it’s rooted more in precolonization, as well as other practices around honoring small objects that happen along the Andean mountains.”

Her practice is interdisciplinary and the content is driven by “worlding.”

“It’s kind of like world building, but it is really referencing from an autoethnographic research practice,” Medina says. “I look at my personal history, my family’s history, create myth and symbolism out of those stories, and then tie it back to larger social political movements.”

In her approach to being an artist-educator, Medina has found inspiration from her teachers, including V. Maldano, who was a faculty member and diversity leader at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

“They were such a life-changing, supportive person for me, because they also immigrated to the U.S. and we shared similarities—coming from a working-class family and wanting to be an artist and navigating that alone,” she says. “They have a really successful career and they were an incredible educator. I feel like a lot of students come into art school not really having a lot of resources or any experience in that kind of environment. I just would love to be that window of hope or opportunity.”

Ariel Wills

“Interdisciplinary” takes on a broad definition for Wills, an illustrator and animator—who also writes, dances and embraces teaching as a way to help other artists discover their capabilities.

“Having that experience of talking with another person and seeing them find confidence to try things makes me love teaching and being around people who are learning,” Wills says.

Drawing grounds Wills’ art practice. It is, she says, her mother tongue.

“I started drawing and making work when I was a baby. Both of my parents were very encouraging of me and my sister. They always had things to draw with, so I always was drawing,” she says. “People who don’t make work will look at drawing and they’ll act like it’s this magical thing, that we are just capable of drawing. But it’s something I’ve worked on since I was a baby. It’s something that I love, of course, and put in time with. But it’s taken my whole life to do what I can do every day.”

Wills also has been a dancer since early childhood, learning ballet, modern dance and eventually salsa and other social dancing.

“It feels like a way to celebrate being alive and having a body,” she says. “And I really love how it brings us into so many different cultural traditions and musical traditions.”

For Wills, each creative endeavor pays dividends in the other areas. Dance, for example, gave her experience in learning from formal criticism.

“When we were little in ballet, we were always told that if the teacher comes to you and gives you a comment or adjusts you, that’s an honor because they could just not even care or not see any promise in you," she says. “So having this attention on something I made is an honor, even when it sucks.”

It’s also important, she adds, to learn how to contextualize negative feedback about one’s work.

“If it’s in dance, maybe the critique is about being safe and not hurting your knees,” she says. “But if it’s from somebody who doesn’t understand what you were trying to do, that’s just valuable information. It’s just data. And you can do with it what you will.”