“What About Wood?”: VCUArts Furniture Design Concentration Under Threat

This year’s hiatus, however, comes with news of a wider restructuring. Last Spring, VCU’s Board of Visitors voted to combine the Craft/Material Studies, Painting + Printmaking, and Sculpture + Extended Media departments into one Department of Fine Arts, part of a wide range of sweeping changes that are part of the university’s “repositioning initiative.” Even though the school is routinely ranked among the top five art graduate programs nationwide by U.S. News & World Report, the repositioning seeks to provide, according to their website, “a more academically attractive and more efficient university.”

Before the University’s decision was made public, Michelle Millar Fisher, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, expressed concern on social media that the program could be in jeopardy, ringing alarm bells for many in the field. “As a curator who stewards one of the country’s preeminent collections of contemporary craft, I know that our holdings—and the history of postwar craft—would not be half as rich without the contributions of VCU faculty and graduates of this track, including Alphonse Mattia, Wendy Maruyama, and Annie Evelyn,” she says. 

Evelyn said she tried to offer flexible solutions to keep the furniture design concentration running—including teaching sculpture and non-furniture design classes, as well as leading a fundraising effort for the program—but the university was not responsive to her ideas. “I became a teacher because I care about the future of furniture and craft,” Evelyn says. “One of the most beautiful things about craft is the passing down of knowledge—it’s not done on a screen, it’s done one-on-one. Our program had great retention, and it just kept growing.”