Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building — Oscar Wilde.

If you ask Hunter College Masters of Fine Arts students about their education, their first words are likely: the building. The Hunter Art department has long been coupled with its studio building (a blue labyrinthine eyesore on the corner of 10th Avenue and 41st Street). As per Oscar Wilde, I’m not sure if the union between building and college is more marital bliss or torrid love affair, but given the building’s historic location amidst the porn theaters, nudie booths and sex shops of Hell’s Kitchen, I’m leaning toward the latter. Ruin sounds harsh, but it is now fact more than rumor that the love affair between Hunter and the 41st building is over. The juggernaut of Manhattan development and the paucity of public education funds guarantee the relocation of Hunter’s MFA program to a smaller, more traditional, and more sterile studio building, most likely in an outlying borough, most likely soon (when not if). So, when the program moves to its new home, the 41st Street building will be left without its identity, or in more severe scenarios demolished to literal ruin. Don’t mourn its loss yet. Go visit. Attend one of the myriad public events this fall and reflect on a building that is a marvelous relic of New York past and an MFA program that is a bold model for an art world future.

My mother is moving to New York. She scours real estate ads for apartments. She calls me for advice on neighborhoods. “What do you think of Clinton?” “Clinton” I ask, “where the hell is Clinton?” “40’s. West side.” Ah. Not where the hell is Clinton, but where the hell did Hell’s Kitchen go? I guess it was only a matter of time. First the hookers, then the nudie booths, then the strip clubs, then the traffic in Times Square, and now realtors banished even the neighborhood’s sinister moniker from whence it came. Amidst the whitewashing, the Hunter studio building is a hunkering blue hold-out. To walk there, out the back of Port Authority, past the homeless shelters and dollar pizza stand, is to step over a drunk and into the past, every bit as seedy, smutty, absurd, messy and grime-covered as ever. In fact the growing scarcity of filth across Manhattan makes the studio building’s grime feel positively charming. Walk into the bathroom, and not only are you fairly certain that people have had sex in that bathroom, but it’s also the kind of bathroom in the kind of building that makes you consider doing so yourself, thrashing your own life onto the flesh of mortal sin. In that way, the building represents old New York – a landmark of grime and Grindhouse – one of the last hold outs of Hell’s Kitchen against Clinton, worth the visit, at the very least to pay homage to its resolve.

The other central defining characteristic of the building is that it is wholly public. It is a city building, housing a city college, and as such both democracy and bureaucracy are as endemic to the building as smut. Over the years, the building has housed a diverse range of businesses and services in the additional rooms and floors above the studios. In New York City government building fashion, an uncanny blend of people wander in and out of the building, around the artists, past the studios, over the woodpiles, wet paintings and precarious sculptures. Aggregated heaps of treasure/trash, piled in arrangements that can be neither sturdy nor fire-safe (though here at the western edge of the city, as with laws on the frontier, fire codes seem neither applicable nor enforceable). Truly, it is a building with no delineation between the art and source material, or between art and structural material for that matter. On the studio floors, junk mingles in and out of finished and unfinished pieces. In the halls, crap aggregates: graffiti, abandoned artwork, chairs, trash, tools, pianos, and all the behemoth treasures hauled into the building for whim or exhibition, yet abandoned to roam the halls, studio to studio like ghosts, in deference to their bulk. As Seldon Yuan put it, describing his studio: it’s organized chaos. Just file it all under G. For garbage.

Every few years, questions about the institution of the MFA itself swirl in public debate, often incited by an incendiary article in The New York Times. A few years back, articles circulated about the rising number of MFA art stars getting snatched up by galleries right out of school. This month, Roberta Smith rekindled the MFA debate discussing the current relevance of the degree in the face of real economic downturn. Smith, writing in response to the launch of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (a free-school for arts education), decries what she sees as the increasing professionalism of art-making. The resulting din of responses descended into the usual oft-repeated blanket statements and assumptions, punctuated by deep emotion and scant fact. In order to ground this discussion in some sort of truth, unscientific though it may be, I have analyzed the ages and graduate schools of the American-educated artists at 20 major New York galleries, to surprising results.

First, in direct answer to Smith, although the number of artists pursuing graduate degrees is growing (as it is in nearly every field of study), the percentage of artists with MFA degrees at galleries remains relatively low overall (30% for artists born before 1960 and between 1940 and 45% for artists born after 1960). Hardly professionalism in the sense of doctors or lawyers where 100% of practitioners acquire graduate education. Forty-five percent is closer to the level of teaching, a profession in which there may be some monetary or educational benefit in obtaining a graduate degree, but by no means are those benefits always guaranteed or requisite. Further, this means that by far the largest group of artists are still those with no graduate degree. The degree itself provides no statistical advantage, and accordingly, no single school carries a statistical advantage. Not Hunter, nor Yale, nor CalArts (which interestingly has more graduates represented by New York’s top galleries than any other graduate school. Surprise.)

So, if there is no advantage, why go to any program, or more specifically, why Hunter? When I asked the Hunter students this question, they cited many of the same answers: the building, the large studios, the time to work and focus, the affordable tuition, the spirit of democracy, the freedom and the filth—in essence many of the same characteristics underlying the nature of the building. Yet still, one of the best answers came from alumna Andrea Merkx who captured the essence of the Hunter MFA experience in a single quip: at Hunter, you could die in your studio and no one would ever notice. Two-sides. Upside: anything goes. Rogue exhibitions, extra years in the program, free semesters, secret dance parties, rental schemes and good old-fashioned squatting. (So long as you keep a low profile and strategically avoid probing emails). Downside: anything goes. When one really needs help – say when you’re dying in your studio – the same faceless higher-up who overlooks your dance party overlooks your bloody corpse (or botched loans, diplomas, registrations, or funding). No such thing as free lunch after all.

Regardless, the effect of the headless monster is just that. Mom and Dad left for the summer. The babysitter died. A familiar plot? Then perhaps, you’ve seen Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Sure, at first, the lack of hierarchical control incites a bedlam of broken dishes and shattered rules. However, left to their own devices long enough, the kids realize that in order to survive and to thrive they must band together to take care of business in style. Minus Christina Applegate, it’s same story at Hunter. The college is absentee, the professors are a mixed bag, and so the students have learned self-sufficiency unmatched by more organized institutions, out of necessity. They plan their own shows, curate their own artist lectures, form countless groups and collectives, and invent excuses for themed party after themed party. These are tested bonds, to carry through life. MFA candidates at most programs cite these types of bonds as one central end product of graduate school, yet they are arguably stronger between students at Hunter, as with siblings raised in neglect, abuse or adversity.

The force of community forged at Hunter is one compelling argument for the program, despite that Hunter may be the educational equivalent of a ragtag parentless home that no social worker would condone. In fact, this strong sense of community begins forging an answer to Roberta Smith’s recent article as well. In the article, her main point was that in a recession, shifting to a system where a $130,000 education is mandatory is ludicrous. Smith dreams of structures for learning, sharing and building bonds outside of the high-cost capitalist cash-cows of private university MFA programs (and yes we’re all hopped-up on any capitalist rhetoric right now thanks to the anti-PhRMA speeches). So, in many ways, Hunter is a model for the kind of program Smith is calling for, and has been a sustainable one since the 1920s. A public institution, the college has been offering quality, democratized arts education to working artists for an affordable price since the start. A model program, not just for the high quality of ground-breaking work, but also for its commitment to rational education expenditure. (As an interesting aside on this, following my visit to Hunter, I heard President Obama speak on the new American imperative to save, to buy reasonable things that we can afford, instead of charging whatever luxuries we felt like on layaway or credit. It made me ask the question, in a market where a fancy MFA degree brings with it no financial advantage or gain, isn’t taking on $100,000+ in debt a continuation of the spend now, pay later status quo that drives the US debt?)

Regardless, one should see the Hunter MFA building in person. Attend open studios and the MFA thesis exhibition this fall, and enjoy a fleeting piece of New York art history, to which there is no peer. Consider the building and the program, the city and the country, their pasts and futures, and contemplate which will stand together in the future as public monuments and which as ruins.

Hunter Open Studios. November 20th, 2009. 6-9; November 21st, 2009. 2-6. Hunter MFA Building, 450 West 41st, NY, NY.

Hunter MFA Thesis Exhibition. December 16th, 2009. 6-9.
Hunter MFA Building, 450 West 41st, NY, NY.

Special thanks to all the students and alumni who took the time to meet and speak with me about this article:

Matteo Callegari
Dawn Frasch
Vivienne Griffin
Nathan Gwynne
Esther Kläs
Ellie Krakow
Andrea Merkx
Lori Merhige
Alta Price
Seldon Yuan

Cynthia Daignault is the art critic for Last Exit Magazine. An independent painter, writer and curator, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her works can be viewed online at CynthiaDaignault.com. She dedicates her free time to cupcakes, the banjo and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She pledges as New York is her witness that Cynthia is to Felix as Joan of Arc was to France. Her most recent reviews looked at Jonah Freeman’s and Justin Lowe’s BlackAcid Co-op, Dan Graham: Beyond, Picasso Mosqueteros and The Generational: Younger than Jesus.

Copyright Last Exit 2009