Excerpt from Learning to See

Artists and designers have mastered a unique and powerful way of making, thinking, and seeing. This is what defines a successful creative professional. Art and design students are apprentices in creative practice. They come to top art and design schools because these professors are stars in the art and design worlds. This book is about what students learn in art and design school, but it’s really about how professional creatives think and work. Professors are successful professional artists and designers who know how to create repeatedly and consistently. When they enter the college classroom, their goal is to teach students how to see and think like they do. The core of art and design practice is a special way of working that students don’t know when they start art school, and—if they work hard—they know when they finish.

The essence of art and design is seeing, thinking, and making. Once you learn to see, creativity follows.

This book is filled with the stories of the professional artists and designers who teach people how to see. These professors guide students through a process of personal transformation where they learn new ways of seeing, thinking, and making. The artists and designers that I interviewed have dual identities as both creatives and as educators. They have an average of almost twenty years of teaching experience, and they’ve taught at the top schools in the United States; the list is at the beginning of this book. None of them are only teachers; they are, first and foremost, working creative professionals. The artists have dealers, gallery representation, and museum shows. The designers and architects have contracts from top corporations and media outlets. To get a teaching job at one of these top universities, you need to be a rock star, a successful professional creative. Your CV will be filled with clients, gallery shows, and museum collections. This book is about how artists and designers teach, but it’s also about the creative practices of successful artists and designers—how they see, think, and make.

You’ll hear from professors who’ve taught all over the United States—a total of over fifty institutions. These colleges, universities, and institutes have different reputations, different curricular emphases, and different numbers of students. Some art and design schools are based in major research universities, like the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) or the Department of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Others are independent institutions like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) or the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. If I saw something only at one university but no others, I didn’t put it in this book.

In art and design school, a new creative practice emerges from personal growth, discovery, and transformation.

I interviewed professors of both art and design, in over twenty different disciplines, from painting and sculpture to typeface design and architecture. If an art professor said something, but no design professors said it, I didn’t put it in this book. My goal was to identify the underlying essence of the visual arts. Everything you’ll read is shared by many disciplines in both art and design. Art and design are different, of course. But this book is about what is shared across all of these disciplines. I call it the studio model: the shared practices of art and design education today. In Learning to See, I take you through the classroom door to reveal the secrets of how people learn to see.