Manifest’s Jason Franz: a personal note on the state of the arts in academia

By Jason Franz

With the closings of the American Academy of Art College in Chicago and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ decision to cease all degree programs earlier this year, it has become clear that something is shifting in the world of the arts in academia. Given Manifest’s genesis from within and close ties to this world, it seemed fitting – and perhaps timely – for me to share our perspective.

The decline of arts in education is not an isolated occurrence. For years the arts have been de-prioritized in primary and secondary education, and it would seem that the humanities in general are an endangered species. Yet daily we see proof of the desperate need for the critical and creative thinking and true cultural literacy such programs foster. This crisis is a viral response to something larger, a systemic breakdown. Just look at the world around us, at the uncertainty and ground-shifting. As an arts thinker I have begun to consider the arts to be a form of sentinel specie, a canary in the coal mine of society. Where goes art, there follows society. (Research “the Death of Expertise” and “the Cult of Ignorance” for a broad diagnosis.)

Manifest is not a degree-granting institution, but is itself an arts education organization founded by teaching artists and students coming out of several related academic realms. The students were reacting to the lack of something in society their research had revealed to them – so they set out to fill that gap. The artists were faculty reacting to the subtle institutional movements they witnessed in the microcosm of academia, first hand and up close, but which they also sensed as precursors to the larger movements we are now seeing magnified today across academia and society 20 years later. 

For my part in the origin of Manifest, I had the good fortune to represent a breadth of academic backgrounds. These included my years as both an undergraduate and graduate student here in Cincinnati, over a decade on staff at the Cincinnati Art Museum working in exhibitions and closely with curators, conservators, and administrators, and 15 years combined on faculty at the Art Academy, the UC’s College of DAAP (both Schools of Art and Design) and Xavier University. The Art Academy and DAAP are also my alma maters. I was both a student and then a professor at the Academy when it was a Museum School, attached physically and spiritually to the 100-plus-year-old Art Museum. I am so lucky to have all of these institutions as a foundation that has informed my role through two decades running this organization, because they represent a wide spectrum from independent college to private Jesuit university to a very large state university.

Thanks to this fertile ground of the arts, today Manifest is the employer, training ground, and research publisher for many students and professional degreed artists, among a broad community, who develop their studio skills and teaching abilities and are then recruited to teach in our larger sister institutions. Manifest also attracts artists from across the country aspiring to expand their professional skills, and further their careers, many of whom also eventually teach for area colleges.

Society needs a healthy arts ecosystem. Healthy means more than just a firehose of visual stimuli, thinly veiled political propaganda or publicized narcissism. Currently there seems to be an imbalance in the arts in higher education, with a tendency to industrialize education (which may or may not work for other disciplines, but it certainly does not work for the fine arts). Arts institutions by their very nature must adequately reconcile their “institutional” nature with the spirit of the arts itself. There is an underlying risk that Art may cease to be what it is when boxed, labeled, and marketed to an audience of customers, and the same is true for education.

Manifest’s work to solidify its role as a keystone institution in the region, and fill a critically important gap in the arts ecosystem, has its roots in my time at the Museum and the Academy. These two formerly-joined institutions were, in a sense, the parents of Manifest. As they have evolved since parting the space between them has grown, leaving a compelling vacancy. This empty space, present also in the world at large, is what Manifest was created to solve. With our studio program serving over 5,000 participants annually, an exhibition schedule that has featured works by over 4,000 artists (including many professors and college students) from all 50 states and 48 countries, our organization completes a missing piece of the academic puzzle from outside of academia. 

For the end-user, formal higher learning lasts only four years, sometimes six, and occasionally eight. However, for societies it lasts for decades if not centuries by virtue of the residual benefits of learning, of cultural nutrition provided by the fertile ground represented by the presence of serious institutions as foci for aspirational learning. In support of this, artists – whether graduates from college or self-taught – need a community for life, and academia needs a reservoir of skill, knowledge and philosophy to operate as a counterpoint, or a culture bank for when it is needed. In this way, Manifest serves as a form of “academic resource center.”

In observing the atrophy or outright collapse of so many arts institutions around the country, we reflect on our own mission, our faith in artist-founded goals, and the importance of the places where our roots start. At Manifest we believe it is essential to have ongoing conversations about quality, what it means in art, and why it is important to society. The process of immersion in a culture of independent learning and aspiration is working here, and in the end, this is what matters. Visual literacy, critical thinking, and respect and appreciation for skill matter. As our fellow institutions undertake their evolution, and address the challenging currents of these times, we salute them, thank them for holding on where they can, and do our part to carry the art spirit forward.

The arts will not thrive without a number of things, and one of them is genuine support in the form of exceptional and direct philanthropic generosity, which underpins the nonconforming creativity that is unique to this aspect of society. 

Invest in and reward steadfast vision. Have faith in the art spirit.

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Jason Franz is founding executive director of Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center (The Manifest Center for the Visual Arts)