Amy Wendland,
Associate Professor of Art,
wins 2010 Alice Admire
Outstanding Teaching Award
“How I got interested in art? I think that’s because my older sister was the smart one and my younger sister was the cute one and I had to be good at something,” jokes Amy Wendland, associate professor and chair of the Fort Lewis College Art Department.
That sense of humor shows through in her classes, as well as her own art, which she continues to produce and use to tell stories. Speaking of stories, the one that tells of how she arrived at where she is now could probably inspire enough art to fill a gallery.
A lifelong lover of art, she naturally considered studying art in college, which caused a little hesitation in her parents. She recalls a conversation she had with her father. “It’s time for a real discipline now,” he said to her, “a serious thing.”
In the end her parents supported her and Ms. Wendland turned a study of art into “a serious thing.” She attended school in Minnesota for a time before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design. Upon graduating, she began a career as a commercial artist and designer, but eventually found herself wanting to learn more about her craft, especially three-dimensional art. So she returned to school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned a master’s degree in sculpture and an MFA in graphics.
Along with her degrees, her return to school yielded something she didn’t expect: a love of teaching. During her time as a graduate student, she took a job as a teaching assistant for the tuition reimbursement it offered. It wasn’t long before this experience shifted her focus from the commercial art world to the academic art world.
One of her first teaching experiences was what one might call a baptism of fire.
“I had the worst teaching slot you could possibly get: 4:30 - 7:30 p.m., a three-hour class, all freshmen,” she recalls. “I taught in a room with no windows—an art class in a room that has no windows—during the freshmen mandatory dinner hour time, so they couldn’t even eat dinner because they had to come to my class.”
“I had no idea what I was doing except that I loved art and I knew roughly what they were supposed to learn,” she continues. “It was so exciting.”
After finishing her graduate studies, Ms. Wendland found a home at Fort Lewis College. True to the liberal arts tradition here, students who take Ms. Wendland’s class can expect guidance that spans more than just the discipline of art. For example, whether artists like it or not, business sense is a valuable tool for their careers.
“If Fort Lewis College’s art business major had existed when I went to school, that’s what I would have taken,” she says.
“Students will leave here with a portfolio geared toward their target audience. They will leave with sample contracts, sales agreements, ways of figuring out whether they should charge by the hour for their artwork or if it’s by the job, when it’s appropriate to do one, when it’s appropriate to do another, a breakdown of annual expenses and how to categorize that stuff,” she explains, adding that, “I think we’re not doing the students a service unless we tell them how they can use these art skills out in the real world.”
Armed with those skills, her art students are finding work, and not always as commercial artists. Her students are finding success as museum curators, gallery owners, and consultants, to name a few professions. That kind of openness to different opportunities is something Ms. Wendland understands very well.
“If you had told me I was going to be a teacher, I would have just howled. I would have just laughed,” she says. “So you never know where people are going to go.”
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