Arrowmont's art endures
David Willard wants to make clear, first of all, that the property on which Arrowmont stands has not been sold. Willard, the school’s director, says there is no sale in the works, and the school is not considering closing. In fact, Arrowmont’s regular schedule of classes and special events are proceeding as usual this spring.
Late last summer, Arrowmont’s patron organization, Pi Beta Phi, received an unsolicited offer by a Gatlinburg developer to purchase a 70-acre tract the fraternity owns that included the Arrowmont campus as well as historic buildings on the site. The developer planned to build two water parks, four hotels, and various retail shops on the property, but also indicated that the project could include a place for Arrowmont.
Pi Beta Phi soon issued a statement noting that proceeds from the sale would go to several different areas of the fraternity’s operations including up to $9 million for Arrowmont. The statement also addressed the future of Arrowmont, indicating the “hope that this infusion of cash will allow them to have the funding to continue ... without any future obligation to or dependence on Pi Beta Phi.” Further statements noted Pi Beta Phi had a financial responsibility to give due consideration to any viable offer to buy fraternity assets.
As concern grew over Arrowmont’s future, its board of governors issued a statement of its own, indicating that while “Arrowmont could be relocated and rebuilt elsewhere, the cost of doing so would greatly exceed the amount of money that Pi Beta Phi Fraternity has suggested it might offer. …[The] immediate loss of revenue and constituents…while the new facilities are being built could prove catastrophic.” Another statement from the organization indicated that “it is unlikely that Arrowmont would be able to maintain its current level of integrity as an art community and quiet oasis surrounded by this type of planned development.”
Save Arrowmont
Word spread over the seemingly imminent sale of Arrowmont’s land, and avid supporters of the Gatlinburg, Tenn., institution raised a considerable uproar. Within days, several dozen Arrowmont staff members and others staged a protest against the proposed sale, many holding signs with messages such as “SAVE ARROWMONT,” “PRESERVE OUR HISTORY!” and “OUR COMMUNITY NEEDS ARROWMONT.” Local newspapers covered the story as it developed. Letters to the editors appeared. Newspaper columnists and editors wrote opinion pieces, alarmed about the proposed sale and its possible consequences for Arrowmont. One impassioned editorial by Stan Voit, editor of The Mountain Press in Sevier County, called Arrowmont “a source of universal pride.”
“[W]e should all fight to keep it right where it is,” Voit wrote. “[W]e need Arrowmont now more than ever.”
Inevitably, the debate about Arrowmont moved online. School supporters started a “Save Arrowmont” website, featuring blogs and links to news reports. A Facebook profile and a Twitter blog popped up.
An online petition garnered more than 2,000 signatures within a few weeks and several thousand more before the end of the year. Newspaper readers posted comments accompanying online news reports. The vast majority bemoaned the apparent sale, with many people expressing a particular repugnance for the kind of “touristy” development being discussed for the property. Much of the commentary was severely critical of Pi Beta Phi’s apparent willingness to sell the property, some of it questioning that such a decision would be made without the input of the entire fraternity membership.
Nigel Rudolph, the Bradenton, Florida-based potter and former Arrowmont artist-in-residence who started the online petition, said the petition was just a way of showing how many people thought the sale was a bad idea.
“I love Arrowmont,” said Rudolph. “My preference would be for them to stay within the community because there are people in the area who have been involved with Arrowmont for generations. That kind of tugs at my heartstrings.”
Debra Belvin, an East Tennessee native, art teacher at West Valley Middle School in Knoxville and former Tennessee Art Educator of the Year, has attended Arrowmont workshops nearly every summer since her first one in 1979.
“It’s a wonderful, unique treasure for Gatlinburg,” Belvin said. “It has quite an impact on local school children who can experience it. And it’s a wonderful resource for art teachers. If the town loses Arrowmont, they’ll never be able to replace it.”
Many art and craft professionals in the area who’ve never even taught or taken a class at Arrowmont don’t want to see it go. One such person is Kevin Tierney, a candle maker and president of the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community, a nonprofit organization representing approximately 120 craftspeople and artists, of which Arrowmont is not a member.
“I think it would be a tragedy if it had to move from that location,” said Tierney. “There’s no question that it’s historically significant to the development of Gatlinburg.”
The school’s value to the community is not lost upon its elected officials either.
“To me, Arrowmont is almost a kind of brand for Gatlinburg,” said Mike Werner mayor of Gatlinburg. “The school offers wonderful classes, many in authentic Appalachian art, and the campus just takes you back in time.”
Historic preservation professionals have also weighed in on the issue. Nancy Tinker, senior program officer at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Southern Office, wrote in a letter to Arrowmont’s director that losing the historic campus would be “an irreparable loss not only to Gatlinburg’s tourism economy, but to students of fine art as well.” Kim Trent, executive director of Knoxville-based Knox Heritage, said the prospect was “like cutting the heart out of the city [of Gatlinburg].” The Tennessee Historical Commission posted a letter on its website expressing hope for a resolution.
Reflecting back on the remarkable public reaction to the proposed sale, Arrowmont director David Willard and Pi Beta Phi Grand President Emily Tarr were both struck by the outpouring of emotion over Arrowmont.
“When the news came out about the sale, it touched a nerve with the public,” Willard said. “There are a lot of people out there with very strong opinions about the school. I’m delighted we have that strong a base of support.”
Tarr, who also serves on Arrowmont’s board of governors, was reminded of Pi Beta Phi’s legacy with this mountain community.
“I think people do appreciate what Pi Beta Phi has done over the years in Gatlinburg,” Tarr said. “It was a very forward-thinking group of dedicated women who came to Gatlinburg back in the early 1900s. The history will never go away. But much of Gatlinburg has changed over the years. We always want to hold onto the way things are. Sometimes that’s possible and sometimes it’s not.”
Legacy, Lease and Legalities
As it turned out, the proposed sale of the Arrowmont land fell through by the end of October 2008. The fraternity still owns the land, and the property is not currently listed for sale, nor is Pi Beta Phi actively seeking to sell it, according to Tarr. Nevertheless, last year’s negotiations certainly raised public concern for the school’s future.
Pi Beta Phi’s ownership and leasing agreements with Arrowmont are complicated. The fraternity owns more than 90 acres in Gatlinburg, most of it contiguous, which includes approximately 14 acres of the Arrowmont campus. Some 13 buildings sit on the Arrowmont tract. Of those, Arrowmont owns the ones built since 1991, including the Wood Studio, the Pollard and Hughes Hall dormitories and the Resident Artist Studio. Pi Beta Phi owns the remainder of the buildings, all historically significant, and most have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service.
Pi Beta Phi’s original Settlement School campus has two distinct historic districts. One includes the Teachers’ Cottage, built in 1916, the Red Barn (1923) the Stuart Dormitory (1941) and the Staff House (1952). The other district includes the Ogle cabin (1807), an early school building (1913), the Arrowcraft Shop (1940), and the Jennie Nicol Health Clinic (1948), which currently serves as Arrowmont’s business office. The Arrowcraft Shop and another structure on campus are both leased by Pi Beta Phi to other organizations.
Despite the convoluted nature of the Arrowmont situation, the legal ramifications remain pretty straightforward. Pi Beta Phi owns the land where Arrowmont is located, as well as considerable land adjacent to it, along with all of the historic buildings built before 1991. But the National Park Service’s historic districts in Arrowmont do not preclude Pi Beta Phi from selling the property or the buildings it owns. Neither does the existence of a lease agreement with Arrowmont, which is scheduled to end on August 31, 2011.
According to Tarr, Pi Beta Phi has told Arrowmont officials that it is not going to enter into lease negotiations right now, but if the school wants to stay on the property the organization will talk to them in plenty of time to get a lease negotiated. Tarr declined to indicate whether terms of a renewed lease would maintain the $1 a year rate Arrowmont currently enjoys.
“Pi Beta Phi certainly wants Arrowmont to succeed,” Tarr said. “There’s no doubt about that. But we simply can’t be responsible for its success today.”
The Future of Arrowmont
Despite the recent turmoil, Arrowmont is operating as usual. Spring 2009 classes run through April 11. Summer courses run in two consecutive sessions from June 7 to Aug. 15. There are regularly scheduled exhibitions during the spring and summer, an international artists’ retreat, a conference of the National Institute of American Doll Artists, and a national symposium on clay as an art medium. Fall’s one-week and weekend workshops are scheduled for Sept. 20-Oct. 25. Schedules and catalogs for 2010 programs are already being planned.
However, serious questions have been raised about Arrowmont’s long-term future, and the school has hired lawyers to help sort through everything.
“We’re still in between on this right now, whether to stay or to go,” Willard said. “Presently, we’re working on two or three scenarios, not knowing for sure what may transpire. But the school is going to continue, there’s no question about that, whether we continue here or somewhere else.”
Willard said one possibility would be to try to purchase the 14-acre school campus tract from Pi Beta Phi. But in that scenario Arrowmont would still have no control over what happens on the land surrounding it and that situation could create problems.
Attempting to purchase the entire 70-acre tract that was being included in the earlier sales negotiations, or even a considerable portion of it, could prove expensive for Arrowmont, especially without considerable financial assistance from outside the organization.
“We have to make a decision whether we’d want to spend the money purchasing the property or go to land that could possibly be donated, depending upon what we locate, and spend money building something new,” Willard said. “We’ll get an appraisal at some point, but it would be in the millions of dollars to purchase the entire 70-acre parcel. These are decisions we’ll need to make moving forward. All our options are open right now.”
A tourism official from at least one East Tennessee community—Townsend—has publicly expressed a keen interest in having Arrowmont relocate to its area. Willard said people in other communities have expressed similar ideas. It will probably be mid-summer before any major decision will be made, and Arrowmont officials would most likely have to start a new capital campaign to raise the money if the school stays put or moves to another site.
“It’s not about Arrowmont surviving; it’s about Arrowmont thriving,” Willard said. “We all have an overwhelming sense of making a decision that will be for generations to come. Ultimately, this whole thing gives us the opportunity to re-envision ourselves and will make Arrowmont a better institution.”
The History of Arrowmont
Surrounded on three sides by the Great Smoky Mountains, Gatlinburg, Tenn., is a long-time tourist destination. On a hill in the heart of the city sits a refreshing oasis of fine art and culture called Arrowmont. This multifaceted art education operation has been a Gatlinburg fixture and a wellspring of Appalachian artistic culture for more than four decades, evolving out of its patron organization’s educational mission dating back nearly a century.
Arrowmont’s 14-acre campus includes art studios, five galleries, a resource center and a book and supply store. The school offers workshops scheduled throughout most of the year taught by professionals trained in a broad spectrum of artistic media, including ceramics, fibers, woodworking, woodturning, metalwork, sculpture, warm glass, jewelry design, book and paper arts, drawing, painting and photography. Arrowmont also hosts educational conferences, music programs and community outreach activities and can accommodate up to 120 resident students and faculty at a time.
Through the years, Arrowmont has received ample recognition for the quality of its programs including awards from the National Council of Arts Administrators, the American Craft Council, and the Southern Highland Craft Guild.
“At the core of what we’re all about is creating things with our hands that are expressive of the artist who makes it,” explained David Willard, who became the school’s first full-time director in 2001. “We live in a world full of mass-produced goods. It’s our feeling that there is a place in this world for a really good potter, a really good furniture maker, metalsmith, or fiber artist. I’m hopeful that people will reflect upon the art of the handmade and maybe the next time they want to buy something they’ll think about supporting some of our creative artists who are doing this work.”
Willard came to Arrowmont following 14 years of teaching and administrative work at the University of Texas-Austin Department of Art and Art History. Previously, he was a curator of education at the Boise Art Museum in Idaho and has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Having earned a couple of fine arts degrees and a Fulbright Scholarship that won him a trip to England to study fused glass sculpture, Willard found a strong Appalachian craft culture thriving in Gatlinburg.
“The area we live in is rich with artists, rich with great tradition,” Willard said. “It is an indigenous industry, a creative economy. It fits perfectly into what is perhaps the biggest tourist trend today, which is cultural heritage tourism. We live in a tourist destination and one of the things that’s becoming real popular is that people want to go to a place with a unique culture, a sense of place. That’s why we fit into this area so beautifully. We bring great value to the community.”
Willard credits Arrowmont’s previous directors, including Sandy Blaine, and Arrowmont’s assistant director Bill Griffith as vital in building Arrowmont’s programs and reputation.
“One of the things that first impressed me when I became director was the long sense of history that is part of this place,” Willard said. “We’re talking about being on the same property, as an educational enterprise, for nearly 100 years.”
Arrowmont’s storied heritage grew out of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School established by the Midwestern-based fraternity for women as a philanthropic endeavor in 1912. Pi Beta Phi’s Gatlinburg mission was to provide an education for children living in this then quite isolated Appalachian region. Originating before the term “sorority” came into popular usage, the organization maintains its fraternity designation. It traces its origins to 1867 and since 2002 has been based in Town and Country, Mo., just outside St. Louis.
When Pi Beta Phi first came to Gatlinburg, local residents were surviving on subsistence farming and their skill at making the practical items they needed in their daily lives. Eventually, Pi Beta Phi administrators decided to add formal instruction in handicraft skills like basketry and weaving to the three R’s that defined their primary educational mission. In 1925 the school hired its first full-time weaving instructor and in the following year founded Arrowcraft, a shop to market the products local artisans made.
In 1945, the Settlement School partnered with the University of Tennessee’s craft program to present the first summer workshop in crafts and community education, an ongoing educational program that, in 1968, would lead to a full-fledged arts and crafts school called Arrowmont.
By 1970, the original Settlement schoolhouse had been razed to build a new classroom facility. A photography studio opened, as well as a new exhibition and sales gallery. Arrowmont’s reputation continued to grow during the 1980s. A highly successful woodturner’s conference held at the school in 1985 prompted the formation of the American Association of Woodturners. Arrowmont earned the Governor’s Award for Art Education the next year, and The Washington Post named its summer workshop program “one of the five best known in the nation.”
During these years, a board of governors made up of representatives from Pi Beta Phi and the University of Tennessee oversaw Arrowmont’s operation, and the fraternity supplied it with substantial funding. As the art school’s stature grew, the fraternity established Arrowmont as a separate organization in 1991. Pi Beta Phi Settlement School Inc. began doing business as Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and the fraternity has since leased the school’s land to Arrowmont for $1 a year.
Soon after establishing Arrowmont, the fraternity created the Pi Beta Phi Foundation, charged with managing the fraternity’s funds collected for various charitable causes. According to official Pi Beta Phi Foundation Board of Trustees statements issued late last summer, the Foundation has given more than $2 million in grants to Arrowmont since its inception in 1991 and currently manages approximately $89,000 in endowed scholarships for the school. The fraternity and its foundation have contributed about $300,000 in donations per year.
Like most nonprofit art institutions, Arrowmont requires significant financial support to operate. Tuition and fees cover about 60 percent of the school’s expenses. Various grants and donations, including the contributions from Pi Beta Phi, have been making up the remainder.
“The fraternity has been and will continue to be very generous to Arrowmont,” Willard said. “They were the ones who started all this and their generosity has been extraordinary.”