Last graduate ending era at midtown college campus
Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s final class of seniors will receive diplomas today
For close to 70 years, graduates from a midtown college campus have donned their caps and gowns for a spring commencement ceremony, lining up to receive their degrees. First as St. Michael’s College, then as the College of Santa Fe, and finally as the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, the expansive campus on St. Michael’s Drive, built at the end of World War II on the site of an old Army hospital, has served thousands of students, with a heavy focus on the arts.
On Friday, the school’s final class of seniors, numbering 135, will graduate.
The private, for-profit Santa Fe University of Art and Design, which has operated at the cityowned campus since 2010, is closing next month, and there are no plans for another school to take over the site. City plans for new uses of the property are already in the works.
The thought was “a little nerve-wracking,” said 23-year-old Whitney Wernick, a Texas native who will be the last in line Friday to receive a degree — the campus’ last graduate.
“But I didn’t spend four years here not to walk,” said Wernick, a photography major known for her images of nude women and for filling in campus potholes with flowers.
One day this week, sitting in the campus’ almost-vacant Marion Center for Photographic Arts, where she practically had lived in the darkroom, Wernick reflected on her time at the college.
“I spent four years here,” she said. “I worked my ass off here. I wreaked havoc here. I went up on the roof and watched the sun set in the evening.”
She also filled potholes with soil and planted flowers in them last autumn, in the middle of the night. She received disapproving email messages from some who did not find beauty or humor in her efforts.
But, she said, somebody must have gotten the point: “A month later, the school filled those potholes in with asphalt.”
The campus will be empty of students by Saturday and devoid of its last faculty members by the end of next week.
This week, it appeared as if even the ghosts already had abandoned it.
The buildings, mostly shuttered, stood as a monument to a long history of students and teachers who had walked through their doors, a history that will be spotlighted at least once more during the commencement ceremony, scheduled at 4 p.m. Friday at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.
St. Michael’s College, established by the De La Salle Christian Brothers in 1859, moved from a site downtown to the midtown property in 1949. The Christian Brothers changed the school’s name in 1966 to the College of Santa Fe, a name it held until 2009.
Then the school announced it was struggling with finances and was forced to shut down.
The city of Santa Fe purchased the campus land and facilities from the Christian Brothers and signed a 26-year lease with the University of Art and Design, an affiliate of the for-profit Laureate Education Co., to continue operating a school there.
But Laureate officials announced last year that in the face of declining enrollment and shrinking profits, they would close the college in June.
Only rising seniors who had a chance to finish their four-year degrees were allowed to return for
the final school year. Wernick was one of them.
An ever-smiling woman, Wernick said she was focusing on the positive as she prepared to leave the school. She will remain in Santa Fe for at least a year, she said, and already has set up a one-woman photo exhibition of her work, Body Positive, in May 2019 at the Center for Contemporary Arts.
The show is a series of black-and-white photographs of nude women posing in environments that make them feel comfortable, ranging from their living rooms to work offices and wintry outdoor landscapes.
The use of black and white, Wernick said, “neutralizes the image. You’re not focused on the colors around these women. You’re focused on their figures.”
Scars, wrinkles, body fat, beauty marks and all, the photos show that “women’s bodies are beautiful, and you don’t have to conform to what society thinks or wants about them,” Wernick said.
The work is a big leap from the earlier imagery — abstracts and landscapes — that she created growing up in her hometown of Grapevine, Texas.
A graduate of Carroll High School, she had no interest in attending college, she said, because most of her art teachers did not let her explore in a style that suited her curious nature. But one instructor, Eric Horn, cared enough to sit her down and tell her, “You’re never going to know if college is right for you unless you go.”
A representative of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design who came to her school encouraged her to visit. She and her mother decided to take a more than 10-hour road trip to Santa Fe to check it out.
“I was sold just driving into Santa Fe,” Wernick said. Plus, “I got a lot of scholarships, which helped.”
The teachers at the university pushed her to find her own creative style and voice, she said.
“This college gave me drive. The teachers never gave up on me. They supported every idea I wanted to run with. A couple of times, I hated them for it because they pushed me too much. But they made me better.”
One of those instructors, Tony O’Brien, said Wernick uses her talent “to address cultural issues that affect women today. Her senior thesis was a powerful statement about the female body. She empowered young women to break with the stereotype of female beauty that is imposed by modern media.
“She is never hesitant to speak out,” O’Brien said, “and through her work, she is always pushing boundaries, which often forces the viewer to feel uncomfortable and to question their assumptions.”
Though Wernick feels New York is calling her, she said she expects to stay in Santa Fe for a while, honing her skills and continuing to work as an assistant to commercial photographer Peter Ogilvie.
Her family was coming in from Texas to watch her graduate Friday. Her anticipation was palpable. “I don’t know how to express it,” she said. Then, after a second: “Oh my gosh! Wow!”