Heading on home
College of Art leaving S. Main to combine campus
Five years after purchasing and transforming a South Main building into a graduate school and gallery, the Memphis College of Art is retreating from Downtown to consolidate its facilities around its Overton Park base.
The college’s ambitious plan to expand its “footprint” to Downtown with the Nesin Graduate School, at 477 S. Main, proved alienating to some graduate students and cumbersome to faculty, officials said. The expected benefits of being part of a burgeoning South Main arts district failed to make up for the lack of access to art-making apparatus — wood shops, a metal shop, ceramics and printmaking equipment — available at distinctive Rust Hall, the 1959 building in Overton Park that is the base of operations for the 79-year-old private independent school of art and design.
“It’s a beautiful building, the gallery is to die for, but the students are pretty isolated,” said associate professor Haley Morris-Cafiero, 39, head of the college’s Master of Fine Arts photography program. “The graduate students are encouraged to be leaders, but it’s hard for the undergrads to benefit from their experience and their art when they’re way across town.”
To make up for the loss of the Downtown studio space, five Midtown homes on North Tucker that currently function as student housing would be converted into studios for MCA’s 30-plus graduate students, assuming the structures can be rezoned from “residential” to “campus” use. The cost of the rehab is projected at $552,000. MCA also owns a home on North Rembert that already has been rezoned as “campus” space.