Last August, the Southwest School of Art (SSA) and the University of Texas at San Antonio announced plans to merge and create a new art college in UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts.
When the campus opens its doors, this fall, it will be one of the largest and most comprehensive schools of art in the state. In addition to conferring undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, art history and fine arts, it will include offerings in digital art, graphic design and more.
But for some, the merger represents a loss. SSA began as a community school of arts and crafts in downtown San Antonio nearly six decades ago, serving thousands of community members and growing in reputation until it was accredited as Texas’ only independent college of art in 2014.
Though the new college of art at UTSA will provide both faculty and students with access to resources, teachers and colleagues previously unavailable to them, people caught up in the transition say it’s been complicated — especially for current SSA students, faculty and staff.
The Southwest School of Art doesn’t have a tenure system equivalent to the University of Texas system, but many of its faculty are revered artists and teachers who have been embedded in the San Antonio creative community and in their positions for years.
Though SSA faculty worked on one-year contracts, they often enjoyed the kind of benefits granted to tenured faculty at larger schools, including research funding, sabbatical leaves and smaller course loads.
Now, some say they’re unsure whether they’ll enjoy that level of security going forward.
“The major issues at play for the faculty and staff are job rank and salary,” said one SSA source, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of jeopardizing their future job prospects. “Will the faculty and staff be brought on board at a rank consistent with their current position and at a similar pay rate[?]”
Glenn Martinez, dean of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at UTSA, told the Current his institution is committed to ensuring that “all of the stakeholders at SSA have a place at UTSA.”
But what that place will look like is still an open question.
Given the University of Texas system’s stringent hiring methodology, Martinez said there’s no guarantee that SSA faculty will be hired on at UTSA at a rank commensurate with their prior work.
“Faculty will come in at different levels based on their own background and experience and so forth,” Martinez said. “We’re not making a blanket statement as to this kind of faculty or that kind of faculty, we’re looking at each one individually and making the determinations and the offers.”
Equal partners?
In September, SSA faculty were given roughly a month to put together a packet of materials for review by UTSA faculty and administrators. SSA staff had to apply for jobs at the new college as well, while students are in the process of figuring out how many of their credits will transfer to UTSA and how their tuition and class sizes may change.
For now, some SSA personnel said they feel as if they’re in limbo, waiting to find out what the next phase of their careers will look like.
The stakes are high. There are a limited number of college teaching jobs for artists nationally, let alone in San Antonio, where many have lived and worked for years.
Another source at SSA, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of jeopardizing their future job prospects, said UTSA’s decisions — which Martinez said should arrive in early February — will signal to what extent the university sees SSA faculty and staff as equal partners in the new college.
“Is this a merger or is this an acquisition? That’s the big question,” the person said. “A lot of us have been concerned that this is a land grab. UTSA has wanted to have their art program downtown for a long time.”
Martinez said achieving a balance between current UTSA and SSA faculty in the new program isn’t a consideration.
Preserving a legacy
Southwest School of Art’s longtime president, Paula Owen, initiated talks about a deal with UTSA President Taylor Eighmy last summer due to the financial stress the COVID-19 pandemic put on her institution. Owen, who’s retiring June 30, sees the deal as a merger in which SSA’s legacy and structure will be preserved.
“Both UTSA and Southwest School of Art are bringing significant resources to the table in order to create this new and expanded school of art,” Owen said.
Owen said she felt confident initiating the process. SSA and UTSA have enjoyed a close relationship over the years. UTSA artists frequently exhibit at SSA, and some students study at both institutions. To boot, Owen is a former UTSA commencement speaker.
The strain of the pandemic — and continued uncertainty about when it will end — left SSA with little choice but to explore options to stabilize its financial position, Owen said. The campus lost revenue from in-person classes and events, and it was forced to reevaluate its long-term donor prospects.
Owen has heralded the merger as “innovative” — one that will ensure the city’s downtown remains home to a leading college arts institution for years to come. The deal comes as UTSA looks to raise its profile nationally, and SSA could have significant influence on the design of the new college.
The new campus’ Bachelor of Fine Arts program will be heavily based on SSA’s existing program, for example, which is notable for its interdisciplinary approach. One of the SSA sources added that UTSA is already doing a good job of integrating SSA students into its program.
Downtown presence
UTSA is also working to integrate SSA’s facilities and reputation, saying that it “hopes to utilize SSA’s name and brand with respect to its visual fine arts programs in a meaningful way” in the new program.
SSA’s historic downtown campus, located close to the River Walk, should be a focal point of that use.
In a Feb. 4 statement, the university said it will “maintain SSA’s historic and cherished downtown San Antonio campus” and continue to operate the school’s Club Giraud private dining facility. The university will also retain all current names for SSA buildings and galleries.
In its statement, UTSA also promised to continue operating and building upon community programs that are a backbone of SSA’s presence in the city, including young artist and adult continuing education programs, exhibitions and the Fiesta Arts Fair. Martinez said UTSA is aware of the impact and utility of SSA’s community-engagement model. He noted that it could be a standard for how the university offers music and theater education going forward.
“How do we build [a community engagement program] and sustain it over time in ways that create pipelines into our programs and help with recruitment of undergraduate and graduate students?” Martinez asked. “SSA has really done that very well … this merger is helping us think through how [we do] that.”
The question then becomes whether an institution the size of UTSA will put the energy and care into those community programs that people in San Antonio were accustomed to seeing from SSA over the decades. And whether the people who built SSA’s will still be around to help shape the culture and direction of the new college.
“If there is an intangible concern [about the merger] it is over culture, the differences between a small private school with small class sizes and the unknown of how that feeling might change moving to a large, state-run university,” one of the two SSA sources who spoke to the Current said.
Martinez, for one, is confident.
“This is really an exciting time for San Antonio,” he said. “It’s an exciting time for SSA and for UTSA … in the end, the outcome is going to be more than the sum of the two parts.”
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This article appears in Feb 9-22, 2022.