Art Center’s New President Brown Stresses Creativity, Participation

Vance Studley’s typography class at Art Center College of Design was taking a break last February when the college’s towering new president dropped by and changed the school.

The change was small, but it was significant: a harbinger of the increased emphasis on original thinking that David Brown--who arrived at the Pasadena campus in December--is likely to engender at Art Center.

On the surface, there didn’t seem to be much substance to the 6-foot, 8-inch Brown’s visit to Studley’s white-walled classroom filled with orderly ranks of work tables.

Mulling Over Unusual Visit

“We talked about student work, the American Institute of Graphic Artists, New England literature, basketball, baseball, Greene and Greene architecture and Gustave Stickley furniture,” Studley recalled.

Later, the teacher mulled over the unusual visit. In Studley’s previous nine years teaching at the prestigious school, no president had wandered into his classroom just to see what was going on.

Studley got to thinking: “This man reads books. He knows words. He’s a wordsmith.”

The realization, combined with Brown’s “wide-eyed-about-everything” attitude, encouraged Studley to make a proposal.

Early in the morning, a week after their talk, he entered Brown’s office overlooking the Rose Bowl.

“I went into his office extremely apprehensively,” the teacher said. “What threw me was that, after listening carefully for 20 minutes, David said, ‘Go to it. Don’t break the bank. Keep me posted.’ ”

Studley’s fourth-term students went to it, and produced a portfolio of 15 original prints based on phrases from the work of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury (who happens to be on Art Center’s board of advisers).

Each student picked a phrase and--using only type, black ink and white paper--brought that phrase to life with graphic art.

Everyone Got a Copy

Art Center ordered 100 of the portfolios, and Bradbury numbered and signed each one. After being sure every person involved with the project got a copy, Brown took the rest to his office, where he keeps them to give to friends of the school.

To Brown, the original and imaginative assignment is especially significant because it adds a new dimension at Art Center, which is a school renowned for producing highly competent designers, photographers, graphic artists and film makers.

But, Brown observed, the “downside” of the school is that it is known by many for producing “imitators, not innovators,” that its reputation is “all wrist and no head,” or long on craftsmanship and short on innovation.

It is essential, the new president declared, to “get into the (Art Center) mind-set that our responsibility is to educate rather than to train. There’s a very strong training quality around here, to the exclusion of flexibility, initiative and personal growth.”

Some of Art Center’s strongest and most knowledgeable supporters concur with Brown.

“I wouldn’t disagree, but I kind of think it’s unfair to put it that way,” said Strother MacMinn, an instructor at Art Center for 38 years and a man known for his loyalty and love for the school.

“Image-conscious designers . . . are so anxious to continue their creativity that they sometimes overlook the opportunity of pursuing all the arts simultaneously for an enriching background,” MacMinn noted. “So David Brown’s idea is to encourage a greater awareness of all the arts in order to give the students, and therefore their work and the reputation of the college, more depth.”

Important Changes

MacMinn, like other faculty members and students interviewed, said Brown is already effecting deep and important changes at Art Center.

“If you tried to design somebody to be president of the college you couldn’t do as well,” MacMinn said. “He’s spread fingers out through the entire organization so that everybody feels they’re a part of it.

“Because of his manner, he’s promoted a whole new attitude around the place. Any change usually does an organization good because you get a fresh start. He brought that in.”

Students also say they feel a new sense of participation in the decision-making process at Art Center.

“David Brown does, indeed, listen to students,” said Robert Richards, a member of Art Center’s Senior Representatives’ Council.

“He definitely pursues things. He will very often bring up topics that haven’t been mentioned in several weeks to show that something has been done.”

Brown leans toward precision. His desk is a slab of white Formica the size of a hotel front door. On it, lined up like marines on parade, stand six tablets, a note pad, a red felt tip pen, a black felt tip pen and half a dozen No. 2 wooden pencils sharpened to pinpoints. Nothing else.

At meetings, he arranges papers in squared-off piles. Every angle is a multiple of 90 degrees. No exceptions.

While many people try to be organized, Brown declares, “I try to be spontaneous.”

Beneath a relaxed demeanor, Brown is a tense man. “I used to have a terrible temper,” he said.

“Sometimes it seems to be the little glitches in life that provoke the explosions,” observed Brown’s wife, Judy, a former administrative assistant at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund who now devotes full time to caring for the Browns’ son, 6, and daughter, 9. “The really important things promote being silent and thinking.”

But Brown doesn’t spend much time being angry. His usual attitude is friendly and caring.

The Browns love spending hours with their children in their newly restored Greene and Greene home in Pasadena.

“He’s a devoted father,” his wife observed. “He loves his kids and would do anything for them.”

On a recent evening at home, the Browns played host to several neighbors and a few Art Center friends. Their son amused himself and the guests with a small air force of paper planes, Judy made sure everyone was comfortable, and Brown busied himself in the kitchen with one of his favorite domestic pastimes: cooking a Chinese dinner.

An Informal Family

The Browns are an informal family. While they and their guests ate with chopsticks, the children came in for a while, ate a bit, and then went off to whatever children do when they tire of adults.

At work Brown dresses neatly and carefully, always in a suit. He seems more comfortable without his jacket, which he removes at almost every opportunity. Around home his preferred dress is khaki pants, a polo shirt, and docksiders or loafers. “You hardly ever see him in anything else,” his wife remarked.

At work, Brown is considered an excellent listener, a dedicated delegator. “My job is to enable this school to function as close to the peak of its potential as possible. Enabling is my kind of leadership.” He says he wants to get results, not to give orders.

Brown is a firm disbeliever in the old saw, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

He doesn’t wait for anything to break, noting that, “I would rather spend my time improving things than repairing them.”

In his inaugural address, Brown paid homage to his predecessor, Don Kubly, noting that Kubly “has held two of the toughest jobs at Art Center: president and president emeritus.”

At the age of 41, Brown took on one of those jobs with the benefits of having no previous administrative experience in academe, an open mind and immediate popularity.

New England to Pasadena

He took one giant, unlikely step from being vice president for communications at the Champion International paper company in Stamford, Conn., to Art Center in Pasadena.

Brown had worked his way up the ladder at Champion after having graduated from West Hartford, Conn. public schools, from Dartmouth with a bachelor’s degree in English and from Hartford’s Trinity College with a master’s in English and education. He taught high school for a year, spent a year doing public relations work in New York, then went into business as a writer in partnership with two designers.

“I wrote, I sold, I kept the books and I fended off the creditors,” Brown said.

In 1972, after the partnership dissolved, Brown set himself up in New York as a writer specializing in design-related fields. One of his clients was Champion International. Six years later, he hired on as Champion’s director of creative services and he stayed with the company until moving to Art Center last December.

While at Champion, he was elected president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, an unusual position for a non-artist. Sophie McConnell, the AIGA’s associate director, remembered Brown as a dedicated, highly organized man who demonstrated outstanding devotion to the graphic arts. “He was a terrific president,” she said.

The first person to suggest Brown for his new job was Linda Hinrichs. She and her husband, Kit, are Art Center graduates and San Francisco partners in Pentagram, an international design firm.

Kit had received a call from a headhunter, requesting suggestions for presidential candidates for Art Center.

“I went home and asked Linda,” Hinrichs recalled. “Right away she said, ‘David Brown.’ As soon as she said it, I knew she was right.

“David’s long-term involvement with the design field, his strong administrative skills, and his understanding of the effectiveness of good design within corporations made him perfect.”

The next day, Hinrichs called the headhunter and gave him Brown’s name.