Pay Attention, Class

Samuel Hoi has wrapped up his first year as president of Otis College of Art and Design with the opening of a new building on the Westchester campus. The Bronya and Andy Galef Center for Fine Arts--a $5-million, 40,000-square-foot structure designed as an “art factory” by the Los Angeles architectural firm Frederick Fisher & Partners--was formally dedicated Friday, a couple of weeks after students began settling into studios and taking classes there.

The gleaming, corrugated-aluminum and glass building on Lincoln Boulevard is a dramatic symbol of changes at the 83-year-old college, and that suits Hoi just fine. “I think I’m well-matched with an institution that’s in a growth phase because I like to make things happen, garner resources and help other people become aware of the institution’s value,” he said. “Otis is at a good place right now to move to a new phase of relevance, prominence and influence. It has the potential to become an innovative educational leader in art and design.”

The new building was on the drawing board long before Hoi concluded his nine-year tenure as dean of the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and succeeded former Otis President Neil Hoffman. Hoi seems to have enjoyed a smooth transition as the building took shape, but plenty of challenges are ahead.

Otis has maintained a prominent position in Southern California’s galaxy of art schools, along with CalArts, Art Center College of Design and several university art departments. But its particular role, image and identity have been clouded as it has shifted from a publicly funded school to a private institution, expanded its curriculum and moved from the Mid-Wilshire District to the Westside.

Many people can’t even get the college’s name straight. Is it Otis Art Institute? Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design? Otis School of Art and Design or Otis College of Art and Design? The confusion is understandable. Over the years, it has had all of those names and more.

The college was founded in 1918 as Otis Art Institute by Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of The Times, with the gift of his home in Westlake Park to the county of Los Angeles. The county initially operated Otis under the art division of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. In 1947, the college was chartered and incorporated as the Los Angeles County Art Institute, but it continued to be known as Otis and its official name reverted to Otis Art Institute. In 1979, after the passage of Proposition 13 led to the cutoff of county support for the college, it merged with Parsons School of Design in New York and adopted the name Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. The partnership ended in 1992, when the college became Otis School of Art and Design. The following year, the name was changed again, to Otis College of Art and Design.

During the Otis/Parsons years, the college added classes in fashion, graphic design and environmental arts to its fine-arts curriculum. Enrollment expanded to 725 in the mid-’80s, but dropped to 635 by 1992 as crime mounted in the area around the campus. Hoffman and the trustees decided that the college had to move if it was to survive. In 1997, Otis relocated to three sites: a former IBM office building in Westchester and two smaller outposts--a facility at the California Mart in downtown Los Angeles for the School of Fashion Design and a studio in El Segundo for the master’s of fine arts program. The addition of the new building in Westchester, on the same site as the IBM building, has given the fine-arts program its own space and allowed the design program to expand in the older facility.

Hoi considers himself “a very fortunate new president,” partly because, when he arrived, Otis had already passed through an eight-year turnaround phase and found a new home. What’s more, “there was no major fire to put out,” he says. “I had the luxury to learn about Otis, contemplate its long-term needs and get acquainted with the city.”

He brought considerable experience to the job but took an unusual route. Born in Hong Kong in 1958, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1975. They settled in Hawaii, where Hoi attended his last two years of high school.

“The family business is Chinese furniture,” he says. “My father has a manufacturing and importing business in rosewood and teakwood furniture. I grew up with arts and crafts, but I am the only one in my family who has pursued that as a vocation.” His interest in art began at age 8 when his mother enrolled him in pencil drawing and Chinese brush painting classes. “I really fell in love with it as a means of expression but never took it seriously as a career choice,” he says.

He studied French and psychology at Columbia University in New York, then went to Columbia Law School. Meanwhile, art become an increasingly important part of his life. He took art classes throughout his undergraduate and law school days, “never realizing that it was a passion I would need to reckon with for the rest of my life,” he says.

Law school was intellectually stimulating for Hoi, but the notion of actually practicing law left him cold. “That prompted a very early life crisis and I decided to give art a chance,” he says. “But as a Chinese kid, I had to finish what I started.”

Hoi became a member of the State Bar of New York in 1983 and immediately retired from the profession. “While my classmates were looking for law jobs, I put together a portfolio, applied to several art schools and was accepted by Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute in New York. I had accumulated loans from law school and didn’t want to pay any more for my education, so I went to the New School for Social Research, the parent university of Parsons, and asked if I could take classes for free if I worked there.”

He got an affirmative answer along with a job in Parsons’ office of continuing education, then enrolled in painting, drawing and illustration classes. “I was overqualified for my job, so I moved up rapidly through different positions,” Hoi says. In 1986, when he graduated from Parsons, he became director of the school’s associate in applied science degree program.

“I intended to be an artist, but it became apparent to me that college education was a wonderful way to combine my interest in the arts with my legal training while being involved with problem solving and administration,” he says. “Also, partly because of my upbringing and culture, I have a very strong belief in education as a means for individuals to realize who they are and to gain the tools to realize who they can be. I was willing to put aside my own studio practice to do the conceptually creative and concrete work of helping other people become productive citizens through art and design.”

He worked at Parsons for eight years, including a three-year term as director of Parsons School of Design in Paris, from 1988 to 1991. Parsons’ executive dean, David Levy, became president of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1991 and recruited Hoi as dean of the gallery’s educational partner, the Corcoran College of Art and Design. During his tenure there, Hoi was credited with expanding the college’s continuing education program, creating exhibition spaces for Washington-area artists and forging relationships with public schools.

At Otis, Hoi oversees an institution with about 925 students from 39 states and 26 countries. The relatively small full-time faculty of 28 is augmented by 180 part-time instructors, most of whom are professionals working in the fields they teach. While Otis is only one of many places to study art and design in Southern California, he believes it can distinguish itself as the region’s “most democratic, accessible and city-related private college of art and design.”

Otis has a relatively young student body, Hoi says, noting that 45% of the students in the freshman class come directly from high school. Among other telling statistics, more than half the students at Otis are the first members of their families to attend college. The ethnic mix reflects that of greater Los Angeles, which is home to about half the students. But Otis is also “a point of entry into the professional community for the immigrant population,” he says. “The arts are a powerful launching pad that value innate ability rather than cultural orientation, and that’s a tradition we need to continue to strengthen.”

As for the curriculum, Otis offers many classes that are available at other schools, but it has developed distinctive programs in toy design, fashion design, digital media and environmental arts, Hoi says. “We are not going to expand our programs to be everything to everyone, but we need to look smartly to see how we can honor our tradition, build on our strengths and carve out a future in which we can be innovative and valuable and distinct.”

That’s part of clarifying Otis’ muddled identity, says Hoi, who expects a branding and planning process to help chart the school’s future course. Funded by the Irvine Foundation, the program will be conducted during the coming year.

One goal that’s already a high priority for Hoi is to give Otis a stronger presence in the city. That effort includes community outreach such as a partnership with the Venice Boys and Girls Club, offering free art classes at the club taught by Otis faculty and students. Another project is a series of 18 “culture walks” and workshops in various Los Angeles neighborhoods, led by Otis staff and paid for by a $330,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.

Among other new ventures, students in Otis’ graduate writing program and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage have embarked on a collaborative study of the literary West, intended to culminate in a major exhibition at the museum in 2007. Also at the Autry, Otis fashion design students have worked as interns on “How the West Was Worn,” an exhibition of Western clothing that opens Oct. 20. Meanwhile, collaborations with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and other cultural institutions are under discussion.

“One of the challenges for Otis is to figure out how it can continue to insert its influence and offer its services to the city” while building “a powerful and clear identity,” Hoi says. “We need to make our presence felt as a prominent player in the artistic, cultural, economic and social life of the city. Los Angeles is a future-looking city. It hasn’t settled into tradition. If we can harness that energy and give it support, we will always remain in the vanguard in the visual culture.” *

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The Ben Maltz Gallery at the Bronya and Andy Galef Center for Fine Arts has mounted its first show, “Cross-Cuts: Seven Los Angeles Artists,” 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. (310) 665-6905. Through Nov. 3.