The Justice

While many Brandeis students may make one trip to New York in the four years they're here, such travel is the norm for Prof. Graham Campbell (FA), who travels weekly and sometimes daily between Boston and the Big Apple. But he says he's ready to slow down. "I've done 22 years of traveling backward and forward," he says, "and now I don't want to die on my way to work or home, so I stay in [Waltham] during the semester." While most students know him as a professor and the associate director of the Fine Arts department, it isn't until Campbell steps off the Brandeis campus that his real work begins.

A painter for as long as he can remember, Campbell exhibits his work and owns studios in both New York and Waltham. Travel is a necessary and inspirational part of his life, he says. While often recognized for his large abstract paintings, Campbell himself refuses to describe his art. "It is against my principles … because you are using one language to describe another one, and the complexities of that are too enormous," he states. He sees art as "experiential" and wants viewers to see his work with an open mind, "regardless of what I say and regardless of what anyone else says; you should be able to go see it for yourself." Inspired by stone circles, riverbeds and rainy days, his work often explores the relationship between geometric and linear shapes, leaving much to be interpreted by the viewer.

This openness to new ideas applies to all aspects of his art. "Rituals are like bad habits," he says. "You have to leave room for change and for things to develop in their rightful way." The solitude this process entails requires "an incredible internal discipline," in which you must live "with and within yourself."

Teaching, then, is a welcome change of pace since "the energy that you normally have in your studio spills out into your teaching." A professor for over 30 years, at Brandeis since 1981, Campbell equates teaching art with creative writing.

"Art is a really big subject, so it's not how to draw or how to paint, it's how to express yourself using this language," he says.

Unfortunately, the energy that teaching requires is such that he feels he can only paint during the summer, once classes are no longer in session. While teaching, Campbell says he's "engaged in a social activity, but if you're a painter it's a very anti-social activity." A constant transition between the two would be so confusing that he says it would be impossible to "divide myself in that way."

Finding a balance between being a teacher and an artist is a problem Prof. Tory Fair (FA), a professor of sculpture and an artist-in-residence at Brandeis since 1997, also knows all too well. Unlike Campbell, she works on her art in her home and studio in Arlington, Mass. on days off, an experience she finds "very schizophrenic."

While not quite Jekyll and Hyde, Fair is torn by yet another one of her interests, and while most people rarely associate sports with sculpture, for Fair the link is familiar.

A natural athlete, Fair played soccer and lacrosse while getting her B.A. in sculpture at Harvard, as well as an M.F.A. in printmaking and painting at Massachusetts College in 1997. Since then, she has incorporated themes from the field, such as competitive tension and unspoken boundaries between people and spaces, into her artwork: "Whenever I'm on the field people are like, 'Oh, she's the artist,' and whenever I'm in art classes, it's, 'Oh, she's the jock,' so I straddle both spheres pretty evenly."

In her most recent series, "Ready, Set, Bloom," exhibited last spring at the Essex Art Center, followed by a summer showing at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, she was inspired by the sports she played as a child and her mother's garden: "My brothers and I would play out in the backyard and our games would start to encroach into her garden, and she [would yell and send us back] out into the field. You are creating these boundaries that seem to move and change, [and there] is that competitive space between things [that is just] unstated and pervasive in the world."

While it can take Fair up to seven or eight months to finish some of her larger sculptures, she can look forward to smaller and quirkier feats within the classroom. "I think it's very exciting when people have never used a screw gun and get a chance to do that," she says. And with University plans to start building the Safra Center for the Arts this spring, it's an exciting time for professors who are looking forward to an expansion of the department, she says.

So are she and Campbell artists or teachers first? "I ask myself that question every day," Fair says. "I think I see myself more as an artist who is lucky enough to work with young people who are making things, too."

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