When Ron Jones, dean of the University of South Florida's College of Performing and Visual Arts, started talking about reorganizing the department with an eye to cutting costs, we feared he'd go about it with an axe and a sledgehammer and that no good could come of it.But then he did some really smart things. One of the smartest was putting the Contemporary Art Museum and Graphicstudio together under a new organization called The Institute for Research in Art, and assigning Margaret Miller to direct it.
"Graphicstudio was negotiating with artists to make work, and CAM was negotiating with artists to show work," says Jones. "In theory, they should have been talking to the same artists. But they weren't. Instead they were competing, and that wasn't productive."
Miller already had a monster reputation as a creative, resourceful and hardworking arts impresario and shrewd administrator. She built the Contemporary Art Museum, which has become a major cultural vortex on Florida's west coast. Through the museum, she launched major national and international traveling exhibitions, and brought in cutting-edge artists, curators and scholars. Still, it seemed an awfully big task — even for Miller — not only to run both organizations, but also to keep them afloat through budget-trimming times.
She's done way more than that. Under her leadership, Graphicstudio isn't just afloat; it's thriving (though definitely leaner) and it's working in more productive collaboration with the rest of the university and the surrounding community than ever before.
A case in point is the collaboration with Cuban artists, which started under former Graphicstudio Director Hank Hine and has grown into a huge collaboration involving artists, students and faculty in theater, music and visual arts in the Bay area and in Cuba. The collaboration will culminate in a 2005 interdisciplinary event that is envisioned as a biennale. The Tampa Bay Performing Arts has already signed on as a participant after a trip to Cuba organized by Miller's staff.
Fasten your seatbelts, folks. With Miller in the driver's seat, it's going to be an exciting ride.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2003.