Creative Descent ~experiences that carried time~

“No person ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He (or she) sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. There are two kinds of opportunities: one which we chance upon, the other which we create.”
— Ruth Benedict

The training an artist receives shapes not only what they make, but how they understand their place in the world. Technical skill matters—but technique alone cannot carry meaning. Meaning is shaped by context, by history, by material, and by the lived realities that artists move through over time.

Looking back over several decades, what strikes me most is how little academia has changed in how it structures the education of artists. To echo Linda Nochlin’s provocation: why, thirty years or more later, does so much remain structurally the same?

For those who enter the arts through academia, there is often an unspoken promise: that institutions will prepare them for a meaningful life in art. Too often, that promise goes unquestioned. What is rewarded instead is conformity, competition, and the performance of insight rather than its actual embodiment. This essay is not a rejection of education. It is a reckoning with how education can lose sight of what it claims to value. Through my own experiences within and beyond the university, I want to explore how meaning is carried—by people, by materials, by communities and culture—and why art training must reconnect with lived history if it hopes to serve future artists.

The training an artist receives at an art institute is fundamentally different from the education offered at a university. I was fortunate to experience both, and both were rigorous and valuable. What failed, for me, was not the content but the structure—particularly when institutional authority was exercised in ways that discouraged risk, narrowed possibility, and quietly redirected students toward outcomes that served the institution more than the work itself.

During my final semester at SUNY Binghamton, I found myself sitting at a table with a small group of graduate students in an anthropology seminar taught by Professor Margaret Conkey. I was the only undergraduate in the room. The course emphasized interpretation, material culture, and meaning—ideas that felt immediately relevant to my work as a sculptor. My point of origin shifted into a sustained search for meaning itself.

Many of my memories from that seminar are blurred. I can’t put names to faces. I do remember one woman whose research stayed with me—she was exploring the idea that ancient artifacts found in caves may have been toys made for children. Another student I recall was a graduate student, possibly from England, who had worked with a well-known anthropologist before coming to the university. I never knew whether he was visiting or newly enrolled. What I remember vividly is a disagreement we had about the value of what we were doing as students. I can still hear him say, almost casually, that what we did and said didn’t really matter—that academia was, in the end, just a game.

I remember looking directly across the table and responding that it was not a game at all. That what we choose to do—and how we do it—has real consequences in our lives and affects the people around us. The room went quiet. Soon after, the class ended.

Over the years, I have returned to that moment again and again. As I’ve watched how easily people are treated as interchangeable; expendable. I’ve come to understand that exchange as an early fault line. It marked the beginning of a shift beneath my feet. At the time, I was also facing decisions about my own future, with three young children and a life to support. I had idealized academia. It had opened my mind in profound ways. What followed was deeply disappointing.

I came to believe that academia often undermines the very meaning it claims to study by turning meaning into performance. It narrows possibilities, insulates itself from life beyond its walls, and leaves many students unprepared for the realities they eventually face. The idea that something is “just a game” can only survive if one agrees to let it be so. If you take your life seriously, the frame changes—and so do the stakes.

At SUNY Binghamton, there was an innovative group of professors deeply engaged in the interpretation of art and the search for meaning. New sculpture facilities had just opened, including an extraordinary bronze foundry program. So what was wrong? The structure of the university imposed rigid rules with little fluidity—rules that were already outdated. The art world had evolved toward alternative modes of exhibition and engagement, but the institution had not. That rigidity left little room for the kinds of risks artists were already being asked to take beyond the university’s walls.

Within this structure, women artists are often subtly pressured to make work that centers on their identity in order to be seen as successful. If a woman chooses to paint an abstract landscape or build a sculpture that resists narrative, her work is frequently overlooked—not because it lacks rigor, but because it does not visibly perform struggle for a white, male-dominated art market. In this way, expression becomes expectation. Art is treated less as a practice of inquiry and more as evidence of a damaged soul.

Yet art is not a symptom of a troubled mind; it is a mode of attention, labor, and meaning-making. When institutions reward visibility over substance, survival itself is mistaken for content, and complexity is flattened into something easier to consume.

Sometimes the body knows before language catches up. There is a gap between what we sense and what we can articulate. You can argue endlessly, but I chose to walk away. That decision cost me a degree I had effectively completed. As Linda Nochlin wrote, “The fault lies with us… given the social structures of the art world, it is a wonder that there have been any women artists at all.”

I wanted to create an alternative exhibition site that imposed meaning onto the work itself. The university refused. Instead, I mounted an exhibition in the flat where I lived with my husband and three children. I couldn’t afford anything else. I later completed my BFA in Sculpture at the University of Cincinnati, on my own terms and with no regrets. Those terms mattered.

Around that same time, I was anonymously recommended for a solo exhibition at the Arnot Art Museum. Against all odds, I was offered the exhibition. The irony was sharp: the university required my final show to take place in its new student gallery and refused to recognize anything else. Walking through the Arnot exhibition just before the doors opened, I felt the work no longer belonged to me—it had entered a new context and taken on its own life.

Soon after, I was awarded a one-year residency at The Clay Studio. Philadelphia proved transformative. While the residency itself was not the right fit, the city was. I began to understand myself and my work as independent, self-directed entities.

During this period, I worked directly from Rodin’s original clay and plaster studies at the Rodin Museum. I could see his fingerprints in the clay. The presence in those works was palpable—received not intellectually, but viscerally. I also worked from dinosaur bones at the Science Museum and handled one-of-a-kind anatomical specimens at the Wistar Institute. These experiences reinforced what I already knew: meaning lives in material, in process, and in attention.

Capitalism, by contrast, turns meaning into performance. It treats culture as commodity and art as product. Artists are not commodities. Art is not an object—it is a way of seeing, valuing, and living. Like the brightness of a star, its magnitude is not determined by scale, but by intensity.

Today, the phrase “the art of…” is used casually. Yet I hope it persists. The art of cooking. The art of gardening. The art of living well. These practices ground people in care and attention. Meaning is not inherited from institutions; it is created through how we choose to live. What we make becomes connective tissue— binding families, communities and creating culture.

“Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people… Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It’s a conjunction.”
— Eric Weiner,  "The Geography of Bliss"

Culture is not for sale. It is woven, fragile, and shared. When artists retreat into isolation, the fabric tears. Repair requires courage—cracking the door open and stepping back into life. Not for profit, but for meaning.

Some changes offer hope. The Joan Mitchell Foundation’s focus on career longevity treats artists as workers, not troubled vessels. W.A.G.E.-Working Artists and the Greater Economy- removes the shame around asking to be paid. Collective ownership and Community Land Trusts offer physical stability—often the greatest reducer of artistic anxiety. Art Handlers and Museum Unions work offers wages, benefits, and the ability to clock out and return to one’s own practice.

These are not luxuries. They are conditions that allow art to exist.

Artists are not failures if they do not achieve institutional prestige. They are not incomplete if they prioritize care, continuity, or happiness. Success in art must be understood more broadly—as the ability to sustain a practice, to remain spirited and materially engaged, and to contribute meaningfully to the world. 

What I learned—often in spite of academic structures—was that meaning is not granted. It is made. It is carried forward through attention, personal practice, and connection. If art education hopes to remain relevant, it must prepare artists not just to use a hammer and a chisel—but to live.

“There are two kinds of opportunities: one which we chance upon, the other which we create.”
— Ruth Benedict

© Sherburn LaBelle

Published on Medium 02/20/2026 

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