Moore: Oldest women’s art college uses tech to fulfill old mission in modern, creative economy

The Moore College of Art and Design has always been dedicated to preparing women for careers, but it hasn’t always required quite so many Macs.

As technology has rapidly advanced over the last couple of decades, Moore has had to quickly revamp its equipment and its curriculum to reconcile it’s old mission with the new creative economy.

“Mayor Nutter actually singled out Moore as one of the schools that is doing a really good job of preparing students for modern job searching and being qualified to start a business,” said Veronica Scarpellino, assistant director at the Moore Locks Career Center. “He thanked Moore for that.”

Since its inception in 1848, Moore has carried a heavy mantle as the first women’s art college in the country. Over the years, though, Moore hasn’t always been successful at equipping its students with the cutting edge technological education they would need to compete for jobs. But academic dean Dona Lantz said that under her 11-year tenure the school’s approach to technology shifted dramatically.

“When I got here there weren’t as many people in technology-based classes,” Lantz said. “We really wanted every major to be sure that it has at least one course that was pertinent to their industry.”

Some of that advancement has meant more of the school’s real estate is dedicated to computers — computer labs, classrooms, and studios. Alongside this shift, the overhaul has also centered on curricula, which are now constantly being reformulated to keep up with the times. In 2006, Moore launched a laptop initiative that required all incoming students to possess a laptop. Earlier this year, the school announced a partnership with Apple that that will put iPad 2 devices in the hands of all incoming students enrolled in Moore’s introductory Foundation curriculum, as Technically Philly reported.

Change is being felt more broadly at the Ben Franklin Parkway staple too.

In summer 2010, Moore welcomed its first male graduate students — Moore has fewer than 500 undergraduate students and roughly 50 in post-secondary.  In February, the school announced that Cecelia Fitzgibbon, the former Drexel graduate arts administration program director, will take over as the new Moore president beginning in July, taking over for Happy Fernandez, who had the role since 1999. The role of innovation seems to be an obvious for Fitzgibbon.

“That comes easy for me because I come from Drexel and we’re a technology university,” she told the Inquirer.

Before she starts, changes in the academic structure continue to evolve.

The photography major underwent a massive shift as it transitioned from purely film-based training to include the digital arts, Lantz told Technically Philly. Photography and Digital Arts Assistant Professor James Johnson looks young enough to be a student, but told Technically Philly that his more traditional training hardly resembles his students’ college experience.

“I think it was right when I started at Moore that students started having their primary experience with digital cameras as opposed to fiddling with chemicals. They just experience it very differently because it used to be that you had to think a lot because you knew you were going to be spending a certain number of dollars on each frame,” Johnson, 36, said. “That changed a lot about how much is created and it also shifts the focus of the work from pre-production to post-production. Now, a lot of that work happens editing with a content management software.”

Johnson says despite the expansion of the photography curriculum, students are still trained in traditional film-based photography. Still, he says he’s even noticed the creep of newer technology — like using an iPhone as a light source — in the murky enclosure of the dark room.

And, he noted, the culture of technology is having a noticeable impact on the type of art his students produce.

“I have a painting in my office that Sandy Frank  made. It’s an oil painting, but it’s based on a meme,” Johnson said of the student artist whose real name is Megan Price. “She’s taking this artifact from the digital culture that she exists in and she’s trying to make it concrete, which is a really interesting inversion.”

This reporter’s mother is a Moore alumnae who majored in graphic design a little over twenty years ago. At Moore, she learned to design by hand and taught herself the range of graphic design software the field relies on now after she matriculated. Today, though, the major is quite a bit different. Each grade has its own dedicated computer studio and the students go beyond static logos and layouts, to create flash animations and other types of interactive images. For seniors facing the job market, the facilities help them re-imagine what possibilities are in their field.

Jessica Massabrook, a senior graphic design major, told Technically Philly that the location, not the technology, had attracted her to Moore. But in the last six months of her training she discovered she wants to apply her degree to a career in animation.

“I would like to do a motion job,” Massabrook said, referring to animation. “There are so many studios that do mostly motion stuff in Philly.”

Students find other preparation for the a more technical job market through their required internship experience. The internship must be relevant to their industry, although Lantz said the criteria for an appropriate company are flexible.

“They go in many directions. Even in graphic design they don’t always go to straight graphic design firms,” said Lantz. “We support students who may have a quirky idea and it can be in a startup firm that is tangentially related to graphic design.”

Lantz told Technically Philly that the school learns a lot about how its technological competence stacks up through these internships.

“The faculty and the college pays attention when the students come back from their internships. When they say, ‘gosh, everyone knew how to do this and I didn’t,’ we pay attention to that,” said Lantz. “Especially when things are on the front edge of changing — that’s when we find out that we really need to be doing something else.”

Oddly, though, neither the professors nor the students this reporter talked to mentioned a strong connection to the Philadelphia technology community. Moore’s career office did not have data to illuminate how many Moore students have gone on to jobs in the Philly tech scene, but the relationship seems like a natural one to cultivate.

To be fair, though, Moore Director of Locks Career Center Belena Chapp told Technically Philly that 2011 survey results suggest that 14 percent of the alumni who responded are working in web/internet based companies, but that a significant number of Moore alum go into business for themselves. Chapp says these vagaries in the data may be part of the reason why Moore has a hard time tracking the connection between their students and local tech firms.

“When we try to identify how we’re connecting to the tech community, we often ask a different question: how is the tech community communicating to the artists?” said Chapp.

As the local technology community evolves, we may soon notice even more ways that Moore students have taken root throughout the city.

“As the students engage more with technology there is more opportunity for them to have a more intentional conversation, because you need a computer programmer for something like gaming, but you also need an artist,” Scarpellino said.

In the meantime, Lantz says Moore will stay committed to continually updating its facilities and its curriculum to keep its students at the cutting edge of the creative job market.