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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.17 59 it wasn't the right fit for us," the school recently noted in an email. (e school's president at the time, Joseph J. Mc- Gowan, has since died.) "All three of us were sitting there one day and were like, 'Oh, my gosh. is whole thing is about to fall apart,'" Maier says of herself, Davenport and Smith. "It really felt like it was just sucking down the drain." Maier fired off an email to Joyce Ogden, an artist and professor who has worked at Spalding University, a 200-year-old private college, since 1993. A little history: In high school, Ogden moved to town with her family from Long Island. While her sister went to an art school in New York, she says, "at to me seemed stifling in some ways. I wanted to go somewhere where I could figure out completely on my own what kind of artist I was without that pressure or influence of the city." In the early 1980s, she attended what she calls the "funky" Louisville School of Art, an independent entity that had been around in some form since the late 1920s and offered a bachelor's degree in fine art. e school, predating U of L's art pro- gram, went through several partnerships, including one with what is now the artist outreach organization Louisville Visual Art. Gordon Brown, the retired president and CEO of the Home of the Innocents, who is on KyCAD's board, also attend- ed the school. Over the years it moved from downtown to Anchorage and back downtown. By 1983, according to the Encyclopedia of Louisville, decreasing en- rollment and increasing maintenance fees forced it to close and become absorbed by U of L's Department of Fine Arts, which was founded in 1937. Ogden says she sensed that the city couldn't support that kind of art-focused school at that time, but that over the next couple of decades she saw the city grow. "I'm like, 'e city needs this. e city can handle this now,'" she says. She arranged a meeting with Tori Murden McClure, who had recently become pres- ident at Spalding. Maier and Davenport went to the meeting thinking they were just going to propose the idea, then were surprised to see a table full of lawyers and recruitment and financial-aid officers. "(Tori) took a blank notepad, pushed it across the table and she said, 'You write it and I'll sign it.'" Maier says. "I have a soft spot for trying to do things that everyone else says is going to be impossible," McClure says. "I just fell in love with the notion of: Here's this madman who hasn't a clue what he's asking." (Davenport says of McClure, who famously was the first American to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, "She said she rowed a boat across the ocean. I can't quite believe that one. It's kind of crazy.") "You can't afford — literally afford — to spend $40 or $50 million that you would need to start from scratch," Mc- Clure says. "Campus safety, IT, dining, dorms, student life — all things a school needs to become accredited as a separate institution." While Spalding, with its business, teaching, nursing and several other majors offered to its 2,200 students, appears to be very much a practically oriented school, McClure says that Spalding's MFA-in-writing program set an example for how the art school could succeed. She was a trustee at Spalding in the late '90s when the program was being proposed and she voted against it because she thought it was "off-brand." "I've never been so proud to be wrong," she says. She got her undergraduate de- Founder and chancellor Churchill Davenport