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60 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.17 gree at Smith College in Massachusetts, a master's in divinity at Harvard and a law degree at U of L, but calls getting her MFA at Spalding "the academic high point" of her life. e agreement from the beginning was to get the art school up and running — as a department of Spalding by all legal and technical definitions — to a point where Davenport and the staff could re-evaluate whether the art school wanted complete independent accreditation, to remain an art depart- ment or to find some sort of inde- pendent-while-still-partnered middle ground, which several other art schools around the country have done. A word on art schools and depart- ments: At 400 students, U of L touts having the largest studio-art program in the state. Studios for its budding MFA program are under construction in the Portland neighborhood, across the way from where Louisville Visual Art now operates. U of L's is a department, rather than a division like the University of Kentucky's College of Fine Arts, which includes performing arts. ere are two main accrediting bodies that most art schools want on their name: National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. e AICAD schools: MICA, Pratt, Rhode Island School of Design, Art Academy of Cincinnati — around 40 schools total across the U.S. NASAD accredits closer to 400 schools, including some AICAD members, plus four Kentucky schools: Morehead State University, Murray State University, Western Kentucky University and UK. Some schools, such as Yale and Savannah College of Art and Design, which was founded almost 40 years ago and has made a name for itself among artists, are accredited by neither. en there's the difference in tuition. Most of these highly regarded programs cost $35,000-a-year-plus. KSA set its tuition at $24,000, with the assumption that most students would receive financial aid. U of L tuition for this school year is $11,000 for in-state students. Davenport and those working with him weren't thinking in terms of an art department, though. McClure told him: "Louisville needs an art school; Spalding does not need an art depart- ment." at's not to say that nothing was in it for Spalding. To McClure, the art school, it seemed, would further inform the growth that the school and neighborhood had been experiencing. Spalding, mostly situated on urban asphalt, is in the midst of an aggressive greening initiative, 7.5 acres of it in the form of sports facilities for its growing athletics department. It has acquired new buildings and torn down dilapidated ones. It has updated the struggling heating and air systems — all while crawling out of the $14 million debt that McClure inherited. Spalding had vacant space in an old science building for the art school to use. Maier and Smith remember going over, peeking in the windows and seeing dead things in jars. Gurneys sat unused. Davenport's son ripped out affixed tables and sinks. (Both of Davenport and Fader's children live in Louisville. eir daughter majored in sculpture at MICA and their son attends the U of L Speed School of Engineering.) Friends and family paint- ed the walls. Maier was able to get some furniture donated and found a couple of inexpensive Moroccan rugs at a yard sale to go in Davenport's office. One room had partitions with curtains from a nursing class. A maintenance guy offered to remove them, but Maier told him, "No, don't take them down. is is perfect!" In the fall of 2010, those would become the studio spaces for the first class — three students out of the 25 or so high schools visited. After some convincing, Laurie Fader, who has taught at Yale, Pratt and MICA, agreed to come down, help build the curriculum and chair the department. e way Spalding is set up, classes are arranged in seven sessions per year, rather than two semesters, so classes are described as fast- paced and challenging. Art students would Introductory 3-D and sculptural-process classes.