The Museum School at War
Art and design have often been created in relationship to current (later becoming historic) moments, and at SMFA, that couldn’t ring more true. The School has served as a sanctuary for patriotism and peaceful protest alike through multiple wars over the years:
World War I
When military enlistment became widespread during World War I, enrollment at the Museum School (now the School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University) declined. School enrollment fell from 232 to 181 in 1917, despite the student body being 85% female at the time.
Faculty members William James and Ralph McLellan were granted a leave of absence after enlisting. Before shipping off to France, they joined other local artists, some of them alumni, in producing landscape canvases to aid local troops at Massachusetts-based Fort Devens in rifle and machine-gun training. In her 1983 Boston College thesis on the history of SMFA, historian Roberta Shaheen notes, “Individual preferences for impressionism and luminism were replaced by realism of a very special kind. The largest canvases measured six feet wide by two feet high, and they were joined together in pairs to form a panorama featuring rolling countryside suitable for a military landscape.”
By 1918, SMFA was forced to temporarily close its building due to a coal shortage, and classes were relocated to seven galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which was still heated. Finances became so dire that in 1918, the school trustees discussed closing the school entirely. Luckily, they voted against it, and after the war, student enrollment came roaring back.
World War II
When the United States joined World War II in 1941, students again were widely drafted, including the future well-known children’s illustrator Richard Scarry, who had enrolled at the school in 1938 and would return stateside and go on to sell over 100 million of his Busy World books.
To support students in finishing their degrees before shipping out, the school pivoted and offered an intensive summer school program. Additional war-specific courses were created and offered to non-SMFA students on topics like camouflage painting and map-drafting. Later that year, SMFA moved out of its building and leased it to the US Army due to the war efforts. Classes temporarily relocated, again, to the Museum next door and student work was exhibited at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It is unclear from historic records whether the temporary move was voluntary or in response to a government order.
The Vietnam War
Charles Goss, MFA ‘76, an alumnus and longtime faculty member, started his graduate studies at the school in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1970. He remembers SMFA as being particularly vibrant and politically active, particularly in response to the Kent State Shootings on May 4 of that year in Ohio, when the National Guard killed four unarmed students who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, resulting in students around the country shutting their own schools down in response.
When Goss first came to the Museum School, it was well before the 1988 extension project, and the only brick and mortar building was located at 230 The Fenway. “It was an amazing environment because of the ongoing activity of protests,” Goss recalls. “People were having teach-ins, sleep-ins, eating, playing music, and there were dogs and kids running around.” The first time he entered the building, Goss took a look around and said to himself, “This is your school. You belong here.” A few years after graduating, he began to teach in 1979 and it’s continued to be his school ever since.
Today’s SMFA students continue to be deeply connected to world events–both abroad and in the greater Boston area. Paired with the sense of civic engagement commonly seen in the larger Tufts student body, SMFA students standing up for what is right and promoting civil discourse and community building through art are central to what the school continues to represent.
Image:
"Flags Unfurled in Many Parts of Boston," Scrapbook 9, December 1916 - circa June 1918. UA133.001760. School of the Museum of Fine Arts records, UA133, Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), Medford, MA.
