 | Richard Benson |
Richard ("Chip") Benson has been appointed to a third term as dean of the School of Art.
In a letter announcing that Benson had agreed to continue as dean through 2009, President Richard C. Levin noted that he had received numerous letters "strongly recommending" the dean's reappointment.
"In my meetings with you, as well as your helpful letters, it became evident that the Dean is viewed with extraordinary warmth and respect. Colleagues pointed with approval to Dean Benson's wisdom, courtesy and sensitivity, as well as his commitment to excellence in everything associated with the school," wrote Levin. "I was gratified to find my own admiration for his work echoed so enthusiastically."
The School of Art has undergone many changes during the eight years that Benson has been dean. The school moved from the Art & Architecture Building at 180 York St. into classroom and studio spaces at two renovated buildings: 1156 Chapel St., now known as Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall; and 353 Crown St. In the near future, the school expects to move the Department of Sculpture from Hammond Hall on Mansfield Street into quarters adjacent to its current location.
Noting that the school's new headquarters is roughly the same square footage as its old home, Benson says, "There has, however, been tremendous change in what goes on in those spaces. The biggest difference is the new presence of the computer and its peripheral devices. Art-making today inevitably involves digital technology, and this will probably become increasingly true as time goes by."
Yet, even as the school has shifted its resources to accommodate new technologies, it has continued to support earlier forms of craft, emphasized Benson. "One fact about the making of art is that it engages new and old technologies alike; artists never give up the old, but simply add new technologies to an ever-swelling repertory."
As dean of the School of Art, Benson is also director of the Digital Media Center for the Arts, a multimedia facility created to establish connections between traditional art and the computer age. The center, located at 149 York St., contains computer classrooms, printing facilities and video editing stations, and provides expertise and resources to the entire Yale arts area.
In recent years, the School of Art has also sought ways to encourage work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Although many art schools have eliminated areas of specific concentration, Yale continues to offer four separate programs: painting/printmaking, graphic design, sculpture, and photography. The school will continue to maintain those distinct programs while encouraging cross-disciplinary work and interactive collaborations, says the dean.
Benson himself is an award-winning printer and photographer, whose numerous accolades include a five-year MacArthur Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rhode Island Medal for Excellence in the Arts.
His photographs have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His work is represented in many private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, to name just a few.
Benson is an expert on producing fine prints for both vintage and contemporary photographs and in recent years has been working to adapt the reproduction technologies of the past into new digital forms.
His publications include "A Maritime Album" (co-authored with John Szarkowski), "Hart Crane's, The Bridge," "Lay This Laurel" (coauthored with Lincoln Kirstein), "Coppelia, The New York City Ballet" and "Classic Photographs of New York City: Views of Lower Manhattan." He selected the photographs, designed and wrote the commentary for "A Yale Album: The Third Century," a pictorial history of Yale over the past century released during the University's Tercentennial celebration.
During the past 30 years, Benson has created reproductions for such innovative photographic books as "A Portrait: Georgia O'Keeffe, Photographs by Alfred Steiglitz," four volumes of "The Work of Atget," "Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company," photographer Lee Friedlander's "The American Monument" and "Passage, Photographs by Irving Penn." His digital printing/reproduction projects are "Two Lives," featuring the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz; "Native Nations," a collection of works by Edward Curtis; and "Cyclops," featuring the work of Albert Watson.
After a brief stint at Brown University, Benson enlisted in the U.S. Navy and studied at its Optical Repair School in Great Lakes, Illinois. After his discharge, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, took figure drawing from Robert Lamb in Providence, Rhode Island, and then learned stone carving at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, which is renowned for its tombstones and carved inscriptions. Benson's father and his brother once owned the shop, established in 1705 and believed to be the nation's oldest business in continuous operation at the same site.
From 1966 to 1972, Benson worked at the Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut. In the mid-1960s he also began his own printing and photography studio, which he operated until he assumed the deanship at the School of Art.
T H I S
Benson named to third term
as dean of School of Art
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