Richard Mead Atwater Benson, adjunct professor of photography, has been named as the next dean of the School of Art, according to an announcement by President Richard C. Levin. Mr. Benson, who will assume his new post on July 1, will replace David Pease, who has been dean since 1983.
"I am extremely pleased that Professor Benson has accepted Yale's offer to lead the School of Art for the next five years," says President Levin. "As an artist of the first rank, Professor Benson embodies the creative distinction that the School of Art has come to represent. I know that his energy, high standards and passion for artistic excellence will help the school continue to nurture and train the important artists of the future. I join the faculty of the School of Art, and all those who care about the school, in enthusiastically welcoming Professor Benson to this leadership position."
Professor Benson, who has taught at Yale since 1979, has been called one of today's most innovative printers and photographers. In the 1960s, he helped develop the method of photographic reproduction now known as the tri-tone process. More recently, he has invented a method of printing photographic negatives in acrylic paint on light-sensitized sheets of aluminum -- a process that takes several hours and can involve as many as 30 separate exposures.
In a profile of Professor Benson that appeared in 1990 in The New Yorker magazine, the photographer is quoted as saying: "I really think that the work of art has to be the container of effort as well as thought, and I've found a way of putting my effort into the photograph. To me the thing I make is literally the physical container. I want to make it! Because I think that's how it becomes the accumulator of effort and of what's in my mind. I want to make pictures the way a painter does, but I love photographs."
Professor Benson's photographs and prints of the Augustus St. Gaudens Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the first black volunteer regiment in the Civil War were published in the 1994 book "Lay This Laurel," which featured text by Lincoln Kirstein. Professor Benson also coauthored and printed the large, limited-edition book "Photographs of The Gilman Collection," which has been described as one of the "the finest photographic reproductions ever made"; copies of this work quickly became collector's items. Professor Benson has also worked on the production and printing of many other books, including "The American Monument," "The Face of Lincoln" and "The Work of Atget," four volumes. He has shown his work for many years at The Washburn Gallery in New York City, and his photographs appear in many private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Among his many honors and awards are a five-year MacArthur Foundation Award and two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships.
Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Mr. Benson briefly attended Brown University. He studied at the U.S. Navy Optical Repair School in Great Lakes, Illinois, and the Art Student's League in New York; took figure drawing from Robert Lamb in Providence, Rhode Island; and learned stone carving at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island, then his brother's shop -- an enterprise that was founded in 1702 and is thought by many to be "the oldest business in continuous operation on the same site" in the United States. From 1966 to1972, he worked at the Meriden Gravure Company in Meriden, Connecticut, under the tutelage of E. Harold Hugo. He has had his own printing and photography studio since the mid-1960s.
Founded in 1869, the Yale School of Art was the first American art school affiliated with an institution of higher learning. From its beginning, the Art School admitted women students, and the first woman granted a degree by Yale was Josephine Miles Lewis 1891, an art student. Today the school offers professional instruction in four areas: graphic design, painting-printmaking, photography, and sculpture, leading to the degree of Master of Fine Arts. In addition, the School of Art offers an undergraduate major for students of Yale College.