Advocate for
the Arts

During his 12 years at the Academy, Tom Folds (shown here with a Jasper Johns print) earned a national reputation as an arts educator. He went on to head the art department at Northwestern University and to serve as dean of education at the Metropolitan Museum.

"Some preparatory schools look upon art instruction either as a branch of manual training or as a safety valve for emotionally unstable students. [To] more than one headmaster, it seems meaningless, slightly immoral, or at any rate highly unnecessary in a practical curriculum. In [such a] school, art is little more than a hobby for the aesthete or the manually gifted, as a vital part of the average boy's education it has no place at all."

T homas Folds published this lament in the July 1937 Bulletin after his third year on the Exeter faculty. Instructor and pioneer "art director" at the academy from 1934 until 1946, Tom Folds was the primary agent for establishing the history, practice and appreciation of art as an integral part of an Exeter education. By the time he left Exeter to chair the art department at Northwestern University, and subsequently to serve as dean of education at the Metropolitan Museum, Folds had earned a national reputation as an exponent for art in the secondary school curriculum. On a wet morning last fall, I was delighted to meet Tom Folds, now a healthy 93 years old, in his apartment outside Philadelphia and compare notes about the history of the visual arts at Exeter. His wife, Kitty, whom he had courted in graduate school and married early in his tenure at Exeter, joined us for part of the conversation as well.

Folds's arrival on campus coincided with the institution of the Harkness Plan. While Principal Lewis Perry promoted musical instruction and performance and pushed to expand student participation in theater, it was English Department chair Frank Cushwa who was Exeter's most vocal advocate for the visual arts. He appears to have been the author of a seminal (but unsigned) article, "The Fine Arts at the Academy," in the March 1933 Bulletin, which reported:

"In the free, frank re-examination of our aims and of our whole educational process, we have found that we must provide a larger place in the school for the fine arts. Saturated as we have been in the Puritan tradition, we have perhaps emphasized duty at the expense of beauty. Hereafter, we shall have as a part of an Exeter boy's education a wide variety of possible experiences and associations with the fine arts. The fine arts will be made, as it were, a part of our environment so that all boys will be exposed to their influence."

In a signed piece the following July, Cushwa described widespread support for the art program, including significant gifts of works of art, photographic reproductions and teaching materials. He wrote proudly, "We believe that we can add something distinctive to our whole educational plan." Within a year he had identified the young artist Tom Folds in the Yale graduate art program and invited him to join the faculty. As an English teacher!

At Exeter, Folds (right) waged a successful campaign to make the visual arts an integral part of the Exeter experience: not only did he introduce courses in art history and studio art, but he also mounted ambitious exhibitions throughout the campus. His students undertook a wide range of projects, including a 55-foot-wide football mural that later toured the country.

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