enland Line
PENLAND SCHOOL OF CRAFTS • POST OFFICE BOX 37 • PENLAND • NORTH CAROLINA • 28765-0037 • SUMMER 1998
Jean McLaughlin: Penland's Sixth Director
IS
I’ve been thinking about how the connection ojpeople to people i.
really one of my guiding principles. In all the years that 1 worked at
the Arts Council it seems that that’s what 1 did the most. Somebody
would call in, they would tell me a story, they would tell me what
they were working on and you’d never believe it, but the next week
somebody else would call in and they needed to be connected to this
person over here. So that’s sort of how I’ve been connecting people for
fifteen or twenty years.”
Jean McLaughlin, Penland’s sixth director, comes to the
school after an extraordinary fifteen-year tenure with the
North Carolina Arts Council. During that time, she adminis
tered a broad range of visual art programs, was director of
public art, and, most recently, headed a new division of the
council which worked to promote all of the arts throughout
the state and fostered dialogue between institutions from dif
ferent disciplines.
According to the council’s executive director Mary
Regan, Jean’s role was larger than any of her titles. “Jean has
been the engine that’s been driving the arts council to move
into areas where we were lacking,” she said. “She has very high
ideals, and in many ways she has been the conscience of the
arts council.”
Her route into this kind of work, however, was not
through an arts administration program, which didn’t exist
twenty years ago; it was through the studio. Her first degree,
from the University of North Carolina, was in studio art (she
later completed a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at N.C.
State). “I got into the studio program not so much because I
wanted to be an artist, but because I wanted to understand art
from the inside out,” she explained.
“I came to the making of art from a broader interest in
civic purpose and how a person functions in society. I began
to see that art was not a single discipline, but that whatever it
is you are trying to
say, you are going to
say that best if you
draw upon all the life
experiences that are
meaningful to you.
Through the making
organization grants. Her network of friends* apd colleagues
includes dozens of artists associated with the school.
When the director’s job became available last year, she
decided that
Penland would
be a challenging
and broadening
place to spend
the next period
of her life. In her
letter of applica
tion she wrote,
“There is no
other nonprofit
educational
organiz.ation that
I believe in more
strongly than
Penland. Penland
is a literal and
symbolic refuge.
It deserves
strong leader
ship.” Tbe rather
a
A place like Penland nourishes the
creative spirit. Whether you are going
to make art your profession or it’s
going to be an avocation, it’s so essen
tial for your whole being. I really love
to be able to advocate for that.”
of art I learned to
think a lot more
about myself. I
learned about the
processes, but I also learned what artists need. So when I got
involved in arts management, I advocated for artists’ needs.”
One of the ways she did this was through a series of meet
ings which brought artists together to talk about what kind of
support they needed. Later on, when she was working in the
public art program, she had similar meetings aimed at helping
artists understand how to propose and execute major works
of public art. She also brought gallery owners and curators
together with artists of different racial and ethnic back
grounds to increase understanding and awareness of the work
coming from these communities.
During her arts council years, she made a number of visits
to Penland with the panel which makes decisions about major
grueling inter
view process involved the search committee, other board
members, the staff, and the community. In the end, the board
decided that Jean was the person who could provide that lead
ership.
Jean and her husband, ceramic sculptor Tom Spleth,
arrived in early May. Jean began work on May 18 with a first
priority of getting to know the staff, the facility, the budget,
and the community. “Getting oriented is the first thing I need
to do,” she said, “with an operation and
staff of this size, that’s going to take more
than a day or two.” And of course, sum
mer has started so there are classes to
visit, instructors to meet, and day-to-day
problems to solve.
A priority that lies just behind her
information gathering, however, is the
development of a strategic plan. “I’m
proposing a two-year plan which the
staff cuid board will be instrumental in
developing. We’ll have the community advise us as well,”
she explained.
“The plan will not just have goals and objectives, but
specific action steps that feed into each individual staff
member’s work plan so that we can measure whether ;
we’ve accomplished what we needed to do that year. Of j
plans. He described a series of maps that any institution needs
to have in order to plan—for water runoff, for traffic pat
terns, for light, safety, accessibility, and certainly a critical
issue is the aesthetics of the campus. What should future
growth look like? Wf^at do we, as the stewards of this place,
need to consider when we make decisions?
“Haystack [Mountain School of Crafts], for instance, was
designed by one person, Edward Larrabee Barnes, so deci
sions there are going to be guided by following the integrity
of his initial premises. At Penland the architecture has a dif
ferent spirit and greater complexity so we need to identify
and characterize what this place is like, and what we want
future building to be. We also need to think about sacred
places. There are places here that we aren’t going to want to
touch. We need to identify those places and think about wbat
they mean and how we are going to care for them.”
As passionate as she is about this process, however, Jean
made it clear that it’s not an end in itself. “The central thing is
to nurture and continue all the incredible programming that’s
here,” she said. “To nurture the people and the opportunities
they have when they come here. We can’t ever lose sight of
the intense, magical experience of Penland.”
When asked about the director’s role in charting a course
for the school, she spoke with an awareness of Penland’s his
tory, and her answer reflected, once again, her penchant for
bringing people together. “1 think that Penland is larger than
any of us—certainly larger than me. There are so many peo
ple who care passionately about Penland, and I want to make
sure we move forward together with a collective vision.”
“I think my role is to junderstand and articulate that vision
and to be one of the voices. If my ideas resonate with oth
ers—the board, the staff, the community—then I will steer
things in the direction of those ideas that make sense for this
place. But I didn’t come Here to make Penland into something
that looks quite different from the Penland we all know.”
Her explanation for why she wanted this difficult and
complex job included a strong interest in preserving and
improving the facility, a desire to learn development skills,
and a deep belief in Penland’s purpose: “I really believe in this
Robin Dreyer idea that art is
something that
course it has to be flexible, but basically we will know what ■ Jean and Tom on the porch at Bonnie’s Place.
we hope to accomplish so that we can all move forward ; '
together.” j
Another part of the process, and a huge part, will be; a
campus master plan which will start from the ground up. “We
are talking to Abie Harris who just retired as the campus
architect at N.C. State and is considered the master of master
everybody needs
to make in their
own way. For so
many people, art
leaves them for
one reason or
another—when
they are five or
six, I would imag
ine. And I think
they probably
spend the rest of their life' looking for it in some way. A place
like Penland nourishes the creative spirit. Whether you are
going to make art your profession or it’s going to be an avoca
tion, it’s so essential for your whole being. I really love to be
able to advocate for that.”