As the school turns 150, it celebrates the teachers and students—from Impressionist painters to intergalactic wrestlers—who continuously reimagined what an art education can be
Over the years, SMFA has gone through revolutions and evolutions, adapting with the times to take up new art forms and new ways of teaching them. Photo: SMFA catalogue, 1977-1978
Administrators resigning in protest over the encroachment of modern design in the 1910s. An embrace of Expressionism and the latest painting aesthetics in the 1930s. An experimental curriculum that put teachers and students on equal footing in the late 1960s.
In its 150-year history, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University has gone through revolutions and evolutions, adapting with the times to take up new art forms and new ways of teaching them. Like perpetually wet clay, the institution has proved itself malleable enough to conform to the ever-changing needs of its students.
“SMFA has always nurtured artists who challenge, question, and transform the world around them,” said SMFA Dean Scheri Fultineer. “When I look at the past 150 years, I see the same kind of fearless creativity that marks our current students and faculty.”
Join the Party
This year, SMFA at Tufts is celebrating its sesquicentennial as only an art school can: using artworks to tell the stories of the teachers and students whose talents and vision have continuously redefined the institution over the decades.
Throughout the school building, translucent larger-than-life yearbook photos curated by Jennifer Munson, AG97 (MFA), give glimpses of what has changed for students (mostly hairstyles and fashion trends) and what has stayed the same (a welcoming of all genders in the studios). When light passes through the images, they glow like the spirits of artists past.
And what’s a birthday without a party? On Sept. 17, the school will open its doors for a community reception with music, food, and tours of “SMFA at 150: Looking Back,” an exhibit that now fills the Grossman Gallery and Anderson Auditorium.
Featuring artworks from some of the school’s most illustrious alumni and collaboratively curated by alumni and former faculty, the Tufts University Art Galleries exhibit traces the path of SMFA from its birth in Copley Square in 1877 through its move with the Museum of Fine Arts to the Fenway in 1909 all the way to the early years of the 21st century.
Challenging the Status Quo
The exhibit introduces visitors to some of the most influential characters in the school’s history. Take Frank Weston Benson and Edmund Charles Tarbell, early graduates of SMFA who later studied in Paris and began teaching at the school in 1889, eventually leading the departments of drawing and painting. Under the direction of these admired Impressionist artists, the school grew in both enrollment and renown.
Edmund Tarbell, who led the department of painting until 1912, was renowned for his Impressionist style, shown here in “On the Fens,” part of the “SMFA at 150: Looking Back” exhibit. Photo: Tim Correira
The two believed in the traditional “master-disciple” style of teaching, championed by the European academies of art. When a new administrator, who came from a design background, sought to change the strict sequence of skill building that had been the standard for students, Benson and Tarbell resigned in protest in 1912.
The friction between established and progressive approaches would continue for decades, leading to other faculty resignations. In the 1930s, SMFA hired instructors trained at London’s Slade School, who brought insight into British modernism, realism, and avant-garde movements.
Karl Zerbe encouraged his students to experiment with expressive imagery and new materials, much as he did with polymer tempera in his 1951 painting “The Inventor.” Photo: Tim Correira
With the appointment of Karl Zerbe as head of the drawing and painting department in 1937, SMFA became the hub for an art movement called Boston Expressionism. A refugee from Nazi Germany—which labeled his work as degenerate—Zerbe favored abstract figure drawing that was emotional and personal, but still recognizable as the human form.
“As faculty, these influential instructors urged students to work from their hearts and minds and no longer from a plaster cast or traditional perspectival realism,” Darin Murphy, assistant director of the SMFA Library and a co-curator of “Looking Back,” writes in the exhibit text.
Famous students from Zerbe’s time included abstract painter Cy Twombly, minimalist Ellsworth Kelly, and painter and sculptor John Wilson. Their works are on display in the exhibit.
Alumnus Ellsworth Kelly made this 1948 drawing of John Dion, who was likely a janitor at SMFA.
A 1965 lithograph by John Wilson titled “Father and Child.”
An untitled pen and ink drawing by alumnus Cy Twombly from 1966.
An Experiment in Art Education
Perhaps the biggest pedagogical shift for the school came in 1968, when Dean Bill Bagnall ushered in an experimental curriculum. He encouraged students to explore a variety of media, removed prerequisites to studio access, and advocated skill-building rather than technical proficiency. Bagnall “kept a low profile and let the creators create the school they wanted,” Murphy writes.
The game changer was doing away with the traditional grading system in favor of review board evaluations. A film running at the entrance to the exhibit shows one of these early review sessions. Aside from the tinted glasses and leisure suits that mark the era, it’s not unlike the candid, collaborative review boards that still happen today.
Murphy writes that the changes were a response to the cultural and political climate of the times, a climate that would soon heat up the campus as protests against the Vietnam War and the Kent State Shooting roiled the country.
“One could hear the store windows smashing near Harvard all the way to Putnam Square during the multi-night riots in 1970, and the entire city was on high alert,” Avram Finkelstein, A73 (BFA), writes in the exhibit. “Across town the student body at SMFA contributed what they were best at: fight the military war with an equally powerful information war.”
To that end, students took over the first-floor studios at SMFA to print resistance posters that they shared with protestors at other schools.
In the early 1970s, students took over the first-floor studios at SMFA to print protest posters. Photo: Tim Correira
Beauty and Chaos
Part of Bagnall’s legacy was adding film, video, and photography to the school’s curriculum. At first, photography “was the suspect child relegated to the darkest corners,” write emeritus professors of the practice Bill Burke (who taught from 1970 to 2025) and Jim Dow (who taught from 1973 to 2016).
But, they write, artists with cameras were soon welcomed in, thanks in part to the new spirit of interdisciplinary exploration: “Potters taught and reviewed photographers, sculptors evaluated sound artists, and so on. This integrated approach overcame the silos of departments, and it produced photographic artists of every persuasion.”
1980s black and white portraits by Shellburne Thurber. Photo: Tim Correira
Among those darkroom denizens of the ’70s and ’80s who would go on to fame were David Armstrong, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Christian Walker, brothers Doug and Mike Starn, and Shellburne Thurber.
In the exhibit, Thurber describes “being overwhelmed by how chaotic and crazy it was” when she first arrived at the school: “There were dogs everywhere, drag queens everywhere. I mean, it was just a free-for-all. And I thought to myself, ‘Ah, okay. Yeah, I could probably do this.’”
The chaos of the times may have felt something like a photo Dow took of the school’s spray room in the 1990s: colorful and wild.
Jim Dow's photo of the SMFA spray room from the 1990s was transferred to a gallery door for the exhibit, giving the illusion that you can step into the past. Photo: Tim Correira
That healthy pandemonium laid the foundation for the boundary-breaking work to come from performance and interdisciplinary artists. Among them was Kaiju Big Battel, which brought intergalactic wrestling to the school’s atrium in the late ’90s. Students Rand Borden, A95 (BFA), and Jeff Warmouth, AG97 (MFA), inspired by Japanese sci-fi and pro wrestling, crafted monster suits and staged “battels” (a typo that stuck) among increasingly bizarre contenders, including a pair of tag-teaming plantains and a club-wielding club sandwich.
Rand Borden’s “Sky Deviler” was one of the monster costumes he created for Kaiju Big Battel performances in the SMFA atrium in the 1990s. Photo: Tim Correira
A sister exhibit, which will continue the SMFA story through its official incorporation into Tufts University in 2016 and into the future, will open in the spring. It’s a reminder that in the hands of today’s students and teachers, SMFA is still taking shape.
“This milestone is both a celebration of the past,” said Fultineer, “and a call to build a future for the school as a place where boundaries continue to be broken.”
