Building a Career Beyond Fine Art

Creativity can be found everywhere, according to John Grieg (Cert. ’02).

As the shop manager for PAFA’s sculpture department, Grieg sees opportunities to create in materials students leave behind.

“I am a big proponent of reusing materials. The sculpture department and the shop is the number one place, besides facilities, to see how many things are thrown away at PAFA,” he said. “ In my own work in the last two years I haven’t bought anything, everything I’ve used is found.”

Making something out of the unexpected is a point of pride for Grieg.

He teaches a “Found Materials” class at PAFA with fellow graduates Steven Dufala ‘00 and Billy Blaise Dufala ‘03, teaching students the value of raw materials.

“We’ve taught that for almost a decade and it’s been a really fulfilling class,” Grieg said. “It helps to point out to students how much waste happens around here, to look at the materials as a little bit more precious.”

In his own art practice, Grieg strives to blend his personal work with more commercial endeavors. He believes it’s important for students to see a wide range of options when thinking of a “successful art career.”

“I consider my profession to be here at PAFA but I also do a lot of other things too. I just finished doing a Walt Whitman project for the University of Pennsylvania where we outfitted a van and made it into a mobile printing press, and they went from school to school doing letterpress demonstrations,” he said. “I’ve done work for hotels and while they call it ‘sculpture,’ I call it ‘making decorations’.”

The life young artists imagine for themselves when they enter PAFA isn’t always the path they continue on, and Grieg says that’s more than okay. He himself originally came to the Academy from Minneapolis to study traditional sculpture but his interests and focus have changed.

He points to Wharton Esherick, a former PAFA student who has been called the “Dean of American craftsmen” for his leadership in the American studio craft movement.

“He was a painter, not a very successful painter,” he said. “He turned to woodworking after he started making his own frames and kind of carving the outside of the frame and making it relate to the inside of the painting. People really caught on to these so he started making some money from that and began experimenting with furniture and sculpture simultaneously.”

Grieg is currently curating an exhibition for the school galleries highlighting Wharton Esherick and the idea of an artist moving away from a solely fine art focus.

“This show for me is about those people who leave school and get socked in the face a little bit. I think Esherick was a person who got socked in the face a little bit,” Grieg said. “His work didn’t sell as well as his friends' work, he had a wife and child, he was trying to figure out how to make money and make it happen.”

By using his Academy training, Esherick was able to transition into furniture and build a successful career.

“A lot of Academy graduates whether they know it or not, are studying design components when studying the figure and that is really useful to all other visual aspects in making,” Grieg said.

Artists included in the upcoming exhibition, include Ben Jones ‘12, Chelsea Dombroskie ‘15, and Marguerita Hagan ‘10. Grieg said the artists in the exhibition, along with Esherick, have found ways to use their traditional training to build a career outside of fine art.

It all comes back to finding creativity in different avenues. Grieg has even found an outlet for creativity in business pursuits.

When he co-founded Traction Company, an artist collective specializing in fine art, sculpture, and custom metal and wood fabrication, Grieg took small business classes and saw the creative potential in running a business.

“If people could see how much creativity there is in business, people would be blown away. There’s nothing more satisfying than for a spreadsheet to be all worked out,” Grieg said. “The skills a person learns when they are taught art are problem-solving skills. And you can solve a problem in a spreadsheet or you can solve it on a canvas.”

—LeAnne Matlach (lmatlach@pafa.org)