STORIES FROM PAFA
Student Ambassador Spotlight: Tierra Deacon
Student ambassador Tierra Deacon (BFA '19) always stops in the museum when she takes prospective PAFA students on a tour.
“They get tickets to go to the museum afterward so I tell them to come back here and notice all of the artists who have works up,” she said. “They’re amazing, and you’ve heard of these artists and they’re all from this long lineage of PAFA!”
The work and artists in PAFA’s museum collection drew Deacon to the Academy.
“[In high school] I was working on still lifes, and my teachers would always tell me to look up different working artists and they told me to look up Scott Noel,” she said. “I looked him up and loved the work and one of his works was on PAFA’s website. I realized he taught here and had work in the museum. I was like ‘Wow, they have actual artists teaching people’.”
Even though her Kentucky high school was hundreds of miles away from PAFA, Deacon had already been introduced to the school and museum before learning about Scott Noel.
“We had representatives from Admissions come and they were the only people who actually paid attention to me and actually talked to me about my work,” she said. “That left a really good impression on me and then I started learning about the museum and that’s what really sold me.”
The Kentucky-native loves art history. She said the interchange between people consuming art and the artists creating is what interests her most.
And coming to PAFA has gotten Deacon to appreciate more avenues of art.
“In Kentucky I always went into museums and would see quilts and never thought of that as being art. I devalued craft and felt like everything else was better than it,” she said. “But it has taken me leaving, and not seeing it anymore, and going to art school and seeing contemporary stuff all the time to realize that craft was real, that it was genuine. It had this human thing in it, that the modern art world is lacking.”
In her time studying in Philadelphia, Deacon is also able to create in more mediums.
She originally enrolled as a painting major but has since picked up a printmaking minor. She painted all throughout high school but said her school, like most high school art programs, did not have a printmaking program.
“I was lucky in learning a couple of printmaking methods so I got to do them a little bit I but wasn’t able to go very far with it because I didn’t have anyone to instruct me,” she said while showing off some of her recent works in the print shop.
The added course load a printmaking minor, isn’t slowing Deacon down. She is on track to graduate with her BFA in 3½ years.
She says she works hard and enrolled at PAFA because Deacon didn’t see herself doing anything else.
“I heard people say if you can do anything other than art then don’t be an artist or don’t go to art school because its hard and people don’t want to put in that work,” she said. “I thought, well I can’t do anything else so this is where I’m supposed to be.”
She’ll finish classes in the fall of 2018 and then spend the spring of 2019 preparing for the Annual Student Exhibition.
