Arts: Masters of Art

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Masters of Art

Arts

The South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, founded by Dr. Virginia Uldrick, was first established as a summer program in 1980 by Governor Richard Riley.

Then, in 1999, the nine-month, public, residential program for students in the eleventh and twelfth grades (dance students may enroll in ninth grade) opened its doors to an inaugural class of high school juniors from all over the state. Those same juniors have gone on to reach professional accolades in the various disciplines of drama, visual arts, music, creative writing, dance, and academics, but one common theme appears to unite them all: The tutelage they received under their instructors was indelible and transforming, and the relationships with those trusted mentors—many of whom are now friends and colleagues—are long-lasting. Billing itself as “a place where your dreams can soar,” befits a school that strives to go beyond the standard hallmarks of achieving excellence in academia.

Set within a master-apprentice community of artists on a campus designed to resemble a Tuscan village in downtown Greenville, the Governor’s School is a specialized high school that gives emerging artists an early chance to prepare for life at university, the conservatory, or the professional realm. (Imagine a Greenville version of New York City’s Fame school.) Since the inaugural class, 891 students have graduated, and many alumni return from time to time to assist in teaching at the school’s summer programs, or to study with their former instructors. Reflecting on the unwavering focus and solid foundation laid by the Governor’s School, the following five alumni say that being the best they can be started at a place that brought out the best in each of them.

If all goes according to plan, Andrew Pastides’s fellow Governor’s School classmates will one day be able to say they knew him when. With a scene in the upcoming independent movie In Praise of Shadows, with actor James Franco (Spider-Man), and a bit of background work in a pilot for HBO, Andrew Pastides may be well on his way to the big time. (Oh, and that pilot? It was called Boardwalk Empire, directed by someone you may have heard of—Martin Scorsese.)

But Andrew, 25, doesn’t seem the type who’ll let the bright lights blind him, even as he walks the streets of New York City, where he has lived since 2006, going from one audition to the next. (That is his day job, by the way). “I’ve always felt like you have to have a strong integrity as an actor,” he says, “and I think that comes from people like (Governor’s School instructor) Dan Murray who taught me not only how to act, but how to live and how to be a good person.”

After graduating from Governor’s School in 2002, Andrew spent four years at the North Carolina School of the Arts and then moved north to begin what his instructors called “‘the graduate studies’ of trying to figure out how to get work,” he says. He now has an agent and manager to help him in the pursuit, but still cherishes the guidance from those early years of learning his craft. “Those moments were so formative,” he says of his time at the school, “because it was the first time that I had ever heard those words about ‘living truthfully’ and ‘imaginary circumstances,’” he says. “The voices of my teachers haven’t left me.”

Simply put, going to the Governor’s School was “the most amazing experience of my life,” says Elaine Quave from Lexington, Kentucky, where the 2001 alum is now the gallery director at the Living Arts and Science Center, a nonprofit which promotes and supplements education in the arts and sciences. “It was just an immediate community,” she says of the school, and credits her teachers for their attention to “strengthening each student as a whole to be the best that they could in every area.”

Elaine, 26, works primarily with clay, but also keeps her hand in photography and drawing, and finds art in the mundane—such as the Scotch tape that she fashioned into a pair of boots for an exhibit, and by combining materials as she did for her latest foray: making crystal crowns (pipe cleaners, borax, and a crystal-growing kit, who knew?)

“Art teaches us to look objectively at what things are, and then consider what they can be,” says Elaine. “I have learned to not see the world as concrete, but something that is consistently changing and malleable.” And while organizing and facilitating gallery exhibits for other artists is part of her job at the Living Arts Center, it is after she goes home that the rest of her work begins. “I’ve started applying for shows, a couple pieces here and there, but I want to start applying for some solo shows,” she says. “I’m going to be really excited for that time.”

It’s not everyday that a Detroit music producer hears some music parts you’ve worked on for your church choir and tells you he’d like to run it by someone—someone named Stevie Wonder, that is. But, an occurrence like that, for Robert Young, is just a part of his life, and oddly—refreshingly, even—not the highlight of it. “I’m focused on getting my goal accomplished,” he says, which, right now, is to earn his doctorate in saxophone performance at the University of Michigan.

After graduating from Governor’s School in 2002, Young studied musical performance at the University of South Carolina, and then received his masters at the University of Michigan, though he points to two pivotal moments at the Governor’s School that “put the spark in him” to play classical saxophone professionally: a recital by his teacher, classical saxophonist, Dr. Clifford Leaman, and a performance by Van Cliburn International Piano Competition winner, Olga Kern, whom the school had brought in to give a master class. “She played Rachmaninoff’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 3’ at the Greenville Symphony Concert, and that was by far one of the greatest experiences of my life,” he says—“and one of the reasons that I decided to do what I’m doing now.”

Robert also excelled at paying attention in class: “My teacher instilled in me that, yes, you play the saxophone, but you’re a musician, so you have to listen to the great singers, the great cellists, the great violinists, and learn from them, too. So I’ve learned how to learn from everybody.”

The cornfields of Iowa are a long way from Due West, South Carolina, but Mary Helen Kennerly, 26, has found an “oasis in the middle of them,” at the prestigious Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she is earning her Master of Fine Arts.

In the parlance of a true writer, Mary Helen says she felt “illuminated” during her whole time at the Governor’s School, a place at which she found a community of artists that was unparalleled. “I guess it was just the age,” says the 2001 Governor’s School creative writing graduate—“to be so young and to be floating around and getting introduced to all these wonderful ideas.”

And while her long days (classes, reading, attending workshops for her own writing, and teaching nonfiction to undergrads) don’t leave much time for “the big epicurean dinners” that she enjoys making, Mary Helen knows that inspiration for her next piece could be as close as what’s on the plate right in front of her. Or, as she wrote in a recent essay—who is in, say, the sauna with her. Her boyfriend’s mother, as was the case . . . naked.

After all, as Mary Helen knows, “you write what you know”—even if you end up maybe knowing more than you bargained for. Surely, Joan Didion, an astute observer of life’s intricacies in the moment, and a favorite writer of Mary Helen’s, would totally appreciate that.

It might be Don Quixote that is Joseph Phillips’s favorite role to dance, but it is actually a Russian who has greater significance in the 24-year-old’s life.

Famed master teacher and Governor’s School dance chair, Stanislav Issaev, took a young Phillips under his wing and, as Phillips explains, “made me into a dancer.” Phillips started dancing at age 11, and by 13 had enrolled at the Governor’s School. After graduating, he went on to the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then spent four years with the San Francisco Ballet, followed by a year with the Miami City Ballet.

He has lived in New York City for two years, though he’s hardly there much. When he’s not touring the world as a member of the Corps de Ballet with the renowned American Ballet Theatre, Phillips performs with other dance companies—he recently returned from Colombia, South America, as well as Australia, though he’s sure to get home to that other Columbia (South Carolina), when he has rare time off (“I miss the cooking”) to see his mother. He pays a visit to Greenville, too, to see “Stas,” whom he is sure to think of with each pas de deux.

“The Governor’s School is just an environment set up so that all you have to do is focus on your art form,” he says, “and none of it would be any good if you didn’t have great teachers—and I had an amazing teacher with a lot of experience—and that’s what really made a difference for me.”