It’s easy to see how Tony Phillips, the new chair of the Art Department, differs from the department’s former chairs. Phillips is from the Math Department.
Phillips, who has been teaching mathematics for over 50 years, started at Stony Brook in 1968 and served as the chairman of the Math Department from 1997-2000. Before his relocation this year, he worked as the associate dean for curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences. But Phillips has never taught art. Furthermore, he has no credentials or formal experience in the field.
Phillips says he was selected for the position by Nancy Squires, the dean of the college of arts and sciences, for logistical reasons. He says he’s coming into a department that is completely understaffed. With only 16 full-time professors, eight for art history and eight for studio art, Phillips says people in the department either just couldn’t be spared from teaching or already served as the chair, such as Emeritus Professor Mel Pekarsky.
Though Phillips says he was brought in more for administrative purposes to help the arts cope in times of severe budget cuts and professor shortages, Phillips does have some secret art background. His father was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so he grew up in museums and around famous artwork. He says he has a fascination with the connection of art and science and even co-taught a class with a musician entitled Approaching Mathematics through Art and Science at Stony Brook more than 20 years ago.
“I don’t even know if the dean knew this when she gave me this position,” Phillips says about his art background. “And I’ve been interested in art. I’ve done these sorts of math art things for years. So I do have some sympathy, I’m not an expert, I don’t have an opinion that people have to take seriously in art.”
Though he has some art background, Rhonda Cooper, art history professor and director of the Staller Center Art Gallery, says she was surprised when Phillips asked to submit his own artwork to the 2010 Faculty Art Exhibition. According to Cooper, Phillips said his piece wasn’t “art art” but was a math project that he had worked on in graduate school.
“I took that as him being very interested in trying to fit in in the department even though he is a math person,” Cooper said.
Phillip’s piece that is now sitting in the art department’s faculty exhibition is a work that made the cover of the Scientific American in 1966. It is a sketching of a step-by-step diagram of how to take a surface and turn it inside out. One of these sketches was also shown in an exhibit in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
“It seems like now he’s part of us,” Cooper said about Phillip’s submitting artwork for the faculty show.
But Phillips says that he isn’t considering his position as chair as a chance to change the department, but rather to just get it heading in the right direction. According to Phillips, the department was running on a deficit last year. Now that they have leveled out, Phillips says he wants to hire more adjunct professors and move forward with a plan.
“If anything, any changes are going to have to come from the faculty, and I can’t just say ‘here I am this is what you’re going to do,’” Phillips said. “But I’m going to have to help them crystallize their plans and bring the rest of them along.”
