The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York will be owned by an alumni affiliated nonprofit following a period of financial difficulties and a recent unionization effort by its faculty.
On September 1, the Rhodes family, which has owned it nearly 80 years, transferred ownership to the SVA Alumni Society, a nonprofit that has funded student scholarships since 1972. The school’s longtime president, David Rhodes, has promised that “day-to-day life for students, administration, faculty, and staff would not change,” per a release.
“For almost eight decades, my family has proudly shepherded SVA through countless changes in the landscape of higher education amid New York City’s ever evolving arts community,” Rhodes said in a statement. “It feels like the natural next step for such a beloved institution to be guided into its future by the Alumni Society, an organization comprising leadership that cares for SVA as much as I do.”
SVA, which opened in 1947 as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, enrolls around 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Its alumni from the past 75-plus years include some of today’s most important artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lorna Simpson, Sarah Sze, Elizabeth Peyton, Andrea Fraser, Keith Haring, KAWS, Collier Schorr, and Tom Burr.
In a statement, Todd Radom, the SVA Alumni Society’s board chairman,said, “My own relationship with SVA spans more than half of its entire history, so the opportunity to help lead the College into this new era is both exciting and deeply meaningful. Our entire Board is bound together by our love for SVA, and we look forward to building upon the Rhodes family’s great legacy as we work with the SVA community to support its mission—to educate future generations of global creative citizens.”
In May, some 1,200 SVA faculty unionized, following a 77-percent in favor of unionization. SVA Faculty United, the name of the union which is working under the aegis of United Auto Workers, recently elected a bargaining committee and is currently conducting initial bargaining surveys from its memberships that will inform its first contract negotiations.
In an email to ARTnews on behalf SVA Faculty United, Hans Tammen, a professor in the MFA Computer Arts program, and Edwin Rivera-Arias, faculty member in Humanities & Sciences, wrote that the union vote allows the faculty “to have a voice over our teaching conditions no matter who is in leadership at the School. This is also one key reason we organized regardless of whether the school’s leadership changes, it’s critical that the faculty, who teach thousands of students and do critical work, are part of any decisions.”
Last month, reported that SVA had quietly laid off around 30 workers. The layoffs were later confirmed in an all staff email from Rhodes, who cited “financial challenges” as the reasoning for the cuts.
In their email, Tammen and Rivera Arias added, “Now more than ever, given higher education and the arts are facing attacks more nationally, it’s critical faculty have a collective voice and that the School works with us towards enshrining rights and protections in a contract.”