Interview with Andrew Douglas Campbell

 

Gallery Coordinator and part-time faculty Andrew Douglas Campbell

Andrew Douglas Campbell is a part-time faculty instructor at LBCC and is the gallery coordinator for the college. He grew up in northern Chicago. With a lifelong interest in the arts, he started working with photography at a young age. Andrew has continued photography into adulthood and even works with different forms of mixed medium art. A first generation college student, he attended school in Chicago before eventually moving to Oregon.

What was your background before you started teaching?

I mean, that's a lot. There’s not a very clear line in the sand right? 

Like my first Experiences with teaching were outside of an accredited university. After I finished my undergrad, I spent a while doing some work for Little Street Arts Center, which is like a community artist center in Chicago. I was teaching classes there. And you know, those are obviously different, right, that's like a community center, and it's not an academic teaching position. So I spent a number of years teaching a number of things there, then I started working in sort of like accredited schools as a graduate fellow. So my first college teaching classes came from being a student in my master's program. Then that just very smoothly transitioned into a job once I graduated and like, didn't have one. 

Where did you get your education?

My education was pretty not traditional in a number of ways. I came out of high school, and enrolled right away. I was obligated to like – sort of family pressure – obligated to enroll right away in a school. I was going to Columbia College Chicago at that point and I was studying photography there primarily. I had to leave that school before the end of my first year. 

Then I was out of school for a while, just sort of like working and living and like relying on my social circle to keep up a sort of studio practice without the structure and guidance of school, and that was pretty good.

In Chicago, in my 20s, I had like a very strong sort of group of friends that were all involved in our production one way or the other. That kept me as dedicated to the craft and into the skill building as I could be at the time. But after a number of years, I went back, decided to go back and finish my undergrad degree. Then I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at that point. And had some credits that I could take from my first attempt there, but this was now in my like my late 20’s I restart my Bachelor's degree. We're on like 26 or so. And finish up that school, like I said, after undergrad for a little while I was teaching at Wall Street arts center along with a number of other jobs.

There's always multiple jobs. 

Yeah, usually in the arts, there's multiple jobs. 

So I've always had multiple jobs. After that, there was a combination of like, the service industry. I worked in clubs and bars for a long time and then was teaching these classes during the day trying to like eke out a studio practice as well. 

Then in my late 30s, I decided to go back for my master's degree. Then I moved to Oregon, decided to start applying. I was in no hurry, so I started sort of inquiring about grad schools almost like a full year before the application cycle that I was intending to engage in. I just sort of spent like a year doing research and looking at programs and stuff. Then I ended up applying for the following year. And U of O had the best offer for me, in terms of like the price and cost of the school.

I ended up back in school, and I really did have to prioritize as little loans as possible.

Did you grow up in Chicago, whereabouts in Chicago? 

My family moved around a little bit around Chicago. So my dad's family was from the Southwest side, like the large Irish community down there. My dad's side of the family is very, very sort of like Irish Scottish immigrant. So my dad was from Southwest, and my mom moved to Chicago in her teens from Iowa. My family met and were around north Roger's park, which is like the northernmost neighborhood of Chicago.

Around the time that I was entering elementary school, my brother and sister already were starting to move towards middle school and high school. At this point, my family moved up to the north suburbs and bounced around there for the years that we were all in school, because they had much better public schools, right? So like I had this weird experience of going to like one of the top wealthiest public schools in the nation. But the reality is, I was the kid of the private chef of the people at that school. So we were living in the neighborhood and I was going to the school but I was like the son of the help. 

I was like socialized around a fairly wealthy demographic of people. The assumption like leant the other way right? It was like my being working class or being sort of like poorer was more invisible than it was isolating, and so people didn't understand why I wasn't going on spring break. 

How long have you been teaching at LBCC?

I think this is something that's always hard for me to remember. I think my first term was winter 2019, so I think since 2019, I'm not positive on that. 

What classes do you teach here? I know you do photography, as well as the screen printing class this term. 

So those are the most consistent ones. Occasionally, I really do enjoy it too, when I teach an art 102, which is the understanding art. Sort of like an introduction to art and one time I pitched and taught a special section of it which was theme focused. There was a version of art 102 that focused not exclusively, but like we used the notion of camp and Susan Sontag's essay notes on camp as sort of like the main question we were asking about the history of art. We go through periods and movements of art from time to time like, “is this camp or not?” 

Which I liked better than the question is this good or not? Like it doesn't have the same sort of consequences as determining something good or bad, but something camp or not camp is kind of a meaningless question, but a fun one to ask. 

Are there any classes that you would like to teach possibly in the future? 

What would I like to teach? I think this is much more like a specific art school model course. But I've seen it listed as sort of like a research studio course, or I've even seen variations on it, which is sort of like a sketchbook class. But it is basically just like a course in developing research skills, like R&D for artists essentially. Just a class on being like, How do you look for your references, how do you unpack your research and how do you then translate it into your own practice? 

I would really love to teach that class being so like open undead, and just sort of about learning how to be self-directed, it is a really fun space to sort of like guide people through.

How's the screen printing class going? 

It's going really well, it's really lovely. We hold two print exchanges throughout the term, so there's also like that, I love a print class because of like forcing people to share their work honestly, like it's an assignment for you to give your art away. 

What do you like best about teaching? 

I do like that It just obligates me to be – even if it's not my own studio, and even if it's not a studio that I'm getting anything done – I appreciate that it obligates me to like just be in the studio and be taking care of the studio space on a regular basis. Not just the inhuman things, but like the people in it. To be facilitating a running and producing studio it's really lovely and that's sort of like inextricable from my own practice too, it keeps my own studio healthy.

You're the gallery coordinator, how did you end up getting that job?

There was a posting, and I said, “I suppose, I could have another job.” I mean, honestly, it was just sort of a bit of good luck timing, the convenience of like this was a second position at a school I'm already teaching at. When the posting came up, I was definitely in a place where I'm like, I need more employment. 

How do you decide what to display, and when to display it? 

Oh, so that's not so much, like the way that I take the role of a gallery coordinator here is I'm more like the faculty mentor of the gallery system here. I frequently have two student coordinators who are employed by the gallery and compensated in tuition. We curate the space together as a group and I do sort of leave a lot of the programming decisions in the student coordinator's hands. 

We come together and we collect opportunities from a number of things. The college gallery has its own email address, people will kind of cold call us looking for opportunities. We will occasionally post open calls. I mean, the student shows a big one, that is just a giant open call for all the work.  We collect other programming opportunities from other institutions that are sort of like-minded as us that we are in communication with. Also sort of like reaching out to local artists that we know with a possible opportunity to give to them. 

With those three different sources, we sort of just make choices, we have discussions and make choices. What kind of thing do we want to do this year, like what are we interested in showcasing? We have a platform, how do we want to use it best to suit our purposes? And I do encourage them to think about programming and the gallery, as an act of agency, that it is not entirely without social impact or that gallery work and curation work is not apolitical or not asocial.

You're sending a message whatever you put up, it's sending a message to somebody in some kind of way. 

Especially like, you know, where we are today, even a big, strong, unambiguous declaration of this is apolitical, is still a political statement. It is impossible not to be engaged with the conditions of the world that we're living in. 

So you display work that's not just LBCC students?

Correct, so we have pretty much two big spaces that the gallery works with. We have the hallway galleries of this building North Santiam Hall, and then we have the white box gallery and South Santiam Hall. The white box gallery, we've often been programming from people that are local, but not from the school. We do really dedicate ourselves to working sort of locally in that way.

What age range would you say you were when you got started in photography? What drew you to it?

I mean, I don't know when I started just like pushing a shutter button and like taking pictures, but I started processing my own film in my tween years, somewhere in like Middle school, maybe. In my head I want to say that I was like 11 or 12, alright, maybe 12 or 13. But somewhere in there I started going to the photo club after school and using a darkroom. But yeah, I started processing my own film around then, and then, like really, really went hard on photography, all through high school.

What drew me to it is that, I think it was because it was immediate. I wasn't thinking of it in terms like this, but the mechanical nature of photography was a huge help to me. Like I wanted to make pretty pictures, I always wanted to make pretty things. But really struggled with learning to draw and having the patients to learn to draw and then having access to a drawing class for a kid was also like pretty limited. I was essentially trying to self teach myself how to draw well starting at like 10. But got very frustrated, and ultimately, it's very frustrating, I was only getting as far as like copying my favorite comic strips and I was really good at drawing Garfield, but I had no one really helping me at life drawing or like any kind of skill building that I can do beyond just copying comic strips.

But then photography was like, “Oh this is instantaneous, and like, what I'm imagining I'm able to produce.” So the fact that I wasn't sort of repeatedly and constantly being disappointed by the outcome. I could be like, “No, that was it, that was what I wanted.” 

So I think that ended up being why it had so much gravity to me, is that it was actually the medium that got me the results I was looking for with the resources I had. 

Do you have any other work that you're currently doing besides what you do for the school and the Art Gallery? 

Yeah, so I’m part-time faculty here at LBCC and then also the faculty gallery coordinator are two jobs. I’m also an artist member at ditch projects, which is a nonprofit arts organization in Springfield, and they run a really robust gallery season. I think we're in the midst of our last or second to last show for this year, before we sort of like shut the gallery for the summer and then the artists get the space as like studio space over the summer. We do a lot of programming there. We just recently had our fundraising gala. We have a show up right now. 

I also do design PR work for Eugene Springfield, pride organization. So I've been working within the community with pride org and working with Ditch projects, I'm working care as well. Those are my four jobs. 

There's some freelance work outside of those institutional connections. I'm also working towards a solo show about a year from now. 

Tell me more about the ditch project. 

Yeah, ditch projects was born out of an independent space that was a group of grad students a long time ago, they sort of started their own art organization and it was moved around in a couple of spaces. It started before I moved to Oregon at all. 

It had sort of like this rotating cast of members and has sort of evolved over the years. A few years ago, I want to say about 5 years ago, they went and did all the work of becoming an actual national not-for-profit organization. So it started off just as this DIY collective to showcase and support each other's work from a group of grad students who were in the program at the same time, into what it is now. 

I'm a big big supporter of there's always a group of grad students that are going to be like, “Let's just go out and start a collective, in some way.” And I love those. I was involved with one that was born much closer to me. Being like in school, I sort of witnessed them get together and a few years later, I joined up with a group called tropical contemporary.

I find those artists run organizations to be really vital and really important, and I also like their historically fairly, it's rare. Ditch is now 15 years old, they’re doing a like 15 year anniversary publication, and a big push about that anniversary, and it's truly impressive, because those sort of artists run spaces pop-up and fizzle out pretty quickly. That's sort of like their cycle, and it's always a little sad when they do, but I also think it's kind of vital that we have that. People just like put together a collective, that's a tradition that I really support, and I also think it's a really important one for art students coming out of school. Because the loss of the support of an institution and the structure of an institution kills our practices – it's really hard to keep making work when you don't have the scheduling – it's weird, how school scheduling can be really oppressive and can be really unforgiving, but the lack of that structure also ends up being stifling.

At a Glance:

Name: Andrew Douglas Campbell

Occupation: Part-time Faculty Instructor & Gallery Coordinator

Hometown: Chicago

Education: Columbia College Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Years at LBCC: About 5 years

Before teaching at LBCC: Andrew has worked with multiple nonprofits, thought classes at Wall Street Arts Center, and University of Oregon

Classes He Teaches at LBCC: Photography, Screen Printing, Understanding art

Website: https://andrewdouglascampbell.com/