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What do we owe to the places where we live and work?
Are they just pit stops that we stay in for a while on our way to a bigger newspaper, hospital or university?
Or are they places that we come to love and identify with? Are they places that get inside us, and make us want to dedicate ourselves to them?
Definitely not the latter when it comes to third-year UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark A. Fuller.
A year after the heretofore little-known academic administrator announced, without warning to the entire leadership of the South Coast, that he would irrevocably close the downtown New Bedford arts college, UMass Dartmouth now boasts on its website that it is a “national research university.”
That’s a bit of overstated marketing if you ask me. But even worse, it’s a bit of a pie-in-the-sky delusion that makes anyone who really loves UMass Dartmouth, and the local branch of the state college system that it was meant to be, more than a little sad.
How important is a place, and what is a university’s relationship to its place?
To me, a university ought to be like a place’s church or guiding light. Integral and inescapable. Unique and local, knowing every nook and cranny of its people and their needs. Respected for both its knowledge and humility.
UMass Dartmouth has proven itself nothing like that.
Mark Fuller is a part of the removed governance of the local branch of the state university that is determined to impose a vision of itself on the region it was meant to serve. He is everything that working and provincial people hate when they think of an elite establishment.
Contrast Fuller’s relationship to Greater New Bedford with that of one of his university’s graduate students in ceramics, Fallon Navarro.
Navarro is a young mother with a connective-tissue disease who came to New Bedford to study her craft about the same time that Fuller came down from mid-level UMass Amherst administration to ostensibly lead the South Coast school.
Fuller, however, egged on by a misguided university president’s office, at a critical moment took away the very kilns that Navarro needed to practice for her master’s degree ceramics work. He also took away Navarro’s very effective studio and her easy access to her academic support system.
UMass Dartmouth, in fact, took away their “place” from its own students, and it took it away without warning, or convincing explanation.
Navarro’s response? She dug in and did her graduate work on time to obtain her degree, but at the same time she also dug into the city that the chancellor walked away from.
Navarro, like Fuller a refugee from Arizona, is unlike him in the way she talks about New Bedford.
“I think it’s really about the community down here,” she told me last week at the opening of the graduate students’ latest downtown exhibit, “Beyond the Star Store — More Than Just a Building.”
It’s the latest of a series of exhibitions the students have staged themselves even as the university has staged almost nothing arts-wise in the city since it announced it was leaving a year ago.
“You know, there’s so much investment in living here. And being a part of the community here that rubs off on you when you’re in this environment,” Navarro said.
She talked about working in her studio space on the fifth floor of the Star Store with its breathtaking views of the New Bedford waterfront and what it was like when she and her arts college colleagues came down for a break at No Problemo or Calico in the decidedly not gentrified streets of the city.
“You feel like you’re a part of something, and you want to make it better,” she said.
There’s something about the bricks, the cobblestones, the old architecture that draws you in, she said.
Navarro and fellow ceramics students Anis Beigzadeh and Jill McEvoy, for nine months now, have led an effort to keep UMass Dartmouth art in New Bedford. They took over an empty storefront at 65 William St. in the downtown and launched what became the Star Store Collective.
When the university shut down the CVPA, it also shut down its three popular downtown galleries, including the University Art Gallery, which local critic Don Wilkinson has said was arguably the best in the city.
Navarro, who also became the most identifiable voice of the student protest of UMass Dartmouth’s unnecessary and destructive one-month-notice closing, started with an exhibition called “Star Store No More, Works in Ceramics.”
With the exception of a month or so, they’ve continued, since December, a revolving series of exhibitions until this last exhibition at what has come to be known as the Star Gallery. The exhibit honors the work of Star Store alumni who have worked at the university’s New Bedford campus these past 23 years.
Names like the late painter Sig Haines and late photographer Marc St. Pierre, whose works are shown, are as well known as any New Bedford artist of the last half-century.
But the students did this. Not the faculty, not the alumni, not the academic administration.
Meanwhile, the university itself has retreated to Dartmouth and describes its latest plans with the same kind of marketing delusion as when it labels itself a national research university.
Ryan Merrill, the chancellor’s spokesman, refers to the former Bed Bath & Beyond outlet in a Dartmouth strip mall, where much of the CVPA has been relocated, as the “Art & Design Studio (ADS) at Dartmouth Towne Center.”
As for the rest of the CVPA campus, Merrill wrote a prepared statement outlining a bright future for an arts school in the Dartmouth woods: “The University has enlisted architects to collaborate with campus partners to both modernize our existing CVPA facilities and design new on-campus spaces that will offer exceptional teaching and learning environments for our students, faculty, and staff.”
The official spokesman, for good measure, blamed it all on the “withdrawal of state funding for our downtown lease,” forgetting that the school refused to buy the campus for $1, and then missed its deadline for the $1 sale when given a second chance.
Not a word in Merrill’s statement about the university’s future relationship to New Bedford, the heart of the Southeastern Massachusetts population center it is supposed to serve. It was as if the long history and identity of the CVPA really had nothing to do with New Bedford at all.
Navarro said the students’ efforts to create exhibition space in the city have been sponsored by anonymous private donors and the university’s Maintainers and Teamsters unions. Nationally known actress Tea Leoni, who has a home in Nonquitt, paid for the gallery space this summer.
The students are at the end of their financial road now. They’d like to continue a gallery for UMass Dartmouth work in New Bedford but they will need more support. Navarro finished her MFA and Beigzadeh, who came to study on the South Coast from Iran, has a year to go. They both have dreams of starting a collective in the downtown where they can sponsor shows, and maybe make some money selling work.
“If Anis and I are able to stay here another year, we are sort of already planning together what we want to do,” Fallon mused. “Really going even bigger than we have.”
It is clear that Fallon Navarro loves New Bedford.
She seems to have a clear understanding of place. That a place is not just a pit stop. That a place is part of our identity.
Editor’s Note: On Aug. 14, 2023, UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark A. Fuller announced that the university would immediately close the College of Visual and Performing Arts campus in downtown New Bedford. The university had previously failed to twice follow the state’s arrangement for it to purchase the campus for $1, first in 2021 when its 20-year private sector lease was up, and a second time in 2022 when the state, on legislation authored by state Sen. Mark Montigny and Gov. Charlie Baker, expressly instructed the school to purchase the building. UMass Dartmouth, however, made the offer after the purchase deadline had passed, and owner Paul Downey exercised his right to keep the building.
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
