Art and Design Intertwined

Eastern’s departments of art and design navigate a long-hoped-for union.

By Charles E. Reineke

Back in 1919, amidst the chaotic ferment of post-World War I Germany, a visionary architect named Walter Gropius was chosen to head a newly organized, state-sponsored school of architecture.

Gropius began his term with an audacious declaration: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is building!” he wrote in the founding manifesto of the institution, the Staatliche Bauhaus. “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art.”

With this assault on the status quo began an institution that, in its day, was less well known for its academic instruction than for its glorious impertinence; one that refused to recognize a meaningful distinction between art and craft, between the painter’s vision and the typographer’s grid, between the potter’s hands and the industrial designer’s blueprint. The Bauhaus insisted that form and function were not opposites to be balanced. They were a single language to be mastered whole.

That conviction echoed through the 20th century, shaping how creative programs were organized at universities across America and Europe. Today’s foundational, first-year art and design curriculum — exercises in color theory, composition, line and form — descends in nearly unbroken lineage from the workshops Gropius ran in Dessau more than a century ago.

For the past few decades at Eastern, however, the erstwhile “inseparable disciplines” of art and design have not only occupied different administrative homes, they’ve been located in different buildings in different towns, domiciles that in many ways reflect the divide at EWU that separated them in the first place.

The Fine and Performing Arts Department, part of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, is housed in Cheney’s Art Building, a structure suited to the beautifully messy pursuit of manual creativity: ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, painting. Design, meanwhile, is located in Spokane’s gleamingly modern, tech-heavy Catalyst building, where students and faculty members work under the auspices of the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or CSTEM.

This arrangement, administrators long argued, made sense from an organizational perspective. Pedagogical sense? Creative sense? Maybe not so much.

Jenny Hyde came to Eastern in 2007 as a visiting assistant professor filling in for a colleague on leave. She assumed she would stay for a year before heading back east. Seventeen years later, Hyde is now professor and chair of fine and performing arts at EWU. She still seems mildly astonished by the institutional logic that kept art and design apart for so long.

“When I came here, it was surprising to me that design wasn’t part of art,” she says during a recent conversation in Isle Hall, one that included her colleague Mindy Breen, professor of design and the department chair.

Hyde did her undergraduate work at Seattle University’s Cornish College of the Arts, where, she says, the disciplines were very much commingled. “Art, design, theater, music, dance — all in the same building.” At Alfred University in New York, where she completed a graduate fellowship in integrated electronic arts, the disciplines were even more intertwined. “And then Eastern…” she begins, and then pauses.

“I’m glad that we’re seeing a shift in the culture at Eastern,” she continues. “When I first got here, it seemed as if the art program wanted nothing to do with design. It was a cultural thing, which was confusing to me.”

Confusing maybe, but, as Hyde acknowledges, it’s a boundary that has remained familiar and persistent: The idea that fine art inhabits a realm of pure creative expression uncorrupted by utility; while design, on the other hand — though indisputably a vital and inventive medium — is merely work in the service of someone else’s agenda, executed for a paycheck.

Mindy Breen has been a faculty member in design since 2000. Unlike Hyde, she didn’t start out studying art or design. But at Notre Dame, where she did her undergraduate work, Breen found her way into that world pretty quickly.

“My freshman year I took an econ class, and the professor put up these charts and graphs and was talking about economic theory,” she recalls. “I looked at them and I’m like, ‘I can’t understand a thing these are trying to tell me.’ It really was frustrating, because they were supposed to convey information, and I was having a really hard time understanding. That catapulted me away from business and into design… By the end of freshman year I was no longer a business major. I was a graphic design major and really interested in the idea of the design of information.”

Breen says her program’s origins, like her own background, do indeed point to a decidedly instrumentalist (i.e., ideas as instruments for action) pedigree.

Over the ensuing decades the department evolved through a succession of names and organizational homes‚ the Department of Technology, then Engineering, Technology and Multimedia Design, then Engineering and Design, and finally, in 2020, simply Design.

“The design program, really the origin of design at EWU,” Breen says, “was a ‘printing technology’ program, originally in the Department of Manual Arts, as it was called.” There were photography courses, printing facilities and applied technical skills, she says. Pragmatic arts rather than the fine ones.

Over the ensuing decades the department evolved through a succession of names and organizational homes‚ the Department of Technology, then Engineering, Technology and Multimedia Design, then Engineering and Design, and finally, in 2020, simply Design. But it never quite shed the utilitarian antecedents those early roots implied.

What is perhaps most striking about EWU’s art–design divide, in retrospect, is how artificial it often felt to the students experiencing it. In the mid-2000s, Breen says she began to notice that a significant number of them were double-majoring across the two programs, voting, as it were, with their schedules for a curriculum integration that nobody had thought to offer.

In response, the two departments collaborated on creation of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design, a co-located degree drawing equally from art and design coursework. It was the first cross-disciplinary, cross-college degree in the university’s history. And it worked, at least for a while.

“The students who graduated with that degree‚ it was such a great experience,” Breen says. “They got the best of both worlds: the conceptual, hands-on studio practice, and also the applied, skills-based design work.” But the arrangement proved labor-intensive for faculty, and structurally awkward. When a key faculty member departed for the University of Denver, the load became unmanageable. The shared degree quietly dissolved and the programs resumed their parallel trajectories.

The story might have ended there, the two adjacent disciplines operating in polite proximity, were it not for a confluence of pressures that made the current merger feel, as Breen puts it, “like finishing something we started years ago.”

The immediate trigger was classic academe: a set of course proposals from one department that duplicated offerings in the other. “We had a conversation,” Breen recalls, “and it was like, ‘This is ridiculous‚ neither of us wants this.’”

Hyde felt the same way. “We all realized it was just too hard to explain to students what the difference is. It just became another layer of heaviness that doesn’t really need to be there.”

Practical considerations also played a role. With EWU’s new emphasis on bringing health sciences instruction together on its Spokane campus, the Catalyst building’s space was needed for health sciences and other CSTEM programs. With Design slated to return to Cheney, the case for continued separation became harder to make. More fundamentally, as Hyde said, it was becoming ever more difficult to explain to prospective students how, say, a photo class in design was different from the photo class in art, or why a student passionate about visual storytelling needed to choose a program affiliation before understanding what each could offer.

“It’s confusing for new students to land here and be interested in art and design, but then have two separate places to navigate,” Hyde says. “For me, that was a major incentive: Can we just get all the students that are interested in visual creativity and visual things to start in one place, and then be able to go from there?”

When Breen and Hyde brought the merger proposal to the deans of the two affected colleges, both were supportive. The provost’s office signed on. There was, as Breen notes with some relief, “not much of a case that needed to be made.”

Now that it’s settled, there remains only the pedagogical tension that needs navigating, that friendly friction between those who see art as pure vision and those who see design as applied problem-solving. The most obvious resolution at EWU is, in its essentials, the Bauhaus resolution: an understanding that the distinction is less meaningful than the disciplines’ shared inheritance.

“Design really goes back to the Bauhaus,” Hyde says. “Our foundation classes, the main foundation classes that you’ll see typically in most art and design programs link directly to the principles and rules of design and art that were formed in Bauhaus.”

What the Bauhaus artists understood, and what the EWU merger implicitly argues, is that the capacity to solve visual problems and the capacity to make visually meaningful art are not separate faculties. They’re aspects of a single sensibility.

The question of whether that argument survives contact with the job market is another matter. The professional logic that originally pushed Design toward CSTEM, the idea that employers respond more readily to programs that provide outcome-oriented credentials, remains a central concern. Breen says design students often choose their major partly because “at least I can explain to my parents that I might get a job in web design with this.” The merger, she hopes, will give those same students access to the fine arts without requiring them to ghost their moms and dads.

“When they have a choice,” Breen says, “they can then say, ‘Oh, right‚ let’s think about that beautiful creative aspect,’ that maybe they wouldn’t have gotten had we not had art classes available to them.”

“Design really goes back to the Bauhaus,” Hyde says. “Our foundation classes, the main foundation classes that you’ll see typically in most art and design programs link directly to the principles and rules of design and art that were formed in Bauhaus.”

Hyde says she’s comfortable with the exchange also running in the other direction. “I’d love for all of our art majors to take typography and graphic design,” she says. “I don’t care if AI is doing that work. They still need to understand what it is.

“There’s something really important about understanding process in the use of making something. It is part of the problem-solving exercise from start to finish.”

Or, as Breen puts it: “Craft. Understanding craft, absolutely.”

These days, of course, terms such as “process” and “craft” are very much implicated in the “AI question,” that specter haunting any conversation about creative education. When the topic came up during the conversation with Breen and Hyde, both were ready with answers. But their ambivalence was clear.

“Our students are using AI as a tool right now,” Breen says, “but they also need the humanities. What the humanities have to offer is an approach of how best to use it, how best to include it in their process.”

“Or when not to use it,” Hyde adds.

The fine arts might be expected to harbor more resistance to AI than design disciplines, for reasons that go deeper than tech aversion. If design has always been to some degree an intersection of tools and materials, fine art has been, at least in the ways it thinks about itself, a practice whose value is inseparable from consciousness and intention. Generative AI doesn’t participate in that discussion. It iterates and approximates. It produces, at dizzyingly high speed, outputs that often look like what has come before.

Tro Trujillo is a junior who studies both art and design at EWU while working as a photographer for fine and performing arts. He sits, one might say, squarely in the middle.

Trujillo’s path to Eastern was classically “nontraditional.” He spent a decade as a hairdresser, followed by a stint as an EMT during the early days of Covid and then enlistment as an Army medic with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

He came to EWU planning to use his veteran’s benefits to study business, but was redirected to design by a perceptive admissions counselor. He eventually found himself drawn to both art and design, something that the programs’ separation made administratively complicated and, at times, financially painful.

“I fought tooth and nail,” he says of his efforts to get the VA’s vocational rehabilitation program to approve art courses alongside his design coursework. “And both my design and art advisors have to work together in tandem when building out my [VA required] four-year plan to get approval.” An earlier merger, in his view, would have made the path much smoother.

“I would have loved for this merger to have already been completed before I started Eastern, because I think it would have accelerated my trajectory, rather than everybody figuring out workarounds.”

On AI, Trujillo is an unabashed enthusiast, at least insofar as he typically deploys it. “I use AI as an idea generator,” he says. “I have a hard time staring at a blank canvas.”  But he’s alert to the tensions the technology produces.

“You’ll find that a lot of the design students are against it and a lot of them are for it,” he says. “The art department really doesn’t like AI.” After a quick pause, he adds. “I think they fear it takes identity away from the works being created.”

Trujillo’s sense of AI’s value mirrors that of his academic advisor, EWU design professor and nationally recognized AI expert Travis Masingale (see our Fall/Winter 2024-25 issue).

Masingale’s approach to AI offers one possible model for how the merged program might navigate the technology; not as a replacement for craft, but as a way of building tools that serve it. “His vision, at least as I understand it, is something like this: If I run into a problem, I should have the opportunity to use AI in creating my own tools to deal with it,” Trujillo says.

While AI integration in some form will undoubtedly be the future at EWU, the past is certain to continue to assert itself. It’s easy, for instance, to imagine how a renovated Isle Hall, the 70-year-old building into which Design will move this summer, might serve as a not-so-subtle anamnesis to new generations of young artists and designers.

It sits on the west end of Eastern’s central campus, a two-story red-brick structure built in the post-WWII boom years when American universities were expanding rapidly, and architectural ambitions were running high.

On the clear May morning of the conversation with Breen and Hyde, its warm brick facade glowed auburn under a cobalt blue sky. Indoors it asserted a worldly self-confidence: Solid, purposeful, comfortable with its eccentricities.

“I think it’s a gem,” Hyde says. She says she first encountered the building through a storage room the art program had been using, and came away converted. “When I was in here, I was like, ‘What? Design just needs to move in here. It’s amazing.’’’

Breen has loved the building even longer. “Back when Anthropology was in the building, I would spend a lot of time in here,” she says. She and her colleagues have already begun thinking about furnishings, mid-century desks and chairs and lighting that belong to the aesthetic of the space. The building’s history adds layers. Isle Hall served for years as the university’s student union, and many Eastern readers will fondly remember the bowling alley (gone) and the fireplace (still stands).

The plan is for it to eventually house a “makerspace” open to students across disciplines, equipped with laser cutters, 3D printers, and large-format printing equipment. This will be built out alongside faculty offices, classrooms and a projection-mapping installation that students are already developing around the building’s exterior. Design students have been asking about murals.

Design is slated to move into Isle Hall in the summer of 2026. Curricular changes will be drafted and submitted for approval in 2027, with new integrated programming taking effect in 2028. The question of which college the combined program will ultimately inhabit, whether art moves to CSTEM, design moves to CAHSS, or some new arrangement is negotiated, remains open. “We haven’t figured that out yet,” Breen says.

What they have figured out is that students, the ones, at least, who are already moving between the programs, are almost uniformly in favor. Trujillo, who may be the Eagle most personally inconvenienced by the current separation, expressed a sentiment that the department chairs echoed from their own vantage point.

“We are already integrated,” Trujillo says. “Making it official isn’t going to be this big, scary thing. We already implement design in art, and art into design. So the fact that Eastern is facilitating that, and just making it easier for students to get what they need out of their program, I think that can only be a good thing.”