Last week, we received the heartbreaking news that our beloved alma mater, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, was abruptly closing its doors after 150 years. Today, that sad announcement has become real.
For many people, a school is just a building. A place where you take classes, pass through hallways, collect credits, and eventually move on. But for those of us who came of age inside UArts, it was never just a school. It was a living, breathing, paint-splattered, sleep-deprived, wildly imperfect creative organism. It was where we became ourselves.
“A community of people, that’s really what art school is.”
— Ross Bleckner
Many of my fellow alumni, people I still consider family, gathered on those familiar steps one last time. They stood where we had once stood as young artists, dreamers, rebels, messes, makers, and misfits. They took a final photo. They shared memories. They shared anger. They shared grief. And even from a distance, I could feel its weight.
It felt like losing an old friend we thought would always be there.
At first, I told myself, Come on, Emily-Kate. It’s silly to cry over a school. But then the tears came anyway, because UArts was never only a school to us. It was the place where a whole bunch of strange, sensitive, intense, funny, stubborn, beautifully odd young people discovered that we were not actually misfits. We had just been waiting to find our people.
I remember my first day at UArts so clearly. I was newly out of high school and stepping into a world that felt bigger, louder, weirder, and more alive than anything I had known before.
That was the day I met this insanely cool guy named Trevor. He wore a grey suit, had this mop of platinum hair, and looked like he had walked straight out of some downtown art film that I definitely wanted to be part of. I had no idea then that he would become a lifelong friend and housemate.
That summer changed everything.
We stayed up all night together, pushing each other to finish projects, survive critiques, and figure out who we were becoming. We learned the perils of gouache, the magic of bad coffee, and the strange beauty of watching the sun rise over the Henry Moore sculpture after being awake far too long.
We were exhausted. We were broke. We were probably eating terribly. But we were alive in the way only young artists can be alive when they believe the world is still wide open and they are just reckless enough to make something of it.
I am not saying my college years were exactly like a John Hughes coming-of-age film, but let’s be honest, they were pretty close.
There were late nights in the sculpture studio. There were critiques that made you question every decision you had ever made. There were friendships formed in the weirdest corners of the building. There were conversations that started with art and somehow ended with life, love, politics, music, money, heartbreak, and whether anyone had enough change to buy food.
Sometimes we pooled our literal pennies to split a taco pizza at Taco House with John Geary. And somehow, that felt like abundance.
That was the thing about UArts. We did not have much, but we had each other. We had studio keys, big ideas, half-finished projects, bad lighting, borrowed tools, wet plaster, cheap food, and an unreasonable amount of confidence for people who were still figuring out how to pay rent.
And honestly? That was enough.
UArts gave me more than a degree. It gave me a language.
It taught me how to look harder. It taught me how to defend an idea. It taught me that making art is not always romantic. Sometimes it is frustrating, physical, lonely, expensive, ridiculous, and completely necessary.
It taught me that sculpture is not just about materials. It is about presence. It is about space. It is about how a thing holds its ground in the world.
I was an 18-year-old girl who believed that getting a BFA in Sculpture was a perfectly reasonable life choice. And you know what? I still believe she was right.
That choice shaped everything.
It shaped how I see the world. It shaped how I teach. It shaped how I move through grief, motherhood, illness, recovery, memory, and reinvention. It shaped the way I understand community. It shaped the way I understand survival.
Because art school, at its best, does not simply train you to make things. It gives you a mirror. It gives you witnesses. It gives you people who remember who you were before you learned how to explain yourself.
Thirty-nine years later, I can still call many of you for art advice, life advice, or simply to laugh about who we were back then.
You were there when I was becoming myself. You saw the raw version. The messy version. The version with big hair, big feelings, big ideas, and no real plan beyond making art and figuring it out later.
There is a special kind of intimacy in that. The people who knew you when you were young, broke, passionate, confused, and completely on fire with possibility know something about you that no résumé or artist statement can ever fully explain.
That is why this loss hurts.
We are not only grieving buildings. We are grieving a physical place that held our becoming. A place that held our youth. A place that held the echoes of critique rooms, studio nights, hallway arguments, found families, and all the versions of ourselves we left behind there.
UArts may be physically gone, but it is not erased.
It lives in every artist it shaped. It lives in the work we make, the students we teach, the communities we build, and the strange little creative fires we keep tending no matter what life throws at us.
It lives in the friendships that survived decades.
It lives in the stories we still tell.
It lives in the part of me that is still that 18-year-old girl, standing in Philadelphia, believing that art mattered enough to build a life around it.
And it does.
Thank you, UArts.
Thank you for the studios, the chaos, the friendships, the professors, the arguments, the breakthroughs, the disasters, the late nights, the sunrise walks, and the people who became family.
And if my favorite professor, Thom Stearns, were still with us today, I know he would have been on those steps, defending what UArts meant to all of us.
Farewell, old friend.
You were never just a school.
You were where we found each other.
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