A to B: Mike Fink, M.A.T.’56

My connection to HGSE began at the summer prelude in what was then Mount Ida College and then continued as I taught a class in East Providence on French for beginners based on the Language Through Pictures lecture approach that substituted performance for translation. I was preparing for the then-new M.A.T. semester at Harvard, and my tuition was paid by the Charles Smith Award for Providence scholars, which was originally offered for Harvard Law School. I sensed that my future lay not upon the landscape of legal rhetoric but instead in the classrooms of the community of students seeking more “poetic” lore. The Smith legacy was willing to make the switch.

I was welcomed by Christine M. Gibson and by I.A. Richards, who used the experiments of David Weinstein who believed that, upon the birth of the Israel, it was important, even urgent, to teach languages to immigrants from diverse cultures and linguistic roots with immediacy and rapid success. During that marvelous first semester I also met Marcel Marceau, the Holocaust survivor pantomimist, who had turned the Jewish orphans into everybody, existentially, and supported the notion that not the number of words but rather the observation of actions clarify one’s lot in life. Or something like that. I recall a text by Hugh Walpole in which the classic folktales were reduced to a 500-word vocabulary. Which, oddly enough perhaps, invites an almost Hemingway-esque attention to language! The second semester of the M.A.T. was to practice, not preach. I became the instructor in French, as well as English, at the junior high school in Belmont, Massachusetts. I treasure as a souvenir the photograph of the graduating class of 1957, with the autographs of my first official students on the reverse side of the rolled up scroll.

I then accepted the post of a similar assignment in Eastchester, New York, and took an apartment right next door to the junior high building. Did a bit of tutoring on the side, after hours, and had a grand time for my initiation into using the skills I had read about and tried to use, up in Cambridge, where I had also played the part of a serving waiter in the French through Pictures experiment sponsored by Miss Gibson. “You speak French better than English” she actually said to me.

Destiny had something else in store for me. In the summer of 1957, my uncle Herbert Fink was teaching printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and introduced me to its president, John Frazier. “We are launching a liberal arts department as we widen our curriculum from the studio majors separated from one another to a more general and collective model,” they said as they invited me to join the faculty with my dual degrees of a Yale B.A., a Harvard M.A.T., and a junior year at the Sorbonne. My first “job” was to introduce a composition course — a required class, not an elective, for a so-called “slow section.” Suited me just fine, because my idea was to combine the idea of drawing with the invitation to use words to accompany the details perceived and observed by the incoming disciples. It worked well enough for me to produce and publish Drawing with Words, a text that combined papers/essays written by my students along with quick sketches. Decades later, another president, John Maeda, praised that slim volume lavishly, a high point in my career!

I never lost sight of the inspiration of my Harvard professors, and always, consistently, acknowledged the undying influence of that program in almost every facet of my life. My wife as a girl had watched me in French through Pictures on television in her public school classroom. My source of the idea of Drawing with Words went back to Marcel Marceau, the lectures of I.A. Richards, and the confidence in me by Miss Gibson.

I have been teaching here at RISD longer than anybody in the history of the college, known rather as a “school.” I have gone on from that necessary composition course to a list of electives, all of which had something to do with the central theme of that M.A.T.  I can claim legitimately to have offered “Voices of Diversity” in which I brought together very divergent guest presenters from minorities that did NOT share identical views. I remember all my alums! The native indigenous voices diverged from the early feminist perspectives, as the gay/lesbian speakers might make claims quite far from those of the “civil rights” organizations as well as the anti-war veterans “against the war” and truth to tell, it was a noisy year in the mid-60s. I had no trouble at all getting the students to talk, to question, to participate (the emphasis in Language through Pictures), but the controversial and argumentative atmosphere was almost too much for me to handle, although I tried to balance and remain cordial to opponents on every point. Nevertheless, among my visiting artists and scholars there was the appearance of a little man in a plain suit named Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had written his memoir titled In My Father’s Court and it impressed one and all with its whimsy, wisdom, and strange intimacy that somehow embraced diversity itself. And so, I created another elective titled The Jewish Narrative.  I called it  "narrative art" to invite all studio majors into his readings.

I wrote my public school “career book” on ornithology, and turned that boyhood dream into another elective, perhaps the most popular one with the longest waiting list called Birds and Words. You have to build a better birdhouse or feeding structure or make use of your carpentry or architecture skills along with your journal of observation with its patience as requirements along with reading the required books, from Green Mansions to Birdology.  Even Eating Animals.  I inherited a Bible syllabus from a retired colleague and adapt even holy scripture into design issues. That is, we visit all the churches and other places of worship that flourish in the former colony established for freedom of religion by our founding figure, Roger Williams.  I want my young artists to interpret the doors and windows, the paper upon which the prayers are printed and bound, from the viewpoint of their majors…to see faith as poetry! 

Oh, after a career of six decades and more, I have an infinity of anecdotal tales as well as fights and disagreements.  I saved a building from the wreckers by occupying “Carr House” and later was congratulated for my courage and had a photograph of me framed above the entrance in a ceremony of re-naming a part of the Victorian town-house with my name for its gallery/coffeehouse.  I had a department head who disapproved vigorously of my using nude models in a writing class. Won that round as well. My curricula have more than once earned (or not) the disapproval of administrators, but, so far, like the gingerbread cookie, I have won each battle and left with a smug smile as the years of my service have moved along with a stride and plenty of hellos from the tightly knit campus world of downtown Providence (aptly named). But this is already too much. 

Mike Fink, M.A.T.’56, is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, where he has taught for more than 62 years, making him the school’s longest-serving faculty member.

Explore HGSE's Centennial website, a central resource for events, stories, ways to get involved, and more.