New World School of the Arts

Great school! Great teachers! Great location! FREE for high school students! c/​o ’98 is da bomb!!!

Small classes, good people, clean campus, moderately priced, hard to get into, amazing location, lots of bums, poor lighting, pointless classes/​teachers, no school spirit.
You pick the cons and pros.

Alas, I have to give ‘New World School of the Arts’ three stars — five for when I started and one for when I left.
I didn’t mean to go to NWSA, it just sort of happened. I had a car and a friend of mine had come to town to apply at the school. I drove and waited for her while she presented her portfolio to the Dean. When their meeting was over she came out of the office and that is when I met Dr. Ed Love — Dean of the Visual Arts Department. Dr. Love was the epitome of a Strong Black Brother — as I remember him that day he seemed 6’4″ and big, wearing a dashiki and cowboy boots. He came over and, looking down at me said, «Where’s your stuff?!» I said I didn’t have any and he said, «you’re lying, go home and take pictures.» So I did.
I really *didn’t* have any stuff! But I took pictures of the way I had arranged things in my apartment. I went back and showed him and he actually let me in and subsidized my attendance. I hadn’t even intended to go to school and suddenly I was on a scholarship.
I loved Dr. Love. He was a sculptor and was very dedicated to making the visual arts program into a top-​notch program. This was maybe the first year of the program because we didn’t even have any buildings of our own. I took my drawing classes in the attic of the Baptist Church building over by the Metrorail station. They had donated the space to NWSA/​MDCC to use as long as the models always wore underwear of a certain size in the «Nude» drawing sessions — sometimes a woman would even come with a tape measure! I still have many classical looking academies /​charcoal drawings of men and women in their skivvies!
We also had an amazing sculpture studio with power tools in the back of a copy shop.
But then after maybe a year or two NWSA bought the old AT&T building — a multi-​story building in downtown Miami near the MDCC campus — where AT&T had stored equipment and generators or something. People got greedy and the dance department was put on the top floor with the natural light and the visual arts and painting classes were hidden in the basement with fluorescent bulbs. Anyone who has studied color theory knows this is a recipe for disaster. Dr. Love really fought to fix things but to no avail. He resigned in protest and took a job teaching sculpture in Tallahassee.
After that things got worse. Because we were a magnet school and high school kids went there; and because that was the year our brilliant leaders invaded Panama and Noriega had been placed in a jail cell two blocks away; and because Miami Vice had made the world aware that there was crime in Miami, the parents freaked out forced the school to hire all these security guards who acted like reincarnated members of the Gestapo. They would come and riffle through our lockers looking for drugs or one time, one of them opened the door to the darkroom when I was developing because that was «part of his patrol.»
Finally, one day I went into the painting studio and there was a group from MDCC in there talking about child care! I just ignored them and went about my painting at which point the older woman — possibly their leader — turned to me and said in the most gratingly saccharin voice imaginable, «Why must you do that now? You must not care about people.» In the painting studio!
Each year for the Art History class, instead of writing a paper, we were required to create an art work or presentation based on the period we studied. That semester it was the late 20^th century and so I decided my piece would be a «Situationist attack on my school» in light of the recent developments. But I have to consider the outcome an utter failure because not only did it not incite any action, the Provost actually gave me another scholarship. Alas.
I quit going to NWSA the following year. I was sad because a school that I had loved, with radical people like Dr. Love, had turned into the worst kind of uninspiring nightmare.
I think Dr. Love passed away some years ago. When I learned that I was very sad as he really walked the walk. He was replaced by a woman who… well, when I first heard about «Deconstruction» I had no idea what it was or meant so I asked her. She said that it was «when they tore buildings down.»