For Penn State laureate, art is everywhere
Chris Staley stared at the football cradled in Penn State quarterback Matt McGloin’s hands. On McGloin’s cue, he put his head down and dashed for the end zone, dodging cornerback Adrian Amos. He caught the quarterback’s pass with ease and rolled into the end zone, letting out a celebratory, “Woo-hoo.”
Then Staley joined head coach Bill O’Brien on the sidelines for an interview as the team’s practice music blared through loudspeakers. He asked O’Brien how the first-year coach designed practices.
O’Brien responded that creativity is essential in planning practices and games. He said the art of deception is important when calling plays and that teamwork is at the heart of the football team’s success.
Staley isn’t a football player. He isn’t a reporter and he isn’t a coach. He’s a distinguished professor of art, and this year’s Penn State laureate, an honor he earned for his own artistic talents and passion for teaching art appreciation.
The interview with O’Brien was one installment of a video series Staley is creating for the Penn State community. The series, dubbed “Art and Life: Where They Intersect,” is meant to empower both the artistically talented and the artistically challenged to discover that art is everywhere around them — on a football field, a kitchen table or in the woods.
Staley wanted to open his classroom to as many people as possible and said a video series was the best way to do so. He based the content of the videos on a class he previously taught.
“For that course, I tried to think of as many perspectives as I could on ways that life influences what we create,” Staley said. “I thought about technology, thought about silence, thought about the unconscious…to come up with as many aspects of the human condition that influence who we are.”
Staley has been teaching art for more than 30 years. He specializes in ceramics, but enjoys speaking about all types of art. His artwork is displayed around the world and he often asked to speak about his talents.
When he speaks about art, he speaks from the lessons he’s learned throughout his own life. He wants people to understand that art is for everyone, for those who can paint a watercolor masterpiece and those who can barely draw a stick figure.
“Art’s a bit of a mystery,” Staley said. “In the broadest sense, everyone’s an artist because they’re creating the lives they’re living. They make these decisions everyday about how they want to live their lives.”
For Staley, art is snow fallings on his wiry gray hair in the wintertime. Art is a dilapidated grain silo sitting on a farm. Art is a ceramic plate designed by an aspiring art student. Art is a spoon sitting next to a breakfast bowl on a kitchen table.
Staley takes these ordinary everyday objects and incorporates them into his artwork.
Architecture professor Scott Wing assisted in nominating Staley for the laureate position, now in its fifth year, because of his ability to bring the arts to so many people by speaking.
Wing said sometimes it’s difficult for artists to express what their art means and many choose to stand behind their pieces instead. But that’s not the case for Staley who can talk for days about the parallels between clay pots and the human body.
As the laureate, Staley is traveling the state to speak to Commonwealth Campuses. He’s also given presentations to Fulbright Scholars and to hundreds of students and community members jammed inside a packed auditorium at the Palmer Museum of Art.
Wing and his family even use some of the ceramic cups and bowls Staley created. Staley gave them to Wing as a gift. But before he did, he gave Wing one requirement – to use them everyday.
Though he’s no expert on ceramics or the fine arts, Wing still reflects on the gift from his colleague.
“It’s taking everyday things and finding connections that elevates everyday objects to something special,” Wing said.
The 58-year-old Staley’s passion for the arts is nothing new. Since he was a child, he was skilled in making things with his hands and drawing pictures.
The sight of a pottery wheel was all it took for Staley to fall in love with ceramics. Staley discovered pottery as a senior at Conestoga High School in Berwyn inside an art room where a student was throwing on a wheel.
“It just seemed like magic, and I just thought I want to learn that magic in some way and throw pots,” Staley said. “That was basically the beginning of a long relationship.”
Staley studied ceramics and other art styles at Wittenberg University, a small liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio. He later earned his Masters of Fine Arts in 1980 from Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y.
As an undergraduate, Staley wasn’t sure whether he wanted to earn a living as an artist or an athlete.
Growing up, he was an all-around athlete, playing football, lacrosse and rugby. He continued to play football in college. But, after injuries ended his playing days, Staley focused his efforts on becoming an artist.
To some, ceramics and athletics may seem like polar opposites. But to Staley, they go hand in hand. Staley still incorporates aspects of teamwork and athleticism into his art and teaching.
“There’s something about the physical virtuosity of working with clay and how skilled your hands are,” he said. “There’s some parallels between the athleticism you find in sports, so both really can be very physically engaging in some way.”
Staley is no stranger to physically engaging work.
To earn tuition money as a college student, Staley worked as a miner in the desert of Green River, Wyo. He descended underground everyday to mine. To save money, he camped in a tent for two summers where he experienced all that the desert’s large sky and flat and open plains had to offer.
“We were always taught how important it was to work,” Staley said of his decision to accept a gruesome summer job. “There was no free rides in my family.”
Staley’s family life was “close, but dysfunctional.” The oldest of two brothers and one sister, he watched his parents go through a divorce. And a stable family home was rare.
Before he reached the ninth grade, Staley’s family traveled nine times across from country from Boston, Mass., to Sacramento, Calif. His father worked in the Navy and then later for Procter and Gamble, jobs that required much travel.
“Every year to just pick up and move was just a lot, to always be adjusting,” he said.
Now, Staley has a job he loves and a stable home with his two daughters and wife in State College.
He’s no longer working in the emptiness of the earth for a paycheck. Now, he’s fulfilling his dream as a ceramicist and teacher who influences the lives of hundreds of students at Penn State.
But his recognition as a distinguished professor won’t change Staley, who will always be devoted to giving his students the best education possible. He frequently revamps his lesson plans and thinks of new ideas for each of his classes.
One of his goals for the future is to influence education. He believes students are integral teachers in the classroom. He often asks his own students how they can improve their own learning environment and what he can do to be a better instructor.
In the classroom, he listens intently to everything his students have to say. He sits at a round table with them, rather than lecturing from a podium. He takes notes about them inside a black leather bound book adorned with a picture of a gold Chinese statue and the words “Penn State students” penned in perfect calligraphy.
“Learning is at its best when students are actively participating in the process of teaching themselves and others,” he said.
Staley aspires to write a book and to include several chapters about ways education can be improved.
But, one lesson plan Staley hasn’t changed since he began teaching at Penn State is taking his students to the woods.
Every semester, Staley take his classes to a tiny patch of trees on campus. The only instruction he gives is that no one is allowed to speak on the walk. The lesson’s purpose is to introduce students to silent reflection, something he believes is almost unheard of in today’s technology-filled society.
Having watched the culture of college students change, he wishes students would learn to slow down. Too much time is wasted in front of televisions and computer screens, rather than in the outdoors or just reflecting on life, he said.
“You might as well live [life] with a lot of gusto and zest and be excited about the life you’re living,” Staley said. “Time is the most valuable thing we have in life. Life is a gift. It can be fragile.”
(This story was written for Comm 462 Feature Writing.)
