Adjunct Spotlight: Pamela Wallace, Art
First published in January/February 2013 edition of The Bullhorn. The original publication can be found here.
From a young age, Art adjunct Pamela Wallace unconsciously followed her parents’ example of working with their hands, developing and honing her own interests in creating. “As a kid, I was always making projects, or painting, or fixing something.”
Her mother’s sewing enticed Pamela to take up lessons and make some of her own clothes. Her father, a technician in the Energy and Magnet labs at MIT, neither a scientist nor college-educated, built the mechanisms the scientists came up with. Pamela remembers standing on a milk crate in the basement with her dad, cutting out shapes on a bandsaw for a made up puzzle. “I was really just playing around, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was learning how to use all this stuff before I knew I was going to make art with it.”
As an undergraduate at Bard College, she started to work with a variety of materials and became a sculpture major, which greatly exercised her love of hands-on work and remains one of her strongest artistic skills. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Pamela worked as a waitress for many years, and then got a job with a carpenter. Moving between carpentry jobs, she developed woodworking skills, but realized “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I’m going to grad school to learn how to teach and buy some time to make artwork.”
While completing two Masters of Fine Arts degrees—in sculpture and in blacksmithing—at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, she taught undergraduate courses in sculpture and drawing. On the subject of blacksmithing, she strongly states that, despite her degree, she is not a blacksmith. “I use many of the techniques of a blacksmith to make my sculptural forms. My work is not functional, nor is it about iron per se, I borrow the methods of metalworking and apply them to my work as I need them.”
Drawing also developed from her graduate work, first to aid in sculpting, but now she says her drawings have become entities in themselves. Pamela works with a variety of materials such as plaster, paper, beeswax, plastic, wood, etc, “I like to experiment with different materials to figure out how they’re going to work.” Welding also finds its way into her work. Her diversity of skills allows her to teach a lot of different classes, which is why teaching at New Paltz works out so well for her. “Sometimes I teach in metals or in sculpture, but mostly I teach drawing or Art Seminar in the Foundations department. The variety of classes keeps teaching exciting and interesting for me.”
Interested in continuing teaching after receiving her Master’s degree, she started her adjunct position at New Paltz in 1999. Over the years, she has taught at a variety of colleges in the Mid-Hudson Valley area. In addition, she has filled in twice as a sabbatical replacement at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA.
Currently, she balances her two introductory studio art courses at New Paltz with a drawing course for The Bard Prison Initiative, a rigorous undergraduate program that offers inmates at maximum and medium security prisons in New York State a bachelor’s degree equivalent to a Bard College undergraduate degree. In the past, on top of her coursework, she often worked with her husband as a part-time carpenter, but “since I started teaching in The BPI program, I’m not doing carpentry at all.” Preparation for a solo exhibition of her artwork in early March at The John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY also puts carpentry on hold. “Sometimes I feel like I’m all over the map, but I like the balance between teaching and working with my hands, doing real physical things.” Building her own house with her husband is one example of her dedication to making things with her hands.
Low wages and job insecurity plague adjunct faculty at SUNY New Paltz. After more than a decade of instruction, Pamela’s employment situation is only slightly better than one of a recent part-time hire. She regularly receives the meager DSIs available to adjuncts, “and it helps my pay a little bit, but it’s not enough.” Despite the small benefit of the required 45 days notice before non-renewal, she can still be laid off or altered from yearly to semester contracts. “A couple of years ago, we got an official letter laying off all the adjuncts in the Art Department. Eventually, they hired most of us back because they need us, but there are a lot less of us than there used to be.”
While Pamela remains grateful for teaching two courses per semester, which guarantee her full health benefits, she knows if she were only given one course, she could not afford to keep the job she loves. “To drive an hour to teach one course for the pay I get, without the benefits… well, at that point, I’d probably have to quit and become a full-time carpenter. I stay as an adjunct because I love teaching, but even a part-time teacher should be treated with respect and paid well!”
Wallace also expresses the pressing need for adjuncts to have an office, hold office hours, and receive pay for their services. Students often converse with their instructors, but rather than shooting e-mails or squeezing time before or after classes, an office and advising hours would enrich those interested in the majors behind their GE courses. According to the Provost office, 42% of GE courses were taught by adjuncts in the Fall 2012 semester. “If the school relies on us to teach their students, they should also let us advise them in some way, or meet with them to talk about issues they have in class.” Earlier in her career, there used to be an office shared among twelve to fifteen Art and Theatre adjuncts. “At least it was a space. I didn’t mind that it was shared.” However, the office was moved far from the Art buildings and classrooms, so its usefulness was limited. Currently there is no office space that she knows of.
An office would reduce daily burdens for adjuncts. “Usually you’re teaching at strange times of the day, so you show up and try to find a parking spot, and you find one very far away. Not having an office means I need to carry all of my stuff, every single thing I need with me, from the car to the class and back. I don’t bring students’ homework home, because I’d have to carry it to the car, so I come early or stay late and grade their homework in the classroom when no one else is using it.”
Understandably, adjuncts hardly stay on campus after class, and Wallace admits to having little knowledge of on-campus events. “There are few services I use at SUNY, so I teach my class and go.” Since she has little time to make many meetings, nor is she required to do so, she makes time to communicate with faculty within and outside her department during her available time on campus. “I wouldn’t mind being more involved. It’s hard when you have to go to another job. I think a lot of adjuncts wouldn’t mind being more involved on campus and in the department. If it was part of my job description, I would gladly attend meetings.”
Despite her varied work and limited time on-campus, she contributes as much as she can to UUP. She enjoyed volunteering last year for Campus Equity Week, collecting signatures on the Petition for Educational Quality, Fairness & Equity, and attending the union’s occasional contingent gatherings. “I am appreciative of what the union has already done for adjuncts, such as health benefits and DSI.”
Pamela Wallace knows many adjuncts would prefer full-time work, and some do get hired as lecturers. However, being a lecturer is difficult. “I cannot imagine teaching five courses a semester – or four with a course release to do advising. In the Art Department one course meets for six hours a week; that alone would amount to thirty contact hours excluding prep and grading. I probably put in another six or eight hours a week outside of class for two courses. The time spent would be unbelievable! Lecturers work so much; I have a lot of respect for them. However, it does seem like the system is making them work incredibly hard, and that it’s very different from a tenure-track teaching job.”
After graduate school, Pamela applied for several full-time teaching positions, but realized she preferred teaching part-time. Her love of teaching combined with her interest in making art has proved to be a good combination for her. Accompanying this article are a few examples of Pamela’s plethora of artwork.
Her mother’s sewing enticed Pamela to take up lessons and make some of her own clothes. Her father, a technician in the Energy and Magnet labs at MIT, neither a scientist nor college-educated, built the mechanisms the scientists came up with. Pamela remembers standing on a milk crate in the basement with her dad, cutting out shapes on a bandsaw for a made up puzzle. “I was really just playing around, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was learning how to use all this stuff before I knew I was going to make art with it.”
As an undergraduate at Bard College, she started to work with a variety of materials and became a sculpture major, which greatly exercised her love of hands-on work and remains one of her strongest artistic skills. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Pamela worked as a waitress for many years, and then got a job with a carpenter. Moving between carpentry jobs, she developed woodworking skills, but realized “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I’m going to grad school to learn how to teach and buy some time to make artwork.”
While completing two Masters of Fine Arts degrees—in sculpture and in blacksmithing—at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, she taught undergraduate courses in sculpture and drawing. On the subject of blacksmithing, she strongly states that, despite her degree, she is not a blacksmith. “I use many of the techniques of a blacksmith to make my sculptural forms. My work is not functional, nor is it about iron per se, I borrow the methods of metalworking and apply them to my work as I need them.”
Drawing also developed from her graduate work, first to aid in sculpting, but now she says her drawings have become entities in themselves. Pamela works with a variety of materials such as plaster, paper, beeswax, plastic, wood, etc, “I like to experiment with different materials to figure out how they’re going to work.” Welding also finds its way into her work. Her diversity of skills allows her to teach a lot of different classes, which is why teaching at New Paltz works out so well for her. “Sometimes I teach in metals or in sculpture, but mostly I teach drawing or Art Seminar in the Foundations department. The variety of classes keeps teaching exciting and interesting for me.”
Interested in continuing teaching after receiving her Master’s degree, she started her adjunct position at New Paltz in 1999. Over the years, she has taught at a variety of colleges in the Mid-Hudson Valley area. In addition, she has filled in twice as a sabbatical replacement at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA.
Currently, she balances her two introductory studio art courses at New Paltz with a drawing course for The Bard Prison Initiative, a rigorous undergraduate program that offers inmates at maximum and medium security prisons in New York State a bachelor’s degree equivalent to a Bard College undergraduate degree. In the past, on top of her coursework, she often worked with her husband as a part-time carpenter, but “since I started teaching in The BPI program, I’m not doing carpentry at all.” Preparation for a solo exhibition of her artwork in early March at The John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY also puts carpentry on hold. “Sometimes I feel like I’m all over the map, but I like the balance between teaching and working with my hands, doing real physical things.” Building her own house with her husband is one example of her dedication to making things with her hands.
Low wages and job insecurity plague adjunct faculty at SUNY New Paltz. After more than a decade of instruction, Pamela’s employment situation is only slightly better than one of a recent part-time hire. She regularly receives the meager DSIs available to adjuncts, “and it helps my pay a little bit, but it’s not enough.” Despite the small benefit of the required 45 days notice before non-renewal, she can still be laid off or altered from yearly to semester contracts. “A couple of years ago, we got an official letter laying off all the adjuncts in the Art Department. Eventually, they hired most of us back because they need us, but there are a lot less of us than there used to be.”
While Pamela remains grateful for teaching two courses per semester, which guarantee her full health benefits, she knows if she were only given one course, she could not afford to keep the job she loves. “To drive an hour to teach one course for the pay I get, without the benefits… well, at that point, I’d probably have to quit and become a full-time carpenter. I stay as an adjunct because I love teaching, but even a part-time teacher should be treated with respect and paid well!”
Wallace also expresses the pressing need for adjuncts to have an office, hold office hours, and receive pay for their services. Students often converse with their instructors, but rather than shooting e-mails or squeezing time before or after classes, an office and advising hours would enrich those interested in the majors behind their GE courses. According to the Provost office, 42% of GE courses were taught by adjuncts in the Fall 2012 semester. “If the school relies on us to teach their students, they should also let us advise them in some way, or meet with them to talk about issues they have in class.” Earlier in her career, there used to be an office shared among twelve to fifteen Art and Theatre adjuncts. “At least it was a space. I didn’t mind that it was shared.” However, the office was moved far from the Art buildings and classrooms, so its usefulness was limited. Currently there is no office space that she knows of.
An office would reduce daily burdens for adjuncts. “Usually you’re teaching at strange times of the day, so you show up and try to find a parking spot, and you find one very far away. Not having an office means I need to carry all of my stuff, every single thing I need with me, from the car to the class and back. I don’t bring students’ homework home, because I’d have to carry it to the car, so I come early or stay late and grade their homework in the classroom when no one else is using it.”
Understandably, adjuncts hardly stay on campus after class, and Wallace admits to having little knowledge of on-campus events. “There are few services I use at SUNY, so I teach my class and go.” Since she has little time to make many meetings, nor is she required to do so, she makes time to communicate with faculty within and outside her department during her available time on campus. “I wouldn’t mind being more involved. It’s hard when you have to go to another job. I think a lot of adjuncts wouldn’t mind being more involved on campus and in the department. If it was part of my job description, I would gladly attend meetings.”
Despite her varied work and limited time on-campus, she contributes as much as she can to UUP. She enjoyed volunteering last year for Campus Equity Week, collecting signatures on the Petition for Educational Quality, Fairness & Equity, and attending the union’s occasional contingent gatherings. “I am appreciative of what the union has already done for adjuncts, such as health benefits and DSI.”
Pamela Wallace knows many adjuncts would prefer full-time work, and some do get hired as lecturers. However, being a lecturer is difficult. “I cannot imagine teaching five courses a semester – or four with a course release to do advising. In the Art Department one course meets for six hours a week; that alone would amount to thirty contact hours excluding prep and grading. I probably put in another six or eight hours a week outside of class for two courses. The time spent would be unbelievable! Lecturers work so much; I have a lot of respect for them. However, it does seem like the system is making them work incredibly hard, and that it’s very different from a tenure-track teaching job.”
After graduate school, Pamela applied for several full-time teaching positions, but realized she preferred teaching part-time. Her love of teaching combined with her interest in making art has proved to be a good combination for her. Accompanying this article are a few examples of Pamela’s plethora of artwork.
