The Kids Are All Right

Until recently, two spindly metal scarecrows topped by horizontal pinwheels stood guard on either side of state Route 520 where it bridges the shallows of Portage Bay. Even on a sunny day, their aspect was melancholy. Even more melancholy for the few drivers who knew that their official name was "the Nellie Cornish Memorial Sculptures," but fitting in a way—a wan reflection of the dwindled heritage of the Seattle educational pioneer whose name they bore.

In 2003, the donor of the freeway-side doodads, perhaps realizing that they projected a weak image, had them replaced by larger and considerably uglier objects. Nellie Cornish's memory deserves better; even more so does the revivified institution she founded. Thirty years ago, the once visionary college had drifted toward becoming a facility, not a school; a collection of teachers' studios, not a conservatory. But slowly, almost under the radar, Cornish has come back from irrelevance and financial scrabbling to new life and liveliness. Cornish's Nov. 20 gala at the Sheraton Ballroom nominally celebrates the 75th anniversary of Martha Graham's first solo recital at Cornish, but alumni, patrons, and fans are also hoping the event will mark the return of Cornish to a potent, central role on the Northwest and national arts scene.

Cornish School began modestly enough as a music conservatory in 1914, but grew under the driving leadership of "Miss Nellie" until, by the mid-1930s, it had become a major nesting ground for America's nascent dance, music, and art avant-garde. In the latter '30s, the school became a hotbed of interarts collaboration—the 50-year personal and artistic association between composer-sage John Cage and dance pioneer Merce Cunningham began here. Always struggling financially, often on life support, Cornish School continued to play a role in the community, but after World War II, slowly came to face competition—for students, as the land-grant universities built their arts departments into virtual conservatories of their own; and for donor dollars, as local performing arts institutions grew from bush-league status to national visibility.

In the 1970s, Cornish struck back, reorganizing itself into a degree-granting college, but despite the change, the institution continued to gasp for air. What, precisely, was the advantage of attending Cornish when the University of Washington offered so much more and cost so much less? While "The Arts" were enjoying an unprecedented level of attendance and funding in Seattle, Miss Nellie's dignified stone fortress on Roy Street off Broadway became a backwater, with an underpaid, mostly part-time teaching staff and an administration that had lost sight of her vision of an institution where artists in all disciplines could not only learn in the same environment but also interact fruitfully with each other.

Cornish's big turnaround began just over 10 years ago when the board hired Sergei Tschernisch as president. Tschernisch began his professional life as an actor, studying with the impeccably avant-garde Actors Workshop in San Francisco, but he's spent most of his time since as an arts administrator, most often—as at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles' Loyola Marymount, and Boston's Northeastern University— in institution-building mode. He repeated the process in Seattle, spending his first half- decade building up and expanding programs and generating new sources of funding.

By the year 2000, enrollment and other statistics collected by national education- standards groups showed Cornish as flourishing educationally but suffering from severe overcrowding. Programs had sprawled out of the elegant but cramped old building on Roy Street to occupy an array of nearby houses, a large facility on the St. Mark's Cathedral campus to the north, and other rentals. It was becoming imperative to consolidate, both to save money and to reduce inconvenience for students and staff. But consolidate where, and how to pay for it?

The dot-com bust, which took the wind out of Seattle's economic sails, proved of paradoxical advantage for Cornish. "Sergei and the board had been looking into possibilities for a move long before I arrived on the scene," says Jane Ewing, vice president for Institutional Advancement. "They had ID'd a number of potential facilities, and when the dot-com bubble popped, a number of possibilities emerged which had not been possibilities before." One was the venerable Seattle Design Center building on Denny Way just off Westlake. Formerly filled with to-the-trade furniture and fabric dealers, it had filled up with aspiring software firms that withered in the economic chill as fast as they had sprouted. The board opted for a radical facilities reorganization, keeping only much-loved Kerry Hall on Capitol Hill and selling off all the rest of its property to developers to help finance the move downtown. In addition, the owner of the Design Center cut the price of the building, providing, in effect, an in-kind "lead gift" to kick off fund-raising for the move.

Founder Nellie Cornish (Cornish College of the Arts)

Ewing is a veteran fund-raiser in the Seattle area, and it wasn't easy to convince her to take on the job. Pratt Institute was beating the bushes for funds, and the prime tenants of McCaw Hall were having trouble raising their share of the $120 million cost of that building. Before making up her mind, says Provost Lois Harris, Ewing "spent literally an entire summer talking to Sergei and the faculty, learning about our academic mission, the students, and the community. I bought so many lunches for this woman. . . . " What led Ewing to say yes was the discovery that beneath the surface, "there was such a reservoir of good will for the institution, so many people with multigenerational connections to the school—not just alumni, but people outside the arts but with deep roots in the community." That fact put Ewing and her fund-raisers one big step ahead of the game. The board signed on to an ambitious $74 million capital campaign, and in September 2003, Cornish College of the Arts opened its downtown doors. Today the campaign is right on target, though half of the total remains to be raised. Promisingly, improvements in faculty pay and benefits were budgeted right in with facilities, as was endowment— during the campaign so far, $650,000 has been added, bringing the total endowment to $5 million.