Meet the Penn State deans: B. Stephen Carpenter II talks art, new Palmer — and homemade crossbow

As part of a collaborative effort with Penn State, which is releasing a monthly video on school deans and their perspectives and passions, the Centre Daily Times is continuing a lighthearted Q&A series that highlights a different dean every month in the hopes the local community gets to know them outside of the classroom.

Up next: B. Stephen Carpenter II, Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean of the College of Arts and Architecture.

Carpenter, who earned both his master’s and doctorate from Penn State, returned to Happy Valley as a professor in 2011 after tenure-track stints at Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth and Old Dominion. He became dean at the start of 2020, following a national search.

On top of being dean, and a professor of Art Education and African American Studies, he is also co-director of the Summer Institute on Contemporary Art (SICA) and chief executive artist for Reservoir Studio. In 2017-18, He spent a sabbatical as the Ida Ely Rubin Artist-in-Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology — and he’s been responsible for several books, more than three dozen journal articles, numerous national and international presentations, and contributions at more than two dozen art exhibitions.

Centre Daily Times: In your video with Penn State, you talked about how you grew up making things out of the leftover materials your dad used for home repairs. How did that help lay the groundwork for your current career, and what’s the most memorable piece you created back when you were a kid?

B. Stephen Carpenter II: Growing up, we had these (Action Jackson and superhero) action figures — my brothers and I — so we’d have the clothes that would come with them. But that’s limited, right? So if we wanted other clothes, my mom taught us how to sew. We made patterns for these little guys, and we sewed clothes for them out of fabric or old clothes that we had. It lays the groundwork in that you can be resourceful, you can be creative and, if you don’t have something, you can find it or make it. And then in the process of making something, you can make it your own. You can modify it to the specific needs or desires that you have. Certain limitations are there; you only have a certain amount of fabric — or you only have a certain amount of your dad’s copper piping. But the idea is that you can modify it.

So as dean, I mean, we’re sitting in a budget situation within the university and you have to be resourceful. ... So we hear “resourceful” all the time, but I’ve kind of done that as an artist or as a kid. So it translates that way. You know, “We need a course to fulfill these requirements.” Or we have space needs, or any number of administrative issues. There are typical, conventional ways or there are other ways we might make it fit to what we need. And, in doing so, we’re able to exercise the pursuit of the goals of the college or the mission of the college rather than those being dictated to us.

And I actually consulted my team of experts — my brothers last night, actually — about those (memorable pieces as a kid). My dad used to play golf, and he had a bag of golf balls and golf clubs. We couldn’t use the golf clubs. So we made a whole set of golf clubs out of copper tubing and crown molding and nails and duct tape, electrical tape. So I made a whole set. And one of my brothers made the most memorable. He made a working crossbow and a suit of plate-mail armor — and a helmet with a working visor that moves. ... He made the armor with like three layers of thick cardboard, put it on our younger brother to not only make sure the crossbow worked but to make sure the armor would protect a human. So he shot my brother with a crossbow.

I still have all my brothers. So, yeah, it worked. It stopped the arrow, and we’re all alive here to tell about it.

CDT: I’ve got to admit, I did not anticipate hearing “crossbow” as an answer when I asked that question. But I like the start of this Q&A. Let me shift gears here a little bit to get at your background in art education since we like to mix it up. If cost and time weren’t issues and you could take first-year Penn State students to any art museum in the world for one day — besides Penn State’s own Palmer Museum of Art — where are you taking them and why?

Carpenter: Yeah, so this could be among the hardest questions ever in the history of the world. ... I can think of places in other countries — Bardo National Museum in Tunisia — would be one. Or there’s any number of large museums that you might hear of around the world that could be interesting and useful. But the place that I would take them would be MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Essentially, what they did was they took about a dozen large paper mills, brick paper mills that are 3-4 stories tall that had been abandoned. So it turns into this Rust Belt kind of situation, this economic decline. And a few folks said, “What can we do to revitalize North Adams and use these buildings? Here’s a crazy idea: What if we turned it into the largest contemporary art center ever, at least in the country?” So there are contemporary art exhibitions. There’s music. There’s performance — it’s an incredible performing art space. ...

Imagine a work of art in which you have maybe half a dozen maple trees hanging about 30 feet in the air but they’re hanging upside down and, over the course of time, those trees start to bend up toward the light. That was a work that was installed there. That artist’s name is Natalie Jeremijenko.

That place has rotating exhibitions of the most amazing contemporary art you can think of, plus contemporary music and experimental artists, musicians, dancers, poets — it’s a vibrant, amazing place. I would take every first-year student there in a heartbeat.

CDT: I’d like to take a step further into you personally when it comes to visual art. So if you could take any two pieces of art from anywhere in the world — with the caveat you could never sell them — and you could put one in your living room and one in Palmer, what two pieces would you pick?

Carpenter: So, if I were to choose a work for the Palmer — of course I’d have to go to the Collections Committee; they’d have to approve because, just being dean, I can’t wave my hand and say, “You have to take it” — but I’d take anything by Kara Walker. Or Nick Cave; any of his “Soundsuits” would be amazing. Or Do Ho Suh creates these incredible — I mean, he does a whole range of works — but some of his works have been these fabric recreations of places, homes, or a fabric recreation of a staircase to scale. So think of the Old Main staircase, imagine if that was made out of fabric that was shear and then it was just installed in a big gallery.

So, of those, maybe a Nick Cave Soundsuit would be amazing for my house or a Do Ho Suh fabric work for my house. Or a Kara Walker. So I’d choose one of those for my house. But, for the Palmer, I’d really like to see a work of performance art. ...

Anything by Tania Bruguera or Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Joseph Beuys couldn’t continue to perform. But anyway, a work of performance art that could be on permanent display at the Palmer would be fabulous, right? So a work by any of them would be brilliant. But I would choose a Guillermo Gómez-Peña performance artwork.

What people could expect? All right. ... So he created a work of performance art — there were multiple people involved — called the “Temple of Confessions.” So he essentially created this set of altars where you would approach, kneel down as if you were going to confess your sins and then confess your sins about racism, oppression, xenophobia that you have committed or that people have committed against you. And you confess them to various saints ... that were members of his performance group, personifying them by wearing a range of clothing or articles. ... So he would sit here in these large plexiglass boxes and listen to the confessions of people. And so it turns the gallery into this confessional.

CDT: We can’t go this entire interview without once bringing up the new Palmer Museum of Art, which is slated to open to the public in spring 2024. What are you most looking forward to when it comes to Penn State’s new museum at the Arboretum?

Carpenter: I guess there’s two things, aside from it being finished. One is the current museum uptake. Most museums can’t show all the work that they have in their collections. You think about an iceberg; most of the iceberg is submerged underwater. In a museum, the standard, typically is 8-10% of its collection is in an exhibition at any time. So most of it is in storage. At the current Palmer, we’re only able to exhibit 4-5%. So the new Palmer will double that and get us within that realm of the industry standard, which is thrilling. It’s thrilling. So we’re going to be able to see more of the Palmer works, more of the Palmer collection.

So I’m looking forward to that. The other thing I’m looking forward to — and I didn’t know that I would really be looking forward to this as much until I went on my most recent hardhat tour of the new museum. The way it’s set up is that you can be in one of a number of galleries. But imagine you’re in one of the galleries and you’re looking at works of art, and you can also look through as a part of the opening and one of the walls to another gallery with other works of art. So now I’m looking at two different time periods, two different exhibitions, two different collections of work, right? So I’m automatically making this critique and then there’s a window into the Arboretum.

So now I’m making this three-way critique of these two works of art and in this natural environment. So, if I’m looking at landscapes, I have an 18th century landscape, 20th century landscapes and a 2024 landscape. .... I am so eager to just spend as long as possible in that space trying to take in that relationship. It’s stunning. That is going to be stunning.

CDT: That was a good answer, so I’m hoping you’ll take this next often-asked question and make the answer unique: If you could invite any three visual artists, dead or alive, to a dinner party, who would they be — and why?

Carpenter: OK, this is really hard. They’ve all been hard, right? OK, so three dead or alive. ... One is Dr. John Biggers. John Biggers was a student here in the ‘40s. He created a number of works; he did his master’s and Ph.D. work here. He started the art department at Texas Southern University. He was an amazing muralist in the latter parts of his career. There’s more to say, but more to his story: I got to meet him twice, a few years before he passed away. I always thought I was going to meet him one more time, and I didn’t. I interviewed him when I was a grad student, went down to the HUB and called him on a payphone ... and he couldn’t have been more gracious. I met him here as a grad student when he came up to visit for an event and then years later when I was a professor in Virginia, he was having an exhibition at another campus and I met him. And he remembered me. It was great. So I’d like to have that one more conversation with Dr. Biggers.

The second would be Dave the Potter — we’ve since learned what his last name was, Drake — but Dave the Potter was a Black slave in the South of the United States. His job was to make pots. But what he did was he wrote words on the outside of his pots when slaves weren’t signing things. When slaves weren’t supposed to read or allowed to read, but he did. He would write words or phrases or references out of the Bible or other texts on his pots. And I’d like to have a chat with him, mostly in part because of my ceramics background but also ... to have a chat with him or anyone who had to live through that time period and in the ways he had to live through. I would probably listen the whole conversation. He would be an amazing dinner guest.

The other, I was torn between myself at 5 (years old). That’s a different person; I was a little kid. But instead of that little kid at a dinner party, (performance artist) Marina Abramović. I just found her work to be conceptually provocative, intellectually provocative, visually provocative. For many years, she performed with her partner but worked after as a solo artist. She just really pushes edges, concepts of being human — existential considerations, borders of lived experiences and artistic experiences, relationships between the artists or artwork or viewers.

You may recall this work she was well-publicized for a few years ago, in New York. She’s sitting in this gallery at this table. And there’s a chair on this side and a chair on this side, and she’s wearing this long amazing red dress. As she sits in this chair, she looks up with one of the viewers sitting there in silence and when she’s finished with that moment, she looks away. The person leaves, the next person sits down. And she looks up in that moment. She did that for hours and hours, for days and days, connecting with different people. That was the work of art. Holy moly, right? ... I’d love to have coffee with her and chat. So John Biggers, Dave the Potter and and Marina Abramović, those are my three dinner guests.