In 1972, Garry Neill Kennedy, then president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, wrote a short text for a themed issue of Studio International focused on “aspects of art education.” Kennedy’s one-page description of NSCAD is a dense block of type that lists, among other things, basic physical and historical facts about the college and Canada; the names of the college’s students, faculty, staff, visiting artists, and administrators; and details of its finances as well as exhibition and publishing programs. He includes a range of playful data points: the total weight of the student body is listed as 5.9 tons compared to the faculty’s 3.4 tons, and eight Scorpios served on the faculty that year. Rather than offer a straightforward presentation of educational philosophy, Kennedy felt that, “The College was on a distinctive and unique course and [he] wanted to do something to demonstrate that—something that would stand out from the crowd.” Kennedy’s article-cum-art piece, titled Page 141, is reproduced in The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978 (this time on page 180), and it remains entirely relevant to his concerns; in fact, the book functions as an extension of the impulse fueling the Studio International text. In The Last Art College, the original one-page list has morphed into a thoroughly annotated and illustrated chronology of artists’ lectures, exhibitions, performances, print editions, and publications, all crucial facets of the successful artistic and pedagogical program that occurred at NSCAD in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. The day-to-day in Halifax during these years, as this book makes plain, was one where the interests of visiting artists and faculty fully overlapped with those of its students, and the varied encounters and interactions between them were of paramount importance to the college community.

Like the Bauhaus or Black Mountain College before it, NSCAD’s experimental environment not only accommodated but encouraged some of the most advanced art of its time. Many visiting artists associated with the college, including Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Michael Snow, were trailblazing figures in the late 1960s and 1970s, though their reputations had not yet been firmly established. Most of the countless visiting artists made, exhibited, and critiqued conceptually inflected work; and The Last Art College chronicles an atmosphere of overwhelmingly conceptualist experiment in many ways analogous to the better known pedagogical developments happening concurrently at CalArts (institutional overlaps between these two schools are detailed on pages 136–37). In bringing a range of visitors to campus, Kennedy’s educational goal was clear: “We began with the simple notion that the college should facilitate and build upon encounters between students and the most interesting artists possible, whether they were permanent faculty members or visitors. The ideas would come first and the structure would follow. With a firm commitment to ideas that mattered, standards, assessments, courses, programs, and timetables would evolve naturally. Nobody was worried in those days about what the college would look like on paper. The 1960s permitted a spirit of trial and error, and for the most part errors were soon forgotten in the rush to move on to something more exciting. If an idea made sense, we had the freedom to give it a try” (xv).

Such license to explore the symbiosis between artistic and pedagogical strategies led to, in one famous example, David Askevold’s “Projects” class, begun in 1969. Askevold, who was hired by Kennedy in 1968, solicited project ideas from a range of artists (his initial list was based on suggestions made by Lawrence Weiner) that were carried out in collaboration with the class each term. These were not simply assignments, but pieces in their own right, and artists would often visit NSCAD to discuss the students’ work, or at the very least communicate with them via phone, letter, fax, or telegram. As Askevold explained, “The artist was the author, the students could be considered apprentices, and my role was to monitor the process” (13). As monitor, he facilitated a series of exercises that usually operated simultaneously as artwork and coursework. Weiner’s own project, submitted in the fall of 1969, reads: “REMOVALS HALFWAY BETWEEN THE EQUATOR AND THE NORTH POLE / The extent of and documentation (if any) of the removals is completely in the domain of the students. / Lawrence Weiner” (13). The same semester, Douglas Huebler asked the class, as a group, to create a myth. In response, students created a fictional art school called the Haliburton, complete with advertisements in Artforum (35). The various projects submitted for execution—some more doable within the confines of the classroom than others—encouraged students to create and/or document variable works using language, performance, photography, and existing systems of distribution like magazines and newspapers. Through the very form of the assignment, these projects exposed students to the essential strategies of conceptualism as the artists themselves were developing them.

The “Projects” course was just one of the ways that NSCAD exposed students to current trends in the arts, and The Last Art College presents it and many other instances in some detail. Much like Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), the history of NSCAD is told through an essentially archival presentation of information, a structure reinforced by the nature of the texts and by the book’s clean overall design. Kennedy has inserted a variety of short writings into a chronology first compiled in 1979 by NSCAD graduate David MacWilliam (class of 1976) from the college’s daily events calendar, the Now Bulletin. Recurrent throughout The Last Art College are many similarly brief pieces detailing the wide range of artists who showed work at NSCAD; summaries of numerous artists talks (by Lee Lozano, Daniel Buren, Carl Andre, and Lippard, to name a few) by Peggy Gale; Christine Lalonde’s short texts on individual prints produced at the NSCAD lithography shop; and descriptions of books published by the college’s press, as well as a historical essay on publishing at NSCAD written by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who directed the press following the departure of its first director, Kasper Koenig. All of these writings—which range in length from a few sentences to a few pages—and the works, performances, ephemera, and visits they comment upon are held together by a timeline that anchors nearly every spread of the book. This calendar discretely manages the shifts in voice that occur throughout the volume and highlights the temporal arc conjoining those who contributed to this varied commentary. As opposed to dominating the page, this schedule of events guides the reader forward through the book’s design, reinforcing the bulletin format of the text’s skeleton.

And it is a dizzying amount of material. While some of the text is republished or repurposed from pre-existing sources, many of the more recent recollections and the wealth of ephemera and documentation that form the bulk of The Last Art College are published here for the first time. The experience of reading it is akin to leafing through the yearbook of a friend who attended a prestigious university—fascinating, though impossible to read cover to cover. Certain events and works (like John Baldessari’s dictum, “I will not make any more boring art,” which was written on the walls of the Mezzanine over 4,000 times by NSCAD students and faculty and also made into a lithograph, printed by Kennedy) may be familiar, if perhaps not immediately associated with NSCAD. Many, however, will require additional context and historical information, and the accompanying short passages can be read as either complete explanations or prompts for further research. While there are too many individual events and micro-arguments to summarize here, the broader thesis underlying a document of the size and scope of The Last Art College is relatively straightforward: the faculty, students, staff, and visitors at NSCAD developed an instructional environment that allowed contemporary art practice to guide the educational experience without preconceptions.

Just as The Last Art College offers a window into the dynamic system of experiment and education in Halifax—where, for example, as budgets and personnel changed over time the institution shifted its emphasis from the in-house lithography shop to NSCAD Press—the text also highlights a fragile synergy of people and place that can only be approximated through documentation. Video artist Les Levine, in a text from 1973 used as an afterword to The Last Art College, was particularly aware of the fleeting nature of NSCAD’s milieu: “Usually innovative art schools discover that the necessity of survival gradually upstages the students’ and faculty’s needs. Brilliant teaching—or more properly learning—situations of this nature tend to be limited to a few years” (421). NSCAD, currently celebrating its 125th anniversary, is facing budget deficits requiring increased student fees and staffing cuts for the coming academic year. Given the current context, the publication of The Last Art College feels particularly dramatic. While Kennedy’s text does not point to a specific way forward, hopefully the experimental emphasis it so thoroughly records will give rise to new scholarship on the artists and teachers who passed through Halifax and inspire new approaches to the educational endeavor taken so seriously there.