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Corporate America

From wooing Sony to Pixar, Larry Thompson is angling to place Ringling’s art school graduates into high-paying jobs
in high-profile places.

By JAMES THORNER
Published October 7, 2006

If Larry Thompson needed a reminder that artists and designers aren’t condemned to starvation wages, it arrived last spring with corporate recruiters who flocked to the Ringling School of Art and Design.

Scouts from such companies as video game designer Electronic Arts and big-screen animator Sony Imageworks wooed top students with $60,000-plus entry-level salaries.

When Thompson, the Ringling president, returned to his office, the phone rang. Professors wanted to discuss raises in light of what those 22-year-olds were securing straight out of college.

“I had a faculty revolt on my hands,” Thompson says with a laugh. “I got a call from the head of the department who said, 'Do you see what these kids are making? It’s time for us to talk.’ I reminded him of the joys of teaching.”

High starting salaries are a sweet problem to have as Thompson, 58, attempts to raise the profile of the 75-year-old arts college that circus millionaire John Ringling founded in his adopted hometown of Sarasota.

The four-year school has established a reputation for funneling talent to the film and video game industry. Wowed by the computerized armies and castles in the Lord of the Rings movies? They were created with the help of seven Ringling graduates. Ditto for such blockbusters as Spider-Man 2 and Shrek.

But Thompson sees a larger role for his school. He accepts the theory that the past belonged to knowledge workers, the engineers and computer programmers who ushered in the information age. But the future belongs to creative workers, the right-brain thinkers whose art will dress up otherwise interchangeable commodities in the high-tech marketplace.

The iPod isn’t just a portable music player. It’s a stylish fixture that appeals to a buyer’s aesthetics. Same with Starbucks, which Thompson insists sells lifestyle more than coffee. Cars aren’t just motors, but moving sculpture.
“Art and design have just been over here in left field when they really need to be in center field along with technology,” Thompson says. “You have to take that image you have of artists and go throw it away.”

The Ringling school spent decades saddled with a mom-and-pop reputation, a modestly endowed arts academy where free-spirited students painted sunsets on Sarasota beaches.

Thompson is the school’s sixth president since 1931. As if to reassure parents the $22,000-a-year tuition isn’t Bohemian frivolousness, Ringling focuses heavily on job preparation and placement. Thompson views his mission as getting young artists “cleaned up and showered” to greet the world.

Ringling was cited in the Oct. 9 issue of Business Week magazine in a list of the nation’s “best design schools for creative talent.”

After years of supplying illustrators to the likes of Hallmark, Ringling opened a new job pipeline in the early 1990s with a computer animation program. A new hot major, video game design, arrived this year. Other mainstays are fine arts, photography, interior design and graphic communication.

“Ringling is the key school where we find most of our artistic talent,” said Jack Lew

of Electronic Arts, whose Orlando office designs sports video games like Madden ’07 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. “They’re well known in California. All of the film studios converge on the campus.”

Lew’s company has hired 35 Ringling grads in the past two years. Similar numbers are drawn to companies like Pixar, DreamWorks and Sony. What Lew likes best about Ringling students is that they’re true artists and disciplined workers who know their way around a computer screen.

Sony has gone further and collaborates with Ringling professors about curriculum.

“We’re not looking to turn them into a trade school or a direct feeder for us,’’ Sony’s Barry Weiss says. “But we want the kids to be reasonably successful, to succeed at a major studio.’’

Freshmen cram in a core curriculum of painting and drawing, what Thompson calls “art boot camp.” Students dip deeper into technology as they advance. The 1,100 students can tap 800 computers, including 30-inch screens on which animators apply color to tiny polygons that make up their characters.

“We want our students to be artists first and foremost, no matter what they do,” Thompson says.
Thompson seems well equipped to bridge the artistic and business worlds. The president calls himself a typical “left-brain guy” who majored in math and got a law degree. He once ran the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Ringling hopes to raise its profile by hosting the Sarasota International Design Summit from Monday to Wednesday at the Ritz-Carlton. Designers from such corporate leaders as Procter & Gamble, BMW and Target Corp. will laud the importance of arts to industry. It’s that sort of cross-fertilization Thompson assumes will soon dominate business.

As Thompson tours Ringling’s campus — 80 buildings spread over 35 acres of city block north of downtown — he pokes his head in to observe students: Pen-and-ink artists sketching fish, oil painters at work in a pigment-splattered studio, animators fleshing out creations.

But even a president can’t roam unrestricted. An attempt to enter one studio is blocked with waving hands. Thompson instantly grasps the situation: Nude model at work.

Ringling may be increasingly corporate minded, but some things never change.

James Thorner can be reached at thorner@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3313.

[Last modified October 7, 2006, 17:37:34]