October 30, 2008
From academic to artist: Richey retires to new career
When the Women Painters of Washington’s Waters Alive! show opens Nov. 4 at Seattle’s Columbia Center, retired UW professor Cheryl Richey’s work will be part of it.
Richey was on the faculty for 30 years, so it’s not surprising that a percentage of anything she makes on her paintings will be donated to the arboretum, part of the UW Botanic Gardens, and two other environmental organizations. But what is surprising is that Richey is not retired from the School of Art. It was the School of Social Work that she served — from her arrival here fresh from graduate school in 1973 to her retirement in 2003.
Those were good years, Richey says. She loved social work and flourished in her faculty role. “I think of myself as a do-gooder in the best sense of the word,” she says.
And she wasn’t a weekend artist during that time. Her attention was focused on what she calls a nice combination of teaching, research and community involvement. The art didn’t come until much later.
Richey’s journey began in the Bay Area in the late 60s and early 70s, during the ferment of the civil rights, anti-war and feminist movements. She took art classes at San Francisco State University, but she says when she was formulating her career goals she wanted to pursue a field that would allow her to “make a difference in the world.”
So she went on to the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, where she earned her master’s and doctorate, focusing on women and assertiveness for her dissertation.
“I was recruited to the UW to teach in the master’s program,” Richey says. “I taught direct practice or counseling skills, social work theory and research. I also did a lot of community work. I helped to found the Women’s Institute of the Northwest, which was a community-based grassroots organization to provide counseling, outreach and advocacy services for women in the U District. I conducted groups for women around assertiveness skills and so on. The institute was a place where a lot of innovation took place in services for women who were vulnerable.”
So the years passed, and all was well until Richey took her third sabbatical in the 1999-2000 school year. She had been feeling a vague discontent, a lessening investment in her work for a while before then, and in the summer of 1999 she decided to sign up for an art course at Coupeville Art Center. It was called Experimental Drawing and Painting.
“It was supposed to be about how to tap into your creativity and break your mindset,” Richey says. “There was something about the description that just resonated with me. I felt scared about it, but I thought, I want and need to take this.”
The class proved to be an important one for Richey. The turning point was when the class was asked to do two charcoal drawings — one with their eyes open, the other with a blindfold on. And when the drawings were hung, Richey was astounded to see that the one she had done while blindfolded was better. “It was much stronger and more cohesive, more interesting. It made a statement,” she says. “So I thought, I want to learn more about this.”
But meanwhile, she had an academic plan for her sabbatical that she needed to follow through on. She wanted, she says, to explore the nexus between the literatures of feminism, behaviorism and multiculturalism. She had read in all three areas, saw the overlap and wanted to make a contribution to all three fields by bringing them together. She planned to be a visiting scholar at Berkeley beginning in January, 2000, where she would do further research and work with her mentor.
Before heading to California, Richey spent some time in a cottage in Maine owned by her relatives, where she planned to do a lot of reading. But as she began, she found herself thinking, “I don’t have an interest in pursuing this anymore. I want to divest, and this whole plan is to reinvest and my heart is not in it.” She called her mentor at Berkeley and told her she was bowing out.
“So I closed the door at that moment, and I started painting every day,” Richey recalls. “It was not easy and I didn’t want to disappoint people who had invested in me and who I owe so much to. But I was different. I couldn’t go back.”
Of course, permanent change couldn’t be accomplished quite that fast. Richey returned to teach in the fall of 2000, but she also continued to paint — sending images to her teacher for feedback. Finally, she bolstered her courage and invited some faculty and staff she knew well into her office to show them the portfolio of her work that she’d created.
“I can remember feeling so vulnerable, shy and nervous about it because it was a hidden and private part of myself,” she says. “But uniformly, the reactions were extremely positive.”
By the spring of 2002, Richey had announced her intention to retire. She taught 40 percent time for a year and a half before hanging it up completely in January of 2005. She made her retirement party an art opening as she ran a PowerPoint display of her work.
Since then, Richey has continued to paint, and has exhibited her work in a number of galleries and juried shows. She says she has written haiku poetry for years and that many of her paintings “are like haiku in that they strive to capture and communicate simple but fundamental truths.” You can see examples on her Web site, www.cherylrichey.com.
The Waters Alive! show isn’t the first time she has donated some of her proceeds to the UW. In her first solo exhibit, at the University Unitarian Church, she donated a percentage of her commission to the School of Social Work Student Scholarship Fund. She also donated a painting to the National Association of Social Work for their fundraising auction. She says she isn’t painting primarily to earn money and that she loves being able to use her art to help worthy causes.
It’s all part of the joy she finds in her second career. “My joke as an academic,” Richey says, “was that I had a 30-year shelf life, and I needed to get out before my expiration date. And I did. I got there in 1973 and my last day was December 2004.”
The Waters Alive! exhibit, a partnership between the Women Painters of Washington (www.womenpainters.com) and the City of Seattle’s Restore Our Waters Initiative, will be at the Women Painters of Washington Gallery in the Columbia Center (suite 310) through Jan. 30. The opening reception is 2-4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12. Admission is free.
