You may have wondered about that gorgeous, ivy-covered building at the corner of Prince Street and University Avenue called the Visual Studies Workshop. You may have a vague notion that it houses a school and a gallery. But chances are that you have no idea about the multitude of activities that take place under its roof. The Workshop is a combination of prestigious academic institution (the building is covered in ivy, after all) and youthful, multitasking energy. Its leadership has spent the past four decades balancing on the knife's edge between remaining small enough to focus on students' individual paths, yet large enough to attract great artistic thinkers, and survive when other small artist spaces have not.

Visual Studies Workshop isn't your average art school. The internationally recognized center for media studies offers graduate-level coursework that incorporates history, theory, and criticism for students of photography, book arts, film, video, and digital media. In addition to semester-long evening classes for its 16 full-time students, VSW offers summer workshops, weekend workshops, and holds lectures and screenings open to the public.

This week the VSW celebrates its 40th anniversary with a public auction of art by internationally and locally recognized art luminaries, VSW alumni, and current students. The Workshop's current director, Tate Shaw, and its founder, Nathan Lyons, took the opportunity to look back at the Workshop's journey from humble beginnings to its present state as an established, respected institution that still has the vibe of a space taken over by the avant-garde cool kids.

VSW founder Nathan Lyons was born in New York City and attended Alfred University before coming to Rochester in 1957, where he began a 13-year career at the George Eastman House. Lyons served as associate director and curator of photography from 1961 to 1969, and was responsible for the exhibition catalogs and books publishing program. He had been a practicing photographer since the late 1940's, and over his career has produced books of his photos, including "Riding 1st Class on the Titanic!", a retrospective of his work from 1974 to the present. Lyons remains active in the art world, having curated the multi-faceted John Wood exhibit that showed simultaneously at the Eastman House, VSW, and the Memorial Art Gallery last year.

Lyons parted ways with the Eastman House in 1969, and that year founded Visual Studies Workshop using his $450 severance pay, funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as some support from SUNY Buffalo, the Workshop's initial academic partner. In the early 1980's, downsizing and academic restructuring at SUNY Buffalo caused the college to stop contracting with VSW, and the SUNY College at Brockport took up the call to provide VSW with the full-time graduate degree program it has today.

Lyons recalls VSW's humble origins through the financial aspect: "I think the first year, our budget might have been something under $100,000, and it grew, at its height, to around $600,000." Originally located in a loft on Elton Street, the institution eventually took over its entire building, and within eight years, ran out of space and moved to the two buildings it currently occupies on Prince Street.

Partially designed as a graduate program for the Eastman House, Lyons was encouraged by the University at Buffalo to make the Workshop a not-for-profit organization. "We were one of the earliest independent, not-for-profit, artist-run spaces in the country," he says. The operation was slimmer then, though not by much: it has remained what Lyons calls a "small but effective" institution that offers "an intensity of resources" to its students. VSW has maintained the same mission as when it began: "Part of the original design was to set up this cross-disciplinary discourse in which you would find not just students of art and photography, but of religious studies, psychology, history, and so on," Lyons says.

Throughout the Workshop's history, students with diverse academic backgrounds and artistic concerns have come together to study and develop a variety of approaches to the photographic media. Lyons says that the cross-disciplinary approach gradually led to the development of programs dealing with film, video, and book arts in addition to photography, and that "the main concept was to address the needs of the field in very specific ways, including education, publishing, artists' books, traveling exhibitions, conferences, seminars, and advanced studies in curatorial practices in the museum field."

Since its founding, the VSW has conferred nearly 500 Master of Fine Arts degrees through SUNY Buffalo and Brockport, and its alumni have gone on to work in various professions in the art world. Lyons says that more than 90 percent of the people who came through the Workshop are active in the art field, whether they work as artists, educators, or directors of major museums and galleries. Prominent alumni include Willis E. Hartshorn, the director of the International Center of Photography in New York City; Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum; and Charles Desmarais, the art director of the Brooklyn Museum. Three VSW alum work in the International Center of Photography exhibitions department, and two work in its curatorial department. Professional artists include photographer Mark Klett and internationally renowned book artist Scott McCarney.

Lyons was involved with VSW for 33 years before retiring in 2002, and decided to "get some fresh young blood into the mix," he says. In the summer of 2008, Tate Shaw, also a VSW alum, was appointed as the new director. Hailing from the Midwest, Shaw found his way to the Workshop through his interest in books as an art form. He knew of an anthology collected by Joan Lyons - Nathan's wife, VSW instructor, and founder of VSW Press - called "Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology & Sourcebook."

"The catalyst for my personal move to Rochester [from Kansas City, Missouri] was to study artists' books with Joan Lyons at VSW," says Shaw. "There are only a handful of critical and historical studies of artists' books to date. Likewise, there are only three or four places in the country [where] you can study books at the graduate level - the rest are comparably conservative, whereas VSW seemed to impose fewer boundaries around projects I would be initiating as student artist."

Shaw attended VSW from 2003 to 2006, during which he nurtured his interest in publications. As students, Shaw and Kristen Merola - who now serves as assistant director at the Workshop - started a publishing company. "That turned into something I've been doing very much on the side, but VSW gave me the model to create publications on our own, and now it's come full circle, where I'm working with VSW to do the same [for its current students]," he says.

As director, Shaw is focused on advancing publishing in art. "You can think of that very broadly, not just book publication," he says. That includes an emphasis on supporting Afterimage, the journal produced at VSW that covers media arts and cultural criticism, which Shaw is committed to keeping in print. Other priorities include building online exhibitions, where Shaw says VSW can develop the publication model through online sources; using the resource center to involve students with curatorial work in the VSW print and book collections; curating exhibitions that can also be hosted online; supporting artist book publication; and creating traveling exhibitions.

Currently VSW has two full-time faculty members, plus a network of local artists and historians, and artists-in-residence. Shaw adds that that last group "are contributors to the students' development; they see practitioners working, have conversations with them, and more importantly, the training is about observation and watching artists work," says Lyons. Current VSW artists-in-residence include Darren Floyd, a motion picture artist from Brooklyn; Luke Strosnider, a photo artist and writer most recently of Rochester (Strosnider contributes art criticism to this newspaper); and Doug Manchee, a photo artist and chair of the advertising photo department at RIT. Local alumni also come back and offer feedback to the students. "So there is a wide base for how instruction happens."

The institution supports 16 full-time students, as well as 50 to 60 summertime students (a mix of undergrad, national, and international students) who take five-day workshops. VSW also works with several Brockport classes, accounting for roughly 20 or so students per semester.

The Workshop looks for individuals from diverse backgrounds when selecting its students, from roughly 50 applicants per year. Shaw says, "We definitely have a group model in mind, so the student might bring something that is not a straight photographic background. The aspect of a group really helps to build communication and conversation between individuals, to generate a lot of energy in cross-disciplinary thinking, so you can use a visual model to think about journalism, a visual model to think about psychology, and vice versa."

A formal class contains two students, but every week there is a large group discussion in which students present examples of their current work, and every six to eight weeks a group discussion takes place that includes everyone.

Six-month internships are required of the students, of which Lyons says, "This has been an important catalyst for a number of students who have either realized that they are moving in a direction that doesn't interest them, or they are moving in a direction that is being reinforced by the experience, and that gives them time to readjust in doing their final project." That project is "the wrap-up of the program, which can be anything from a film, to a book, an exhibition, or a performance," says Shaw.

It's uncommon for such a small institution to have survived, let alone remain independent, throughout the years, and not dissolve or get absorbed. Indie status is great, if you can make it economically. "We've lost hundreds of artists' spaces across the country," Lyons says, "or they've been absorbed by larger institutions," such as the Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, an exhibition space affiliated with MoMA.

The local White Ox film group is one example of a tiny non-profit that didn't make it. "We absorbed some of their activities to keep things going," Lyons says. "[VSW] has historically nurtured or helped other organizations to exist - Writers & Books spun off of something called the Books Bus, which we housed for a couple of years. We housed Pyramid Art Center [now Rochester Contemporary Art Center] for a couple of years when they lost their lease on St. Paul." BOA Editions, the local poetry and prose publisher, benefited from VSW in another way: the Workshop owned a Heidelberg printing press from 1972 through 2002, during which VSW designed and produced 50 BOA publications.

Back in the day, the VSW had quite the active press - it even printed local ‘zines - and it became a way for artists to get their work published when they were ignored by museums, Lyons says with a twinkle of a rebellious spirit in his eye. The press was eventually sold to SUNY Purchase, where VSW alum and prominent book artist and photographer Philip Zimmermann started the Center for Editions, as well as other artist publishing activities, says Shaw. He adds that VSW Press still exists, and publishes books by artists and critical titles using on-demand print technologies.

"We've tried to encourage inter-institutional cooperation," says Shaw. "Next summer we're doing a photo book symposium here, but it's really branched out to work again with Eastman House, RIT, a publisher here called 21st Century Editions, [and] a lot of the independent artists who live here to help them put their books out, draw a crowd of thinkers, collectors, and critics to the Workshop."

During a tour of VSW's two buildings, Shaw discussed new and future additions to the Workshop. The front building houses offices, the Afterimage production office, and the auditorium where the Workshop holds screenings by outside filmmakers. ("A great teaching tool for students to see how to run formal screenings," Shaw says.) Local groups rent the auditorium for theater and dance performances - it was most recently home to Shipping Dock Theater - as well as parties.

In January, the Workshop added a new gallery, where it holds individual artists' shows, and a bookstore. Depending on the economy, a digitization lab could be in the offing. Shaw says, "We're moving very much into an idea of digitizing what we have in our research center upstairs, to create free-access databases of what we have in terms of prints."

Located upstairs in the front building is the research center, where students work with a variety of print materials. Shaw says the VSW owns "about 25,000 books, over 1 million images in print form, slides, and film. The students here deal with pictures that aren't their own on an almost weekly basis, and that helps to build a curatorial perspective." Also upstairs is a substantial library, including a section called the Independent Press Archives, which Shaw says is the largest collection of artists' books outside of New York City.

The VSW basement is a cinephile's treasure trove: when the Rundel Memorial Library got rid of its film collection in 2002, VSW took it on. Shaw says, "Part of the learning process for me since June has been finding out exactly what we have." The rows and rows of stacked metal reels and VHS tapes may look like a dream to a film geek, but it translates to pressure to Shaw: the Workshop is racing against time, trying to get funding through grants in order to digitize and preserve the 5000 items, which include a large collection of video art.

The back building contains artist spaces, dark rooms, and a computer lab, which was financed with the money from selling the VSW printing press. During my tour of the lab I met current artist-in-residence Darren Floyd, whose work caught the eye of recent visiting artist Sergei Sviatchenko. The two are in the process of setting up Floyd's work to be shown just outside of Copenhagen; this is one example of the international connections and opportunities sparked at VSW.

Upstairs is a small student gallery, as well as the Siskind Gallery, where the April 3 auction is taking place. It will feature about 110 pieces including vintage and contemporary prints and artists' books. It is the first of a few events being held to celebrate VSW's 40th anniversary.

"We have very generous donations from over 100 individuals this year," Shaw says of the eighth annual silent auction, which includes work by photographers Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas, and Mark Klett, as well as a special 12-print live auction segment for the 40th anniversary. All proceeds benefit artist programs at VSW, says Shaw.

For more information about the Visual Studies Workshop, or to view and bid on auction items, go online to vsw.org.

Visual Studies Workshop 40th Anniversary Auction

Friday, April 3

31 Prince St.

6-9 p.m. | $15 | 442-8676, vsw.org