School of Art in Chicago selects novel leader

2008-07-13 03:10:15 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Art)

Chicago, Illinois (WiredPRNews.com) — Recently, the School of Art in Chicago named an urban architect designer as its next president, an alternative imitating the broadened range of its discipline. After judging volunteers for a very long time, the school picked Wellington Reiter, Dean of the College of Design and the architecture lecturer at the Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Reiter was also the associate lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will join the School of Art on August 25, four days prior to his 51st birthday.

Reiter will be the next chancellor after Tony Jones, who led the School of Art for more than 15 years, an epoch of great development in programs, enrollment and Loop real estate. Tony Jones will become the chancellor for a span of one year and will retire after that year.

Jones stated, “The art school sought the most excellent candidate, not essentially the one with an art and design background.” He further added, “Wellington would put efforts in order to re-balance the prospectus that was once weighted in the direction of the fine arts, but at present it integrates fashion, technology, media, design and humanities as well.”

The School of the Art has roughly the same enrollment as the College of Design at Arizona State. As the school’s Dean, Reiter helped to shape a major expansion of ASU’s Phoenix campus, a project transforming the downtown location. He also lobbied for an $879 million bond issue passed by Phoenix voters in 2006 that allocated about $232 million to the new campus.

Reiter holds architecture degrees from Harvard and Tulane Universities. He is married and has two sons aged 20 and 17.

Wired Art Reporter