#Throwback Thursday: Cornish College of the Arts Turns 100

Cornish College of the Arts—one of three colleges in the country that specializes in both the visual and performing arts—has turned 100 years old.

Founder Nellie Cornish opened Cornish on Capitol Hill originally as a music school, and then expanded it to become an integrative arts campus. Cornish wanted her college to create “artists, citizens and innovators,” which Rosemary Jones, Cornish’s director of communications, feels it still does today.

An art class at Cornish College of the Arts, date unknown. Today the college’s art and design classes take place at its South Lake Union campus; photo courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts

“It’s hard to imagine Seattle having the arts scene that it does without Cornish,” Jones says. “Long before I worked here, I had been writing about the visual and performing arts in Seattle, and I kept running into people who either studied or taught at Cornish.”

Recently, Jones notes Cornish alums Jinkx Monsoon and Major Scales sold out their Vaudevillians run at the Seattle Rep; Amy O’Neal earned rave reviews for her choreography at On The Boards; and Mary Lambert released her first album with Columbia Records.

Lambert in particular, a singer-songwriter and gay rights activist who rose to fame with her performance on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love,” is someone Jones believes exemplifies the school’s mission. “They come out talking about how art can change the world,” she says. Last Friday, alums and other Seattle notables including Mayor Ed Murray honored Cornish’s first century in style with a sold-out Cornish Centennial Gala at the Paramount Theatre. (Mary Lambert, appropriately, was the entertainment.)

In the Fall 2014 Concert at Cornish Playhouse this Friday and Saturday (November 21 and 22), dance students will perform Mystery of Iniquity, which instructor Iyun Ashani Harrison choreographed in partnership with his students as a response to the current civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo.

Iyun Harrison and students rehearse “Mystery of Iniquity” in Kerry Hall for Cornish’s 2014 Fall Dance Concert; photo credit: Mark Bocek

Cornish educates about 800 students pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (art, design, dance, theater, or performance production) or a Bachelor of Music degree at its three different facilities and hires working artists, musicians and theater professionals to teach its classes—a tradition Nellie Cornish established in the college’s early years.

“I attended an event this weekend where a retired dance teacher told me about the time her high school class competed in a dance program at Cornish back in the 1950s,” Jones says. “She still remembers that as the moment when she decided to become a dancer.”

So what’s in store for the school’s future? A new four-story, glass-fronted Centennial Lab, which will include classrooms, a theater and a space for more public forums, is being planned for the corner of Terry Avenue and Virginia Street, and construction is anticipated to begin in late 2015. The hope is that passersby will look in and see art on display, as well as attend hosted conversations about a range of hot, timely topics, including 3-D printing, drone technology and how to better design our urban landscape to offset the substantial time many of us spend at computer screens.

“Over the next few years, we expect even more collaboration with our high-tech corporate neighbors,” Jones says. “Whether it will be musicians working on sound technology, or actors creating characters for the latest immersive games, or artists designing the environment around us, there’s always a huge need for creativity in these industries and enormous opportunity for our students to establish their careers here.”

A hundred years later, Jones doesn’t feel that Nellie Cornish would have any difficulty recognizing her school. The college still stresses the importance of teaching a wide variety of arts and learning from working artists, and she notes that there remains a willingness to look beyond traditional definitions and encourage exploration.

“Nellie might not have had a computer,” Jones says, “but I’m willing to bet she’d have loved that technology, too. She’d be emailing artists around the world, saying, ‘Come to Cornish, come to Seattle, show us what you’ve got.’”