We’re in the eHive Maker Space in Staufer Hall of Waynesburg University. Professor Andrew Heisey is at his laptop, busy putting fellow artist Andrew Walker’s art into production. With a few deft keystrokes, he’s transformed Walker’s image of Periplaneta americana on the screen into a poster-sized page of stickers, then with another keystroke sent it to be printed. That big-bed Roland printer beside him is just one of the 21st century tools that students, under Heisey’s sure hand, can now use to turn their creativity into marketable products.
“I just got promoted to full professor,” Heisey tells me, and then confesses with a classic “Call me Andy,” grin, “I have never fit the norm. I’m not an art teacher. I’m an artist teaching art.” And at the eHive, “I get to be Chief Maker. I’m back to my roots as a country kid who loved wood shop and loved making things.”
For Heisey, teaching entrepreneurial skills that will give every student at WU the opportunity to tap into their own reservoir of creativity mirrors the story of his own life.
Growing up in rural Lancaster County, Heisey admits, “I loved playing with Legos in the basement with my brother, making a mess. We’d make the box version once, then throw the box away and build other things. That’s how I learned I could create. But I never thought I was an artist. My sister was the artist.”
Then, in 10th grade at Lancaster Mennonite High, something clicked. “I got to be in a pottery class just for a week. I remember holding my first pot and saying, ‘Wow! I made this!’” That was the moment the nerdy farm kid who loved making things but didn’t think he was anything special became an artist.
“My grades weren’t that great, but I applied to Messiah College [now University] to be an art teacher and got in, and I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’”
That question found its first answer when Heisey met history major Debbie Tober from Strathmore CT during freshman year. (They would marry in 1997, the year both graduated.)
As the class load needed for a teaching degree began cutting into studio time, Heisey decided to take studio art as a major and threw himself into ceramics, honing his skills. “I was stubborn, and I stuck to it. I got in local exhibits, and before I graduated I had a job offer to teach art at Harrisburg Christian School.”
There, he discovered his years teaching Sunday school and planning curriculum for summer camps had given him the teacher’s skills he needed. Over the next 15 years, Heisey would teach students to use the tools of the creative trade, fashioning his classes like college courses, giving kids the taste of the time and guidance it takes to develop as an artist.
More education was the path to better-paying jobs and Heisey began making the three-hour round trip from Harrisburg to Blumsburg for his MA. Then it was on to the University of the Arts in Center City Philadelphia that offered an MFA to full-time teachers willing to do the work. “I had two aunts I stayed with, and they lived right by the Philly Art Museum. I could go there any time I wanted.”
It would be while getting his MFA he met the professor who later recommended him for the art department position at WU. It would also be where he met fellow art teacher Andrew Walker and they bonded over a collaborative art project on the streets of Philadelphia. This public art project was later deconstructed, and its panels hung at Mt. Airy Art Garage, a nonprofit art hub that promotes creative expression as an instrument for social change.
“It was the vision we both shared of an igloo. We both had sketches of it the first time we met,” Walker tells me. “That’s what did it. I told him I’m an artist, you’re a builder! “
We’re back at the Benedum Fine Arts Gallery now, surrounded by paintings waiting to be hung. It’s Saturday afternoon and Walker’s show “Reaching For The Light” will open on Monday, March 8. Today “the two Andys” will spend hours organizing what goes on what wall, rearranging, joking, reminiscing, climbing ladders to adjust lighting, using a laser beam to straighten, a cordless drill to secure. Slowly, seamlessly, each piece finds its proper place. This is the time it takes to create the conceptual story being told by the exhibit that viewers will soon experience.
This is Heisey, the conceptual artist at work, lending his expertise to help a fellow artist tell his story.
Walker’s photographs of his and Heisey’s shared project from 12 years ago hang in the hallway outside the gallery. “We built it on an empty lot, and homeless people would come by and help. One woman rode up on her bike and gave us her helmet and watched as I cut it in half.”
Heisey gestures to the landscape of found objects embedded in the curved outer walls of the finished structure, thatched with living turf. Using recycled material—slag cement for the skin, the inner structural arches and beautifully rendered door from recycled crates, sandwiched, glued, and sanded into functional art.
“What you can’t see in this photo is the inside, with light coming in through the bottles embedded in the panels. At the time, I wasn’t very environmental, but building this taught me. Now at the eHive, our projects involve creating new products out of recycled plastics. These are things we need to learn.”
Two sculpted heads along another wall are self-portraits. Each shows how art is a way to tell personal stories—in this case by being manifestations of the feelings associated with the migraines that Heisey is subject to. The head with spikes coming out of the neck: “I did this one when I was younger, before I knew what migraines were.” The second is laced with metallic threads in places where the pain emerges.
They display what Heisey has learned to work with and control, through observation and elimination. Foods like oranges and bacon trigger instant onset, he’s found. “When the cooks at Chick-Fil-A [on campus] see me coming, they change their gloves so my food isn’t cross contaminated.” The campy, rose-colored glasses above his bearded grin are there for a reason. “Certain colors help filter light for certain people. For some it might be green. For me it’s pink.”
The call and response of personal experience as art also underlies every painting in Walker’s exhibit. As his artist bio states: “Andrew Walker has always addressed the universal issues of illness and recovery/transformation of human beings and our environment.” His own chronic illness (Alport’s Syndrome) that called for kidney transplants at age 14 has been the texture of his art, from documenting the health of the Schuylkill River to creating art with iPad and Apple Pencil to promote awareness of organ donations.
For this, which he thinks might be his final exhibit, Walker has been making art every day for five years “in the acrylic medium, exposing what could be the future of our planet.”
It’s Monday afternoon now and Heisey’s bagpipes are calling in the students to meet the artist and get a sticker to remember this day. They talk with Walker, field questions from Heisey, then linger over spare but lush paintings of bananas, pears and apples in various stages of shelf life that entice the eye with color and form.
At another wall they stop to browse a brilliant collage of paintings that spreads waves, skies and cracked landscapes from ceiling to floor. Captured in the middle are gold and brick cityscapes taken to the abstract yet grounded in metaphor by the cracks and crevices where mosses and fungi have begun the process of recycling the world once more. American roaches in ancient tribal mode are painted against lush backdrops of gold; dance teams of plastic roaches, compliments of eHive’s 3-D printers, scamper ever upward on every available surface.
Walker’s artist statement notes: “Reaching for the Light is what many of us are trying to achieve. The light could be many things, such as family, fame, or God. In these paintings, the fruit and landscapes are examples of both the darkness and the light coexisting on one plane. The pears show the weather of time, but the very brown spots are the sweetness of the fruit. In the landscapes, the dark colors show the wear of time on the planet, but the light colors and the gold could lead one to reach for the light, as the roaches seem to do. Heading for the light. Aren’t we all someday?”
Andrew Walker’s exhibit will be on display at the Benedum Fine Arts Gallery until April 5, on weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and by appointment. Art in the exhibit is available for purchase. FMI, contact Professor Heisey at aheisey@waynesburg.edu.