About the site

 

To the Reader,

 

If you're interested in the history of Cornish College of the Arts, and more specifically, the intitution's time under Nellie Cornish's directorship, then we're already sharing a connection. You recognize or are coming to recognize the importance of this subject, not only to Cornish, not only to Seattle and the Northwest, but to the history of education in America. I created CornishSchool.com (in plain-old, hacker-resistant HTML) to share my research and, I hope, in time, to present the work of others on the subject.

 

My personal involvement with the history of Cornish began prosaically enough, with work as a contractor hired to produce a simple, online history of the college as it approached its 2014 centennial. It wasn't easy, as there was little readily available other than Nellie Cornish's autobiography, Miss Aunt Nellie, and few documents written by people such as myself. In the end it was acceptable, but unsatisfying, feeling rather threadbare to me. After this, I was fortunate enough to have been brought on staff to write for the college in its Communication Department, really one of the best jobs imaginable, with an opportunity to get out among the faculty and students and chronicle their doings. I never forgot what I had started with the history; I made the case as strongly as I could that the college would benefit in any number of ways from pursuing and publishing its history. Fortunately, I was blessed with two open-minded and supportive directors of communications, Rosemary Jones and Karen Bystrom, who let me have my head in pursuing the subject. As I began to dig, the history expanded before me. I thought the job would be — figuratively speaking — clearing the underbrush from the surroundings of a magnificent old house, but I quickly found that it was hiding the foundations of a much larger and grander structure.

 

The more I worked on the history of Cornish, finding its secrets and reconnecting with wonderful families, the more the work spilled over its confines of a staff position. Soon my spare time was being poured into the labor, and even extended to traveling to Ann Arbor to view the holdings of the University of Michigan. When the third presidential regime I have known at Cornish had no place for the kind of work I was doing and I was separated from the college, it was hardly disruptive: I was already working well past those boundaries. In a sense, I still work for Cornish, I am just not employed there. But it is a bigger Cornish I work for now, the Cornish that is a set of revolutionary ideas, humanistic values, and a century of fascinating people. Today my work is rapidly coalescing into a book.

 

What an exciting thing it is to stumble into a subject that no one has really assayed. It is a scholar's dream. But that excitement is tempered by realizing the danger such a condition presents. When various scholars with various viewpoints square off on a subject, they teach one another, critique one another. Having collegues working parallel to you is both a spur and a guarantor of quality. There are only a few people out there working on this subject. We were fortunate to have David Martin and the wonderful exhibit he put together, Looking Back, Moving Forward, but other than that, there really isn't much, other than Nellie Cornish's autobiography and the bits and pieces available in the press over the last century. David says he is also working on a book, and I hope it's true: the history of Cornish needs and deserves a lot of attention and a shelf full of books.

 

I hope this site will excite people who want to study the history of Cornish College of the Arts and prod them into writing material for it.

 

— — Maximilian Mark Bocek

 

 

The Official Bio — Maximilian Mark Bocek is an independent researcher and writer, a former staff member at Cornish College of the Arts. He holds a bachelor's degree from Reed College in Portland and an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, with additonal graduate work at California Institute of the Arts. He has served on the faculties of design and animation at a a scattering of Seattle-area colleges. Additonally, he has served as publication manager at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, as a technical editor at Boeing, and a writer for Starbucks Design. He won a Washington State Playwriting Award for his play A Junkie for Meaning.

 

 

 

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