Educator

LEONARD LEHRER has had a lengthy and distinguished career as an academic with special emphasis on graduate level programs in the visual arts. In the late 1960s, higher education in the U.S. began to focus on the MFA and the College Art Association declared this degree the terminal degree in the field. Lehrer was attracted to this phenomenon and in 1970 moved from Philadelphia to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Thus began the "Grand Tour" of his own country and its role in the education of a new generation of its youthful visual artists.

In New Mexico he was privileged to work under the mentorship of Clinton Adams, dean of the College of Fine Arts and the director of the Tamarind Institute of Lithography which was in the process of moving from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. This was virtually the first such in-house professional operation in the country. As chair of the Art Department, Lehrer helped facilitate the Tamarind guest artists into the department's activities and also was able to begin his own work in lithography (at the invitation of Dean Adams) with the Tamarind Master printers. Four years later he moved to the new University of Texas at San Antonio as Division Director of the Department of Art & Design. He saw this as an opportunity to design a new MFA program from its inception (the university was in the process of being built), and he accepted the challenge.

Another opportunity presented itself a few years later in the form of a very large art department seeking a new chair at Arizona State University in Tempe. Fourteen years later he was able to look back at the creation of the Print Research Facility and the Visual Arts Research Studios as well as a remarkable success rate for its graduating MFAs. Within two years of graduating all those who put themselves into the academic job market succeeded in their dream of teaching at a college or university. He also had the pleasure of working very closely with the dean of ASU's College of Fine Arts, Jules Heller, another mentor of considerable magnitude. Lehrer then accepted the position of Chair of the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University where his charge was to create its first MFA in Studio Art. The success of this new graduate degree program assured NYU's future prominence in the very competitive national academic art world as well as entrée into the New York gallery scene. (As a result NYU awarded Lehrer status as Emeritus Professor of Art.)

In 2001 Lehrer moved to Chicago as dean of the College of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago followed by service as Associate Provost of the college. Since 2009 he is Visiting Professor and Director, Printmaking Convergence Program, Department of Art and Art History, the University of Texas at Austin. He has also served on the College Art Association's committee on defining both the B.F.A. and the M.F.A. He served as Chair of The College Board's National Task Force on Arts in Education in the United States and continues to serve as Chair of the Arts Task Force for the Fullbright Association.