RICHARD L HIGGS Biography

Richard Higgs is an artist, educator & arts administrator currently serving as he Dean of the School of the Arts with Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina and teaches Painting and Senior Studio for the Department of Art. He has exhibited his work internationally with a focus on showing collages, paintings, prints and drawings that explore organizational forms of human perception, obsession and compulsive behavior. His work often has an undertone of discomforting humor. He has led educational transformation in the visual arts though adopting and adapting to digital technologies that expand the creative activity beyond traditional media although he works only in traditional media himself. Prior faculty and administrative appointments have ranged from Chair of the Department of Art with Alverno College to Provost &Vice President for Academic Affairs for the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He worked extensively with the Artist Live-Work Space movement and Project One Live-Work Space Studios in San Francisco that led to formal changes in the zoning and code system for the City and County of San Francisco. As Assistant Director for the San Francisco School of the Arts he led the growth of a small storefront studio school offering a handful of private lessons to a school with enrollment of 250 BFA students. He has successfully transformed art & design department programs in the adoption of digital technologies with the assistance of over $3 million in developed federal, state and foundational funding. His formal record of higher educational transformation in the arts is intimately intertwined with his studio work, both of which, on the surface, bring a sense of order to the complicated landscape of higher education. He has long questioned the viability of teaching the arts within the academic environment because the goals of creativity and studio action run counter to the intense push for accountability and validation of existence.