Settling in

Already in her third year in Richmond as chair of VCU’s sculpture department, Amy Hauft is finally getting to renovate a commercial space into a studio to call her own.

She spent 25 years in her last studio in New York. She says it will take her a while to re-create the comfort and organization borne of that length of time.

But given the warm welcome Hauft has experienced at VCU, she isn’t looking to leave anytime soon.

“This is an incredible department,” Hauft said. “We have fabulous colleagues who have all made me feel immediately welcome … and then there’s these really great students. It’s a really good environment. I can’t complain about anything.”

With 120 undergraduates and 12 graduates, the sculpture department is the largest in the country. Hauft says this makes for a large number of especially talented artists. Students have come from all over the U.S., Canada and France.

Because of its reputation, the graduate sculpture program can only accept about 3 percent of the students who apply. Selecting six people out of 200 affords her department the luxury of being very picky, Hauft says.

Hauft doesn’t teach as much now as she used to. She teaches senior seminar classes as a professional prep course. In her last position as professor at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, she taught three freshman classes a semester.

“I’m in a much more removed position, and I feel funny about that. I feel like my students don’t necessarily relate to me as an artist so much anymore because they don’t see me in shops the way that my previous students always did,” said Hauft.

Hauft sees the long-term benefits of guest artists coming to VCU and staying awhile. In Philadelphia, artists would come to the school for one day, leaving little impact on students. She says Richmond being a remote cultural center promotes artistic quality.

After years of commuting from her home in New York to her job in Philadelphia, Hauft is relishing her newfound pedestrian life in Richmond. She enjoys the change of pace and quality of life here, and the city’s architectural preservation.

Hauft tries to go back to New York as much as possible for art show openings, as this is one of the things she misses most. She says it can be frustrating that Richmond lacks the same variety and availability of products as New York.

As for her own beginning art education, Hauft says it wasn’t the best. As a child she had a heightened spatial understanding and tendency toward three-dimensional production. She says she always knew she’d be an artist, but not necessarily a teacher.

“I went to Skowhegan, which is this summer artists program . . . I met all these people who had gotten different kinds of educations than I did and told me all these stories,” Hauft said. “So I fantasized about like, what if I had gotten that education, and I built myself as a teacher based on that kind of fantasy.”

Hauft says she is inspired by religious architecture and lighting, spaces, the logic of the built world, landscape and the difference between hand-crafted and mass-produced crafts.

“I’m not really somebody who makes art about art. I tend to make art about the stuff in the world. A lot of time I will have a physical experience that I will want to see if I can reproduce in a more abstracted way,” Hauft said.

The piece she is most proud of is “Period Room,” a caned plane throughout a room at waist height, with a curving path through it. The path has chairs at various points in it. The plane is made semi-transparent by florescent light just underneath it at the walls.

Hauft has been awarded residencies to work all over the world, including the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbria, Italy and the International Artists Residency Fellowship in Poland.

She taught at the Tyler School of Art’s Rome campus for a year. Hauft spends a lot of time traveling, and many of her pieces have been inspired by her travel experiences.

Hauft’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the International Artists Museum (Poland), the New Museum, The American Academy in Rome, PS1 Museum and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Gallery.