Chouinard Art Institute - Merger

Merger

Nelbert Chouinard's age and health led to Walt and Roy Disney along with Lulu May Von Hagen, then chairman of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, overseeing a 1961 merger of the Chouinard Art Institute with the Music Conservatory. The merger combined the administration of the two schools, and utilized Chouinard's facilities for some of the LA Conservatory's non-performance-based classes. At this time Chouinard was in dire financial condition, and The Disney leadership offered funds to keep the college operational. Between 1961 and 1969 Chouinard remained as an independent, functioning entity, and it admitted and graduated students under the corporate entity of Chouinard Art Institute. To its students, faculty and the general public, Chouinard formally became a part of the California Institute of the Arts in early 1969. At some time between 1966 and 1969, however, Chouinard Art Institute was privately brought under the governance of California Institute of the Arts.

When Chouinard Art Institute closed its doors near downtown L.A. in June 1969, it was under what many considered to be controversial circumstances. Walt Disney’s promise to keep the school alive and independent was changed with an abrupt transition period in which Chouinard as a corporate entity and a brand, was closed, and dozens of much-loved, long-term artists and designers who had been teachers at the college were let go. And students who had applied and been admitted to Chouinard, attending Chouinard classes, suddenly found themselves enrolled at Cal Arts. The shift in institutional culture was abrupt, and to Chouinard's existing faculty and students, painful. An article in the L.A. Times at the time articulated it as a debacle.

To the Chouinard community, the transition meant the demise of a nationally-noted professional art college that was famous for producing cutting-edge artists, top-flight animators, illustrators, designers and photographers. It achieved this via highly effective, 6 to 8 week immersive classroom programs for the teaching of art.

However, the Chouinard/Cal Arts transition in 1969 to 1972 had deeper and earlier roots. Beginning in the 1920's, Walt Disney and Nelbert Chouinard developed a long term, mutually beneficial relationship that offered to both new ways of working and opportunities to bring both of their interests to much higher levels. In the 1920s Disney was beginning his animation studio but was low on cash to train his animators. To help him out, and since Chouinard had been the place where some of his original core animators had been trained, Mrs. Chouinard offered Disney staffers free scholarships in order to train his first animators – now known as the Nine Old Men. Chouinard's leading drawing teacher was a former USC engineering student named Donald Graham, who would become the longest-running teacher at Chouinard (1929–1972). An excellent draughtsman, Graham's advanced abilities in teaching figure drawing techniques, gave the Disney animators skills they could not have gained anywhere else. And Graham's thoughtful teaching style, which placed a premium upon intensive student commitment to large-scale work, became a hallmark of the school's approach to teaching all of the arts. The Disney animator's drawing skills learned at Chouinard were not only supportive to Walt Disney’s ideas concerning the future of animation, this collaboration between Chouinard's teaching and Disney's animators made possible numerous advances in Disney's animation style. What had been, in Disney's earliest cartoons a simplistic Mickey Mouse figure, transitioned into full-blown, well drawn, complex and sophisticated animated productions such as Snow White. Disney’s collaboration with Chouinard would continue until his death in 1966.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s Chouinard continued to be highly-regarded as a hotbed of experimental art, and as the primary training ground for graphic and fashion designers, animators and ceramists. At that time Chouinard was recognized as one of the best places in the world to study to become a professional artist. The list of its well-known students and graduates is extensive, and Chouinard's fine arts students have become synonymous with all of the achievements of West Coast Art and the broader art world. Despite the artistic triumphs of its students, throughout much of its existence, Chouinard suffered with years of administrative problems, including at one point in the mid-1960s a major embezzlement and near bankruptcy. At this time the Chouinard Art Institute was several weeks away from closing its doors, when Disney offered limited (to be confirmed) operating funds to Nelbert Chouinard.(Date to be confirmed, funding and agreement to be confirmed).

At the same time Disney was offering financial support to Chouinard, the Disney leadership was initiating studies and plans to create a separate, new, college of the arts, which they soon named California Institute of the Arts, or Cal Arts. For Cal Arts, Disney envisioned a new, multi-disciplinary school which would be a fertile, creative environment, cross-pollinating a wide range of disciplines from music to dance to art. This new college was to be located in a new site at the perimeter of Los Angeles County, in the town of Valencia. The early plans for Cal Arts were developed by the same group of planners who created Disneyland. Disney's planners envisioned a new type of college in which the "creative act" could be viewed or accessed by paying visitors—similar to the conceptual model of Disneyland. Disney's planners envisioned studio classrooms that would have high ceilings transected by glassed-in skyways, where the visitors could watch artists at work. When these plans were unveiled to Chouinard's constituencies, a rebellion ensued. The art students and professors preferred to create in private, and away from outside view. Yet the rebellion had little effect. At the time, Chouinard was vulnerable—it had few funding sources except Disney-related ones. Chouinard's leadership had not ever formally adopted fund raising programs. And, over its fifty-plus years of existence, Chouinard's administration had never developed a mission statement or an appropriate system of governance that would support its growth or sustainability. Because nothing had been formalized or written down, the school did not have the institutional leadership or resources to survive this difficult period.

Disney's untimely death in 1966, plus a series of internal financial crises, led to an awkward period of management instability. At the time, Chouinard's board leadership was pulled in two directions. One set of board leaders looked toward an emphasis upon what had always made the school great: close relationships between professional artists and their students, and high professional standards, and supported this with a continuity of existing faculty augmented with gradual additions of new, recognized artists from the local region. The other, Disney-affiliated board group, wished to create an entirely new school and way of teaching and working, and sought to create a new vision of the future with artists brought in from New York. In 1969, the year of Nelbert Chouinard's passing, the graduates of Chouinard Art School were handed diplomas that said California Institute of the Arts, a school in which no one had ever enrolled. The transition happened without discussion, either with the tuition-paying students or the faculty. After 1969, the fledgling Cal Arts moved to a temporary location in Burbank, where it remained until 1972, when the permanent Cal Arts Facility was opened in Valencia.These interim students had enrolled in Chouinard, but had not completed their studies before the school transitioned into Cal Arts.

While Cal Arts in Valencia has become a world force in art, music and performance – a testament to the enormous creative vision and will of Walt Disney, and the subsequent Cal Arts leadership, the original achievements of a visionary woman—Nelbert Chouinard, have been eclipsed within the larger identity of Cal Arts. Even today, the Cal Arts website cites incorrectly the dates of Chouinard's closure and its final leaders.

Asked how to say her name, Chouinard told the Literary Digest: "Properly, oui as the French for 'Yes': almost shwee-nar'; but generally spoken shu-nard', u as in shun." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)