The long version . . .I’ve been around a while, and I’ve done some stuff. My career in the arts has been a long one, and my teaching and administrative careers have always been in service to my passion for a creative and equitable approach to a relevant arts education. A lot more detail follows.

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Administrative roles: My work as an administrator began back in 2004 when I left my full time faculty role and accepted the position of Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). I served as the dean at SCAD for 4 years before moving on as the Associate VP for Academic Affairs at Ringling College of Art & Design. Eventually I was fortunate enough to be able to work for Denny Griffith, the President of Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD), as his Provost. I stayed in Columbus for 6 years before taking the Provost role at Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas. After a pandemic-induced set of moves in which I briefly served as the Dean of Academic Affairs at the Art Institute of Atlanta, I returned to San Antonio where I’m currently the Chair of the ARTS Department at San Antonio College. You can find all the career-related details by visiting my profile on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conlon/

Consulting work: I’ve worked as a consultant for over 10 years. Most of my clients hire me to help them with program design, articulation, assessment and accreditation, and strategic planning. If you want to find out more, visit KEY International Education Consulting, LLC. I can be contacted for consultation and speaking engagements through the KEY website. My success has always been predicated on one simple idea: Rather than look at challenges as obstacles, I prefer to embrace them as opportunities. As someone aware of the tectonic demographic and economic shifts in our marketplace by virtue of my research and my relationships with other academic leaders across the country, I can state that, motivated by the needs of learners and the institutions that serve them, collectively we have a unique opportunity to critique, innovate and collaboratively redefine our values for a society that needs us to offer solutions, and we have a responsibility to see it done in a manner that serves as diverse a population as possible.

Studio work: During the pandemic I built my latest studio. My wife and I both manage it and we each have examples of our work for your viewing pleasure, as well as a blog we wrote that describes the construction of the actual studio itself. My work is mostly figurative, either realistic or abstracted in some fashion. More about my practice can be found at Liberty Oak Studios. If you’d like to commission me or my wife, you can reach us there. As far as what my work is about, it’s diverse in both media and approach, including traditional materials such as concrete, cast bronze, welded steel and carved wood, as well as more contemporary materials such as cast and laminated polyester, acrylic, epoxy, cold-cast bronze, cultured marble, and expanded polystyrene. The core of my work has always been the figure. While this is especially true with my portrait busts and figure studies, in some cases the figurative element is not always immediately obvious.

Teaching: In some fashion, either directly in the classroom, or indirectly working with faculty to tweak curricula, I’m a teacher at heart. From the most basic of courses to those which are far more advanced, I’ve found that the greatest gift that I can give to my students is the notion that learning never stops, even for me. I am open with students about my own enthusiasm for continued learning so that they will value the approach as something they might want to model for themselves. I believe that learning, to be truly effective, needs to have more than just abstract value to the learner. If I can find a way to tie content, in a relevant and meaningful way, to what they want for themselves in the future, their investment in learning becomes more than just the grade they’ll earn at the end of term, it becomes a means by which they recognize their own continuing responsibility to the process, and the transformative benefit of education. Samples of my student work are on the Portfolio Page of the Liberty Oak Studio website.