The end of an era: Maryville College’s Dr. Carl Gombert to retire at the close of the 2023-24 academic year
March 22, 2024
As a long and distinguished career of more than three decades at Maryville College comes to a close for Art Professor Dr. Carl Gombert, he’s in a reflective mood on a recent spring break morning in his home studio.
Within walking distance of the campus in the bucolic and historic College Hill neighborhood, he and his wife, Anita Blatnik, have raised two kids in this century-old home, and in a more recently added garage, Gombert’s studio looks about like long-time friends and peers might expect. It’s a place he’s looking forward to spending more time as the 2023-24 academic year comes to an end.
His retirement, he jokes, has been a long time coming.
“I graduated high school in June of ’77, and I’m pretty sure I was planning it then,” he jokes. “I was hired at Maryville College in 1993, and it’s been a great gig. I love working there … but I was born to be retired.”
The witticisms and droll commentary are just a small part of what makes Gombert a Maryville College icon. (“I was aiming for ‘eye candy,’ but I’ll settle for icon,” he says, adding almost apologetically that his brain can “leave no punchline unpunched.”) The art he creates, which hangs in buildings across the historic grounds of the 205-year-old institution, is another part. As many pieces are on display or simply stored there, dozens, if not hundreds, more hang in private homes and the occasional gallery throughout East Tennessee, and for a great many local residents, owning a Carl Gombert original is a point of pride.
But then there’s the impact he’s had on students present and past, many of whom will undoubtedly make a return trip to their alma mater when he delivers his “Last Lecture” on April 17, or delivers part of the annual Baccalaureate sermon on May 3. He’s not one to take much credit for whatever impact he’s had, because it’s almost been an obligation, he adds, as a lifelong learner: to give to others what was so readily given to him.
“To a large extent, you teach the way you’ve been taught. If you’ve had horrible teachers, you try not to repeat and do unto others what was done unto you, but on the other hand, if you’re lucky, you had teachers that were really influential and informative,” he says. “I had one teacher as an undergraduate, and when I get in the studio, I can still hear his voice, so I try to model a lot of what I do on him. And then I had a foundational teacher I started studying with when I was 14, and I base a lot of what I do on how he taught me.
“I have been the beneficiary of really good teaching and really sound knowledge that were instilled in me early on, and I’ve come to realize that these are craft traditions, and they need to be passed on. Because I have received this knowledge, I have an obligation to keep it going, but also amend it and modify it, because I’m teaching skills and attitudes. There is not a finite body of material that I think students must know and be tested on at the end of the course, and if they don’t master it, they can’t move on to the next course. There’s plenty of room for that, but I’m not in that field.
“I’m planting seeds. I’m throwing all of this stuff out there, and hopefully, if I offer them enough choices, the students pick and choose and take what they need or what they want from those choices,” he adds. “It’s not going to hurt my feelings if they reject them or contradict them or find different ways to do things, because my job is to try to teach them to be a flexibly thinking problem solver and to tackle interesting problems.”
An incalculable impact on artists and the arts
In so many respects, Gombert was made to work at MC. The liberal arts perspective at Maryville College not only encourages such teaching philosophies; it’s also given him enormous latitude through the years to help students find their own paths and even their own disciplines.
“I feel a little awkward calling attention to anybody, because I know I’m going to leave people out, but there are dozens and dozens of students who have found interesting roads to walk on,” he says. “I’ve had students doing amazing studio work; students who go on to get Ph.D.s in specific areas of expertise; and students who had good studio skills but came down on the research side of things. I had one student interested in geometric patterning, and that really awakened in me my own latent interest in geometry and pattern, and that’s one of the things that’s kept my art going for a few years here.”
A native of Ohio, Gombert financed his first art lessons through money earned from delivering newspapers. He received his bachelor’s in drawing from the University of Akron, a master’s in painting from Kent State University, and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary fine arts at Texas Tech University. Going into academia, he says, was more of a long-term health insurance policy when he first applied at Maryville College.
“I was working as a designer at a silk screen shop, and I realized, ‘This is unsustainable,’” he says. “There were all of these carcinogenic chemicals, and I was watching people retire at 62 and then keel over from these horrible diseases, and I didn’t want that! I knew I liked being a student, so I went the academic route.”
Like his art, his success at MC has been organic. He figured he was doing a good job when, after his first year, the Division of Fine Arts renewed his contract, he adds.
“When we first got here, I remember telling Anita, ‘Well, this gig is either going to be three years or 30,’” he says. “When they hired me, I had never held the same job for more than three years, partly by design. But I knew that here, if I could stick around for a few years, I could have some options, or it might work out long-term. One thing led to another: I kept coming back, and they kept having me.”
Art flourishes in the liberal arts paradigm
The College has gone through a great many changes during his tenure, notably the removal of the old Fine Arts Center and the construction of the Clayton Center for the Arts, within which the Division of Fine Arts has both office and studio space. Gombert’s work studio is located in Building B, a second-floor workshop filled with paints and patterns, easels and stamps, trinkets and baubles and arcane objects that he’s slowly collected over the years. If it can be turned into art, incorporated into art or serve as inspiration for art, he’s reticent to pass it by.
The freedom to use his creative talent as a teaching tool, he adds, has made his MC tenure all the sweeter.
“One of the best things about this job is that there is a hierarchy, and there are bosses, but I have a whole hell of a lot of autonomy,” he says. “The College expects and encourages professional development, but I define what that is. All of my colleagues and I have incredible latitude in terms of developing and following our own interests. Of course, there are never enough resources to do everything we’re trying to do, but whatever resources we have, the College is pretty generous in terms of distributing those in ways that really support meaningful, professional growth.”
Those colleagues, he adds, have been integral to the success his students experience as undergraduates, and the framework of their collaboration often gives them a compass for post-graduate pursuits of the arts. When he was hired, he says, the interdisciplinary approach to the division was literally his area of expertise, given his degree in interdisciplinary fine arts.
“My degree and my training encouraged me and required me to explore connections between art and music and theater and philosophy, and the fact that our division is organized as a division and not as a department or a school is right in my wheelhouse, so to speak,” he says. “I keep in close contact with my colleagues in theater and music, and to overuse the cliché, one of the things I figured out early on as a teacher is that it’s a two-way street. One of the biggest perks is that you learn as much from students as they ever learn from you, because they bring interesting problems to the table, and I’m there to help them figure out ways to figure out how to solve the problem. And in so doing, I’ve learned things and done other kinds of things, and it’s a real benefit.”
Gombert’s presence as the second-longest serving faculty member (behind Dr. Sam Overstreet, chair of the Division of Languages and Literature) has been beneficial for the College, in that students who know of his reputation are eager to work with and learn from him … but it’s been beneficial for Gombert as well. The College has assisted in getting his artwork overseas and to the West Coast, into exhibits that might otherwise have been out of reach, and encouraged him to travel “widely and internationally,” he says, on student trips and to conferences.
“I never had any idea when I got here that I would travel as widely as I have, and it’s been transformative,” he says.
The resident ‘weird, old dude’
Gombert likes to joke that friends and peers are often surprised when he tells them he’s retiring.
“Inevitably, someone will ask, ‘Are you old enough to retire?’” he says. “I know my childish behavior masks it, but I really am old!”
Not so old that he and Anita are packing up and heading to a Florida retirement community to spend their days playing shuffleboard, however. He’s already signed up to teach a class at Maryville College in the fall. He’s traveling to Belgium in May, and he’s determined to complete a long-simmering project that delights him in its artistic absurdity: thousand-word essays about individual pieces of art. That old saying, about a picture being worth a thousand of them? They’ll be exactly 1,000 words, he says. Not 999. Not 1,001.
He mentions a podcast, becoming more skilled on the Dixieland banjo, and perhaps a mural project on a scale previously unimagined (and he’s worked on some big ones). And then he’ll continue to teach, in whatever capacity he can find. Not in the traditional sense of the word … but in the same way he always has, so uniquely Carl-like that fondness for him, and all he’s done, at Maryville College can’t be overstated.
“I’m really interested in writing for young adults, in the sense that I know so many kids who really would have liked better, meatier arts kind of stuff in middle school and high school,” he says. “I don’t need to write for peer-reviewed journals. I would love to write for the curious 14-year-old, to explain how art has worked and works in various places around the world.”
In that sense, Gombert carries with him an air of childlike wonder. Such a trait can often be confused with the “childish behavior” to which he alludes, but over the course of his time at MC, he’s carved a reputation for himself as the grinning eccentric whose love of life, and especially the visual representations of it, is unparalleled. And for the past three decades, he’s been one of the fiercest advocates of the arts that any College could hope to have.
“Every college needs that character, and if you look hard enough, there’s always a weird, old dude lurking about — but not in a creepy way!” he says. “I mean, the Pep Band lets me sit in with my washboard, so why wouldn’t I want to do that? There are still people out there who think of the arts as frivolous luxuries, and who think of artists as mostly Van Gogh types who are weird loners living in frozen apartments, but the College does a good job of reminding people of the value of the arts.
If you look at the U.S. economy, the biggest export could be considered entertainment products — a.k.a., art. Artists, designers, makers … they’re at the beginning of almost every economic enterprise. There are thousands and thousands of good careers available in the arts, because they’re connected to every other field, and I hope the College keeps that idea alive.”
Gombert’s “Last Lecture” will take place at 3:30 p.m. April 17 in the Harold and Jean Lambert Recital Hall of the Clayton Center for the Arts, on the MC campus. A reception will follow in the William Baxter Lee III Foyer. Both events are free and open to the public.
