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Ann Hatch's love of art inspired her to start the Oxbow School.

Dean Sarah Cunningham brings a philosopher's perspective to the school.

Lillian Kingery ’02, the first PA student to attend Oxbow, created a series of pears in response to an assignment on light.

VISION 2:
A SCHOOL GROWS IN NAPA

The remark was one of those "what if ... ?" comments we make from time to time, spoken lightly and meant to be taken lightly. Having heard in 1996 about vintner Robert Mondavi's dream of creating a Napa Valley cultural institution centered around food, wine and art, Ann McKeever Hatch ’67 told friends, "If I were Robert Mondavi, I'd include a school."

One friend—who possibly knew Hatch better than she knew herself—approached Mondavi and said, "I know someone who can do a school for you." Then he told Hatch, "You'd better get to work. Bob wants a proposal in three months."

"I'd never been to Napa, and I no more knew how to 'do a school' than I knew how to perform eye surgery," Hatch laughs now. "However, I knew a lot about the art world. In addition, I could remember my own teenage years and figure out what I might have liked. I thought, 'Yes we can do this.' "

Three years later, in partnership with Mondavi and his wife, Margrit, Hatch opened the doors on Napa's Oxbow School, which offers a semester-long art immersion for high school juniors from all over the country and abroad.

Despite her professed naiveté about starting a school, Hatch was hardly a novice at making things happen. Philanthropy and culture run in the blood of this woman, whose ancestors founded the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. At 23, after graduating from Abbot Academy and the joint B.A.-B.F.A. program of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she had inherited a substantial fortune.

PUTTING WEALTH TO WORK
"At first I was shy about it," she confides, "but once I decided how I wanted to use my resources, I got more comfortable. Now I am very open about my situation: I've never had to take a job, but I'm a hard worker, and having more money than I need provides me with opportunities to accomplish things that are of interest. Philanthropy and resources are like hydrogen and oxygen to me. They're out there, and I work with them."

Hatch's most celebrated achievement came in 1983 when she founded the Capp Street Project in San Francisco. Established through Hatch's family foundation in a converted house on a somewhat shabby block, the nationally recognized project accommodated visiting artists for 12 weeks each. During half that time they would create works of art—often elaborate installations that were too avant-garde or cumbersome for most museums at that time, and of little interest to commercial galleries because they were too site-specific to be sold and moved. During the other six weeks, the visitors shared their artistry with the public in exhibitions and lectures.

Hatch also participated philanthropically in the creation of the Maud Morgan Visiting Artist's Apartment in Abbot Hall on the PA campus, and she has long been a fan of the Addison Gallery's Elson Artist-in-Residence program.

Thus, when confronted with the challenge of starting an art school, Hatch felt it should have a strong artist-in-residence component. Recognizing that few teens get the art exposure she found so valuable at Abbot, she decided it should be a high school—not a four-year school, but a one-semester experience modeled after Milton Academy's Mountain School in Vermont and other short-term enrichment programs. The curriculum would allow youngsters to mesh other disci- plines with art in an intellectually demanding way.

GETTING GOING
With the help of Yale Art Gallery Director Jock Reynolds ’67, at that time head of PA's Addison Gallery of American Art, Hatch arranged for the Mondavis to visit Andover and see students working in close correlation with a museum and with visiting artists. The Mondavis "got it" right away, she says, and told her, "Let's go."

Hatch was already going. Even before the Mondavis formally became co-founders by meeting her $2 million start-up contribution with $6 million of their own, she had begun buying up real estate. In a distressed Italian-American neighborhood overlooking an oxbow-shaped bend in the Napa River across from the vintner's future museum, she purchased 15 properties, including small wood-framed houses and a bank of modest apartments. To help her get started, she hired veteran arts administrator Alexandra Quinn ’87 as project coordinator and engaged Berkeley architect Stanley Saitowitz to design the three-acre campus. After an extensive search, art educator and printmaker Stephen Thomas was chosen as director. He in turn brought past philosophy professor Sarah Cunningham ’85, whose doctoral studies were in aesthetics, ethics and the rise of the development of the imagination, on board as dean and English teacher. The confluence of three Andover graduates on the school's leadership team was just a happy coincidence, says Hatch, who is now president and chairman of the board of Oxbow.

A visionary five-year plan for the physical plant includes construction of a dining hall and student center overlooking the river, as well as the relocation of the administration building, called Scaruffi House after the family who once occupied it, to create a quad. Rehabilitation of several other buildings is planned or under way, and some apartments have been converted into student and faculty housing. Also completed is the construction of three modern studios for painting, sculpture, printmaking and computer design. The studios feature high ceilings, with 18-foot-tall glass doors facing on the water. When the work is done, the school's capacity will be 48. In its start-up phase, it has accommodated between 14 and 22 students each term.

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© Phillips Academy, 2001