Article charts art professor's course

The Red & Black published a nice feature on Lamar Dodd School of Art professor of sculpture Larry Millard online today:

Now a professor at the University and coordinator of its sculpture program, Millard anomalously began with aspirations to be a painter — that is, until James Agard’s painting course at Virginia Intermont College.

“I started to realize that I had such a strange conception of what sculpture is up until that time,” Millard said. “I’d always thought it was always only figurative and always only sort of like reliefs … And he awakened me to understanding that sculpture could be something else.”

Millard talks about his training and early experiences, and also shares a few insights about the imagery he creates. And like many faculty members throughout Franklin College and the university campus, Millard can chart his professional career by the successes of his students.

Greg Shelnutt, an art professor at Clemson University, attributes a great deal of his career to Millard, first meeting him in 1984 while studying in Cortona, Italy.

“‘Hey, what do you think?’” Shelnutt said. “That was his number one question. It wasn’t just about him, even though he knew a lot, it was about saying what did you think and what are you going to do? And he would listen … he would say, ‘Well that’s going to work for you,’ or, ‘I think you should think about this some more.’”