A Fine Frenzy: New Mexico Highlands University Artists and Teachers in the1960s

Essentially a picture book, A Fine Frenzy illustrates the work of Elmer Schooley, Ray Drew, Paul Volckening, and Harry Leippe, the primary artists and teachers of the 1960s at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Schooley, Drew, Volckening, and Leippe expressed themselves uncommonly well in art and language, and these pages reveal their character along with their intelligence and humor. Resisting movements and trends, Schooley, Drew, Volckening, and Leippe remained grounded in the traditions of classical art, while producing prints, paintings, watercolors, ceramics, sculpture and jewelry that defined their own modernity. They taught through example and through their art, demonstrating superb execution, high educational standards, and personal commitment to students. Their legacy lies in the many accomplished artists and teachers who were their students and in the admiration and understanding of art they inspired in so many students of that era. Renaissance thinkers and American individualists, they were the Highlands art faculty in the 1960s.