This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations, where Breya Jones was an Ida B. Wells Fellow.
The Kentucky College of Art and Design, the state’s only independent arts school, received $5.5 million in funding over the next two years from the state and the city of Louisville, to support the school’s operating costs and programming.
To KyCAD’s supporters, the windfall was a vindication of the hard work school administrators and faculty have put in since the school’s founding in 2009.
“Our leaders agree that the Commonwealth deserves a comprehensive, vibrant and innovative arts space that will bring opportunity, networks and a new wave of thinkers and makers to the heart of future development and thinking in the region,” KyCAD president Moira Scott Payne said in a news release in April, when the funding was announced.
Behind the flurry of excitement, however, critics of the school have raised concerns about the treatment of staff and students, and questioned whether KyCAD has been living up to its goal of bolstering the local arts community in Louisville. Some former students and faculty members say KyCAD administrators created a toxic environment, in which they felt demeaned and unsupported.
A decade and a half since its founding, the school is still seeking accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a key requirement to hand out degrees other institutions will recognize and to issue federal financial aid to students.
In materials submitted for its accreditation, KyCAD leadership identified “peer institutions” as the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Kansas City Art Institute and Maryland Institute College of Art. But KyCAD’s enrollment has remained low in comparison to those peer institutions.
Ten students have graduated since January 2019, when the school welcomed its first cohort of students after becoming an independent college.
“The biggest problem at KyCAD is a lack of leadership, a lack of coherence, a lack of vision,” said Leslie Millar, a former KyCAD English professor.
A new partnership
In the beginning, founder Churchill Davenport held lofty goals. He grew up in Louisville but left to pursue his passion for art, studying and teaching at Yale, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Pratt Institute in New York.
He hoped to create a premier arts school that would make Kentucky a center of creativity. To bring his dream to life, he set up shop in the basement of the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Louisville. From those administrative offices, the Kentucky School of Art — as KyCAD was originally known — raised funds, held community art classes, and brought artists to town for talks and lectures.
In 2010, Davenport approached Spalding University and proposed a partnership: The Kentucky School of Art would essentially become Spalding’s art department, while the university would provide the financial and institutional support the nascent art school needed to grow.
“He said, ‘We would really like to affiliate with the university so our students could get financial aid, and we could grow into being a legitimate school,’” said Tori Murden McClure, Spalding’s former president.
Over the next few years, enrollment grew dramatically, to over 120 students, with a full complement of faculty to support them.
By 2017, however, the relationship between KyCAD and Spalding had begun to fray. After joining with Spalding, KyCAD still maintained its status as an independent nonprofit, which allowed it to fundraise to support its work. Tensions came to a head after KyCAD hired Scott Payne to serve as president of the 501c3 and dean of the college. In some professional communication, Scott Payne was referred to as the president without clarification of what entity she led. That title misrepresented the relationship between KyCAD and Spalding, according to McClure, who retired from Spalding at the end of the 2023-2024 school year.
“I don’t know any other [university] president in the United States who would tolerate a separate board and a separate president on her campus,” McClure said. “But I did, because I’m willing to play along.”
More serious, however, was the fact that KyCAD’s website suggested KyCAD and Spalding were two separate entities, with KyCAD receiving official accreditation through Spalding, an assertion that Scott Payne had also made to the SACSCOC during a training, according to McClure. That language, McClure said, threatened Spalding’s own accreditation status.
“Saying KyCAD is accredited through Spalding — like, no. That would be like saying you got your immigration status approved through Spalding,” McClure said.
Ultimately, McClure said she had no choice but to replace Scott Payne with another Spalding faculty member to be the dean, though McClure said she was willing to continue fostering KyCAD at Spalding. Shortly thereafter, however, in spring 2018, KyCAD’s board voted to leave the university altogether and establish the art school as a fully independent entity.
“From my point of view, they left,” McClure said. “From their point of view, I'm sure it would read that I kicked them out.”
Davenport did not respond to multiple interview requests. But Scott Payne said taking KyCAD independent had been part of the plan from the time she was hired, and the relationship with Spalding had simply run its course.
“It…was in the job description: ‘You will make it an independent college,’” Scott Payne said. “These are things that I came in knowing that we intended to do. And in order to be fully independent, we had to break away.”
Striking out as an independent school
Today, KyCAD’s campus consists of two buildings in Old Louisville. One, an unassuming one-story brick building, contains classrooms, art studios, and a gallery space, and sits directly next to Spalding’s administrative offices.
More classrooms, along with a library and KyCAD’s own administrative offices, are housed a short distance away at the historic Speed Mansion, a local landmark.
The Speed family, who made their money, in part, from their Farmington hemp plantation, has a long-standing connection to the arts scene in Louisville. Most notably, Hattie Bishop Speed founded the Speed Art Museum, the oldest and largest art museum in the city, in 1925 as a memorial to her husband, James Breckinridge Speed.
KyCAD’s supporters say the school is doing well, and the new injection of funds from the state and city governments will help it finally achieve accreditation and fulfill Davenport’s original vision of bolstering the Louisville art scene.
But some former students and staff members say the split with Spalding left them in freefall.
Kenyatta Bosman is a mixed-media artist in Louisville. They enrolled at KyCAD in 2018 to study studio art, with their main medium being photography.
Bosman spoke highly of their professors and fellow students. They said they learned a lot during their time at KyCAD and built connections that have lasted until today.
Following the police killing of Breonna Taylor in March 2020, however, Bosman said KyCAD asked Black students for help in crafting a response, which they felt put added pressure on students during an already emotionally taxing time.
The school also switched to remote teaching during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. After Bosman raised concerns about KyCAD’s ability to monitor students’ files and search history on their school-issued laptops, they were asked to return the device to the school.
Bosman was out of town but said they’d return the computer once they were back in Louisville. In response, Bosman said KyCAD threatened to call the police to retrieve the laptop.
The idea that KyCAD would threaten a Black student with police action was particularly outrageous to Bosman, given the ongoing protests in Louisville in response to Taylor’s killing.
It didn’t help that the area around campus was a center of law enforcement activity. At the time, Bosman was living on 7th Street in the Old Louisville neighborhood, and regularly encountered local police and National Guard members in the area.
The situation left Bosman feeling adrift and alone, and they decided to leave KyCAD in Spring 2020.
“I didn't feel like they really cared about me as an individual,” Bosman said of KyCAD. “I just didn't feel like I belonged there anymore, because I feel like you're literally jeopardizing my safety, as well as my mental health.”
KyCAD officials did not respond to requests for comment about Bosman's experience.
Some former faculty members also allege that the work culture at KyCAD was toxic.
“When you are being browbeaten, especially when you go into a meeting where the people who are in charge are not prepared, and who do not know what you're talking about, it’s really disconcerting,” said Leslie Millar, who taught English at KyCAD on and off over the years.
Millar has served on the boards of several local arts organizations, including the Speed Art Museum, and currently runs the local print-making studio and gallery Quonset Hut. She said KyCAD’s Vice President of Academic Affairs, Joyce Ogden, criticized her for the way she dressed and the administration chastised her for how she referred to students.
“They told me at one point that I wasn't allowed to say ‘my students.’ I had to call them ‘KyCAD students,’” Millar said.
Ogden and KyCAD administrators did not respond to requests for comment on Millar’s experiences.
In interviews, however, KyCAD administrators said they have tried to foster a leadership style that is open and welcoming.
“If anyone is stressed or anything, they throw themselves on that sofa, and they will tell me,” Scott Payne said. “When things are easy and open like that, they can be resolved.”
She said she wants KyCAD to be a “safe place” for employees and students alike.
“I try, and we all try, and create a workplace where people can have an off day or a bad day,” Scott Payne said.
Ogden echoed the sentiment.
“It’s really open,” she said of the culture at KyCAD. “If you're not happy, that’s okay. It's just being open and saying, ‘What can we do? Where do you go if you’re not happy? Is there a different direction for you within the organization? Is there a different pathway that we can support you in getting there?’”
KyCAD’s website lists seven full-time faculty members, which does not include administrative and support staff. The university did not respond to multiple requests asking for student enrollment numbers for the 2024-2025 school year. Still, turnover among teaching staff has been high. Of the six teachers who started at KyCAD when it became independent in 2018, one remains on faculty, according to academic catalogs.
Student success at KyCAD
The negative experiences felt by some students and staff aren’t universal. At KyCAD’s senior thesis gallery show in May 2024, students spoke highly of the school.
“It's been so amazing,” said Jesenia Avila-Ugalde, one of the graduating seniors.
At the graduate show, she stood near huge, white arches decorated with bright, multi-colored accents. Inside each arch were images that attendees could scan to create animations on their phone. There was unique food under each arch.
The work, Avila-Ugalde said, was meant to evoke a Mexican pueblo, and was inspired by the immigrant communities along the Preston Corridor in Louisville.
Avila-Ugalde said her time at KyCAD helped her hone her craft and gave her a chance to bond with fellow students and feel connected to the local arts community.
“I've sacrificed a lot,” Avila-Ugalde said. “We were joking about how I was pretty much living in the studio. But I think it just pushes you to make really good work.”
Nathaniel Hendrickson, a studio art professor at the school, said KyCAD is a fast-paced environment where the culture and administrative structures are still in development.
“I think our faculty meetings really feel like a startup,” Hendrickson said. “There’s a lot of administration and paperwork, and trying to just get procedures down. But our administrative team is really talented.”
Where some former staff members found the culture chaotic, Hendrickson viewed it as a source of camaraderie.
“The culture right now feels like a family more than a finished school,” Hendrickson said. “We’re all kind of in this together. Even the students are really working to carve out what they want the school to look like and to be.”
Going forward, KyCAD hopes to use the $5.5 million in funding to support intuitional expenses and help cover costs associated with the accreditation process, like hosting Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges members for school visits.
School administrators say they are in the final stages of the accreditation process, and hope to complete it within the next few years.
“I think KyCAD will become valuable to create a generation coming through,” Scott Payne said. “And I hope that more and more, it helps young people become mobile, to feel that they’re able to go out into the world with a portfolio of skills, transferable skills. And think we’re already doing that.”
