How a Young Michael Stipe Found Creative Camaraderie in Art School

Mike Stipe moved into his parents’ house just outside Athens and came to the University of Georgia like he’d always come to new schools in new towns: eyes open, mouth shut, noticing everything. There was a lot to keep him busy. Registering for classes, finding his way around the campus and then around the business district to its northwest, a blocks-long grid of shops, theaters, restaurants, and bars, most catering to the interests and budgets of students: T-shirts, all-day breakfasts, happy hours with fifty-cent drafts, textbooks, sandwiches and chips, blazers and khaki pants. More than a few storefronts were empty, dark windows testifying to the magnetic pull of the nearby suburban malls, which had been drawing businesses away from the center of town since the mid-’70s. But the telephone poles bristled with life: flyers for parties and bands, two-for-one drink nights, new wave night at Tyrone’s.

He signed up for classes in the university’s art department, projecting a major in photo design. It was one of the more pre-professional courses of study in the department, preparing students for careers in advertising and graphic design. But, as his parents reminded him, it was important to find a focus. They didn’t mind if he studied art, but having a practical application for his passion was the smart thing to do. He took the other intro-level art classes too, the basics of drawing, color, and photography. Slowly his resistance to his new home (I hate it, I hate it, I hate it) began to ebb. Inspired by his changed circumstances, feeling nothing like the high schooler he’d been in Collinsville, the new student presented himself with a revised name. No longer Mike, he’d now be Michael Stipe.

Tucked into a ramshackle building away from the main campus, the art department existed on a different plane from the rest of the University of Georgia. While most of the school was defined by the usual big southern university institutions, the football team, the fraternities and sororities, and the teaching of solid mainstream values, the art department tilted toward subversion. The shift in the art school’s sensibility started in the 1960s, when longtime chairman Lamar Dodd, an accomplished naturalist painter who had joined the department in 1937, launched a staffing initiative. In pursuit of practicing artists with degrees from impressive schools, Dodd wound up hiring a legion of well-trained but bohemian artists.

Jim Herbert, a painter and video artist, made experimental films that featured nude models, many of whom were his students, a move that would have been pilloried today. Judith McWillie’s ideals were informed by vernacular art. Robert Croker took a radical approach to teaching drawing and painting, compelling students to finish a drawing in as little as five seconds. Or else he’d have them work on an elaborate piece for two hours, only to instruct them to toss it on the floor; then he’d put on some music and tell them to dance on the much labored-upon work until it was in tatters. “Some of the kids would be like, What do you mean?!, like really freaking out,” says former student Mark Cline. “But he was teaching us to think differently, that the act of creating was more important than the work itself. They wanted to shock us out of normalcy.”

For a certain kind of southern kid, the ones who didn’t like sports and had no interest in studying agriculture or law or business, finding the University of Georgia’s art school was like discovering a utopia. Sam Seawright, a preacher’s kid who grew up in northern Georgia, recalls visiting his older brother John on campus one weekend, going from a screening of Jim Herbert’s art films to an outdoor lecture by Truman Capote and then to parties full of young people exactly like him: small-town kids just learning that they weren’t the only weird people around, and that their dreams and ambitions weren’t so outlandish after all. “If you were different in your tiny town in Georgia, you’d fantasize about going to school in Athens,” Seawright says. “It was an oasis for misfits and artists. If you didn’t toe the line in Elberton, Georgia, or wherever, Dalton or Bainbridge, you’d come to Athens and find like-minded people. There was support; people lifted each other up and made everybody feel important and worthwhile. And there were just beautiful souls here.”

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Now Michael dressed like a college student. Tennis shoes, shredded jeans, a T-shirt beneath a hooded sweatshirt. In classes he seemed to shrink into his hoodie, a silent presence shrouded in chestnut curls and layers of cotton. Other students tried to connect with him and had better luck when they were away from the crowd. In the hallway, somewhere on campus, in a restaurant. He had a way of drawing attention, even when he didn’t say a word. Armistead Wellford, a painting student who sat near Michael in a color theory class, noticed that his quiet classmate didn’t transport his art supplies in a satchel or one of the multi-compartment carriers the other students had. Michael toted a child’s lunch box from the Munsters TV sitcom. “I was taken with him immediately,” Wellford says. “I knew he was cool.” At one point Michael dyed his hair green and cut it into eccentric shapes, curls piled high one week, then razored off the next, the sides out of balance. It was impossible to ignore, and so was he.

Judith McWillie, who taught the color theory class where Wellford encountered him, came from Memphis, and when Michael’s hair took on a tight-in-back, floppy-in-the-front shape that reminded her of Jerry Lee Lewis, she took note. After he found Athens’s vintage stores, Michael’s look evolved in other ways. He started coming to class in fuchsia velvet pants and mismatched patterned shirts, and the loudness of his wardrobe and its contrast with his quiet demeanor gave him a kind of quirky gravitas among his fellow students. When McWillie told her students to make hyperrealistic paintings of something that’s impossible to paint, she noticed that Michael’s initial frustration with the assignment led him to create an image that bridged realism and abstraction in a strikingly unique way. “He got the gist and applied it in a different way.”

Painting professor Scott Belville saw the same thing in his entry-level class and was so struck by how Michael combined elements of a landscape and a still life on one canvas, he kept it to show other students who could benefit from seeing something so unusual. Later in the term Belville pulled Michael aside to ask about his plans for his future. Michael told him he wanted to major in photo design, and the professor, a talented painter in his own right, urged him to think about focusing his energies in another direction. “I told him, ‘You may want to think about painting. I think you’ve got something here.’”

Beneath the roof of the art department’s little building, boundaries and limitations faded. The list of guest lecturers and resident artists included the likes of Elaine de Kooning, Alice Neel, and Philip Guston. “You could walk down the hall and take a class with Willem de Kooning’s wife,” Cline recalls. “And Alice Neel. I mean, fuck! Philip Guston walked in one day, a year before he died, and there he’d be, teaching painting and blowing people’s minds. Taking us out of ourselves. So when it comes to the overriding aesthetic, that’s what was really important: get out of yourself, get away from these structures of how it was supposed to be.”

Andy Nasisse, a ceramics professor who specialized in vernacular folk art, brought in Howard Finster, the folk artist, musician, and preacher, who made rustic, almost childlike paintings and sculptures. Finster was a real southern eccentric, a charismatic visionary whose work featured religious symbols, saints, space aliens, and Elvis Presley. Finster’s spirit of inclusivity—from the subjects he chose to incorporate into his paintings to his openhearted approach to the students—reflected the spirit the department’s teachers tried to impart to their students. “You saw people like him, you knew you could just do it,” says Curtis Crowe, who studied painting. “You don’t need credentials or training, just enthusiasm and getting up and doing it. We were like, We can do it too! Anyone can!” Sitting in a chair not far from Crowe, Michael came to Finster’s presentation with an air of skepticism, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and brow knit together. But after an hour of the artist’s stories, songs, and tales of the visions that had led him to take up art as an expression of the Holy Spirit, the young student was leaning forward, eyes alight. “He was knocked out and went up to visit Finster” in his Paradise Garden home/studio/exhibition grounds, professor Art Rosenbaum recalled to me in 2021.

Finster wrote songs to accompany his art, and strummed a banjo as he told stories about his life and art. It all came bathed in the same light that flooded his dreams and visions. Finster was extraordinary, but he wasn’t alone: the weave of art and music was everywhere. Rosenbaum was as celebrated for his folk music archivalism as he was for his painting, and he used musicians as models, having his students paint them while they played. Robert Croker blasted the Ramones and the Velvet Underground in class while his students painted and had them bring their drawing pads to a nightclub to make sketches while bands performed and people danced. Students who could play brought their instruments to school, found collaborators, moved into empty rooms and staircases to see what kind of sound they could make. To Judith McWillie, it all went together. “You had to play music in order to be heard. Art takes a long time, and it’s silent and needs a place to hang. That segued into performance art, where it all merged. And the vernacular vision came out because, Fuck that, I want to explode. I need to do this!”

McWillie also recognized the connection between vernacular art, which emphasized feeling and expression over craft, and the visceral punch of punk rock. The students liked to listen to music and chat while they were painting in class, and when McWillie drifted past to look in on their work, she’d drift into their conversations. When an Eric Clapton song came on one day, she edged into a conversation Michael was having with another student. While Clapton blazed away on the radio, he posed the question to her: Was virtuosity really the mark of a great rock guitarist? McWillie shrugged. “I said, ‘If you can’t play it on a $50 guitar from Sears, it ain’t rock ’n’ roll.’”

Something about art schools makes kids want to rock. For just as the art college at Leeds Polytechnic was serving as a spawning ground for British post-punk bands, the University of Georgia’s art school would soon become a hub in America’s independent music scene.

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By the time Melanie Herrold came for a visit, in the midst of a road trip to see family in Alabama, Michael greeted his old friend happily and showed her everything he had found in his new home: the art department building, the cafés and bars where the art students hung out, and a multilevel record store Michael was so excited to show Melanie that he missed a step near the front and took a tumble, landing with a thud near the counter. The guy sitting there, tall and dark haired, cradling an unplugged Fender Telecaster guitar, looked up and smiled. You okay? Michael hopped up, smiled, grabbed Melanie’s arm, and whispered into her ear. That’s Richard, he’s kind of an expert. His name wasn’t Richard, but Michael would figure that out soon enough.

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Excerpted from The Name of This Band is R.E.M.: A Biography by Peter Ames Carlin. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Peter Ames Carlin.