The fall semester of my last year of art school had barely started when the air conditioning in the senior art studios broke. If I lived further north that might not have been a problem, but I lived in Georgia, where the summer heat didn't quite break until September or October. And it was still August.
To make matters worse, the studios were in an old building with high ceilings and big glass panels built into the steep, sloped roof. All the natural lighting normally would've been a blessing. But with the air conditioning broken, it instead turned the studios into an oven. Heat seeped in all day long and remained trapped there indefinitely.
The studios themselves were two rows of cubicles with high, 8ft walls, built right in the center of the building after the college had purchased it. The open ceilings of each cell and the large gap between the cubicle wall and the sloped windows above allowed the light - and the heat - to reach anyone who might be working inside them. Each graduating senior was assigned a specific cubicle as their personal, 24/7 studio space.
There was a big hallway around the perimeter of the building. One section of the hallway widened to make space for a sink to wash brushes in and a table and chairs for critique sessions. The bathroom was there, too - a unisex one with a derelict little door, nearly hanging off its hinges.
Initially I'd worried that having just one toilet in the building wouldn't be enough, but it ended up not being an issue. Most of the students didn't last long. The heat during the day was too oppressive. At times, the air in the building was so suffocating that the heat almost felt like a physical presence, like a large creature weighing down on our shoulders, crushing us under its weight.
I caught the student assigned to the cell next to mine moving out all his paintings just a couple weeks into the semester.
"Hey," I said, pausing outside the door to my own cubicle to gawk. The student - I never bothered to learn his name - looked entirely morose as he stacked a few canvases by the door. "Moving out already?"
"Yeah," he said, solemnly, heavily dropping another canvas on the pile. "I have no idea how you can work in here. My oils keep melting."
"What?" I said, confused. I shuffled over to get a look at the top painting on the stack, and sure enough, the half-finished landscape he'd made with oil paint was completely distorted. Strangely, the melted paint seemed to be in round sections, about as large as my head, scattered all over the canvas.
"It's fucking weird, right?" he said, following my gaze.
"Wouldn't it melt all over?" I asked. "Why is it just in some parts?"
"Beats the hell out of me," he replied. "My best guess is it was cloudy or something so it melted unevenly where the sun got to it."
"Guess it's lucky I work with ink," I said. "It dries fast so it'd sooner burst into flames than melt, and it's too humid in here for a fire."
The student clucked his tongue. "I shoulda used acrylic. Might've held up better." He sighed and picked up the stack. "Too late now, I guess. I'm going to see if I can salvage them at home."
"Good luck," I said, watching him go. At least he had the option of working at home. My apartment was too small for the large paintings I wanted to make, so I was forced to bear the heat.
I and the few other students who had to work in the little plaster cells complained to the administration about the heat many times, but I guess our small group just wasn't a priority because the air conditioner remained broken. The heat remained an issue into September, even when the outside air had cooled off a little. I began to think there was something wrong with the building, that perhaps the AC was spitting out hot air or the large windows had been specifically designed to turn the place into an oven.
