Motivation 101 with Maximilian Re-Sugiura, Principal of High School of Art & Design

So your kid wants to be an artist, eh? Before piling on the discouragement—but how will you make you living?!— as many loving but financially concerned parents are inclined to do, first give a hearing to Maximillian Re-Sugiura, the dynamic, inspiring and very can do principal of the renowned High School of Art and Design.

Located in midtown east at 245 East 56th Street, the institution shares the address with elementary school P.S. 59, which has its own handsomely wrought metal gate entrance and open courtyard. Happily—and invitingly— Art & Design looks like what it is thanks to the brightly painted mural and a new snazzy logo which has adorned its entrance for the past few years, a marked improvement to the streetscape over the plain grey stone that was there before.

The building itself is a seven-story modernist structure, newly constructed and opened for the 2012-13 school year.

The school’s peripatetic history is notable one. Established in 1936 as the School of Industrial Art, its initial home was in a former elementary school at 247 West 40th Street—the same theatre district block as the New York Herald-Tribune newspaper. In 1941, it found the first of its East Side homes at 211 79th Street. In 1960, the year of its name change to the High School of Art and Design, it decamped to 1075 2nd Avenue at 57th Street.

A very foreshortened list of Art & Design’s many illustrious alumni are singer Tony Bennett; sculptor Eva Hesse; animator, Ralph Bakshi; artist and writer Art Spiegelman; pioneering adult film star and feminist director, Candida Royalle; theater icon Harvey Fierstein; movie director Amy Heckerling; fashion designer Marc Jacobs; graffiti artist Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara) and hip-hop emcee Pharoahe Monch (Troy Donaldson).

As for Principal Re-Sugiura, he became the school’s principal in 2019 and among his many initiatives are programs that provide practical, demonstrable answers to students and parents’ questions about the viability having a creative career in the 2020s and beyond.

Re-Sugiura’s journey to Art and Design is quite interesting. He grew up in bucolic Princeton, New Jersey. Though both his parents were artists, he wasn’t only academically inclined (including Japanese school on Sundays), but also multi-sport athlete playing tennis, baseball and basketball.

Leaving the Garden State behind, Re-Sugiara attended the Fashion Institute of Technology—where he played first singles and first doubles on the men’s tennis team—and afterwards worked for American Apparel, where his natural leadership qualities and management skills emerged.

For an exploratory mind like Re-Sugiura’s, business sucess wasn’t enough and he pivoted to education, entering the NYC Teaching Fellows program and becoming a special education teacher at the High School of Environmental Studies at 444 W. 56th Street. A confluence of circumstances, including the encouragement of a mentor at the school, Barbara Harris, who brought Re-Sugiura to the administrative side as special ed lead.

After earning a Master’s in Education from Brooklyn College, Re-Sugiura became an assistant principal. In all, he served eleven years at Environmental Studies before taking over at Art and Design, where students call him “Max.”

Don’t let such informality fool you, for Re-Sugiura is a man of many plans. One of them is how even high school students can prepare themselves for the marketplace.

“As an arts teacher— and as the child of artists myself— a problem I’ve been bothered with, this big nagging question, which is when you’re a young person with your parents, who’ve raised you for 14-15 years, and given you food, shelter, values and love and then you say mom, dad, I want to be an artist. Overwhelmingly the response— with the exceptions of Art & Design— is well how are you going to make a living?”

To demonstrably answer that question, Re-Sugiura partnered with corporate experts like Met Life and Proskauer Rose LLP law firm to teach students about things like IP protection and copyright law. But that wasn’t all.

“The next thing I wanted to do is make sure that students would have a place to sell – ok they have their copyrights and protected it, now let’s make some money off it so I thought Etsy would be a great place in the digital marketplace that would provide not only free stores for our students and listings but also help our students learn best practices SEO and e-commerce”

The Graphics Artists Guild of the U.S. did their part, talking to students about pricing their work, while the Ridgewood Savings Bank came in to offer free checking and savings accounts to those students if they needed them to access the Etsy site.

Ever creative, Re-Sugiura also found a way for students who completed all their Work Based Learning hours to receive monetary stipends via the Office of Student Pathways. It’s all a bit complicated but talking to Re-Sugiura, it’s obvious that he’s a man who thrives on complexity and problem solving—and the tangible results those solutions bring.

“So now if you’re a student you can go to your parents and say I want to be an artist and here’s my five-point plan of how I’m going to design, protect, sell, save, and then iterate on my product” the principal enthused.

Indeed, so inspiring was Re-Sugiura’s presentation, this reporter was ready to hang up his notebook and return to high school to get it right this time. Since that wasn’t possible, he asked Re-Sugiura, who has the motivational manner of superior sports coach or manager—who has in fact been a soccer and handball coach— what sports meant to him.

“I think physical education is a critical part of a creative mind. Not only are tactile sensibilities reinforced through athleticism – this isn’t just my philosophy here, this is neuroscience – our school has eleven PSAL teams, whether it’s something as traditional as basketball, softball or volleyball. We also have bowling, table tennis, a fencing team– again different visual sensibilities and different strengths– and we’re really proud of the way our physical ed program works.”