When Leslie King-Hammond arrived at MICA in 1973, she didn’t come with a master plan. She came through what she calls “a kind of serendipitous surrender,” a willingness to say yes whenever art opened a door. “Windows opened,” she recalls, “and whether I was banging on the doorframe or falling through the window—forward, backward, or upside down—I decided that as long as it had anything to do with the arts, I wanted to be involved and see where the journey took me.”

At the time, she was completing her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University when a classmate told her MICA needed someone to teach art history, specifically, the history that wasn’t being taught. Black students were voicing their frustration: the curriculum reflected none of their stories, none of their heroes. She started by teaching one evening class. Two weeks later, she was asked to teach another section for day students “who were incensed they couldn’t take it.”

From that point on, her classes were never under-enrolled; they were overflowing. Students from Hopkins began taking them too, drawn by the magnetic force of her storytelling and the long-overdue truth-telling she brought to art history.

“It showed how deeply people hungered for this knowledge,” she says. “People were ready for an honest conversation about art and humanity.”

That hunger for knowledge, for truth, for change became a defining thread through her five decades at MICA. It also revealed something deeper about the school itself: MICA was, and still is, a place willing to be uncomfortable in the pursuit of transformation.

Anger, Alchemy, and Art as a Human Calling

Hammond often jokes that she’s “an angry Black woman,” but it’s a statement of purpose, not temperament. “The first image that truly impacted me,” she says, “was the open casket of Emmett Till. Tell me how you can see that and not be angry.” But instead of letting that anger consume her, she transmuted it into energy, a tool for creation, community, and change.

At MICA, she found a place where such energy was not only tolerated but encouraged. “That’s the joy of being at MICA,” she says. “You get to do things that make a difference.” In that freedom, she built spaces that hadn’t existed before: the Center for Race and Culture, post-baccalaureate programs that welcomed nontraditional and international students, and classrooms where every lecture became a conversation about being fully human.

Her pedagogy was grounded in radical partnership. “I’m 50% of the contract,” she told her students. “You’re the other 50%. You bring your full self. You’ll be uncomfortable at times, but you’ll grow.” Everyone started her class with an A; the only question was whether they could keep it. “I didn’t grade on fear,” she says. “I graded on mastery.”

This, too, is the MICA difference: the belief that art education is not about compliance but courage. It’s about creating the conditions where discomfort sparks discovery and truth-telling becomes a creative act. “MICA was a place where you could experiment and take risks,” Hammond says. “You could mix and match who you were and still be effective—as long as you had vision, energy, and someone to pass the torch to.”

Building Programs, Buildings, and Bridges

Hammond’s impact on MICA is visible not just in the students she taught, but in the very architecture of the institution. When two recently divorced women walked into her office in the 1970s—no appointment, just determination—she saw opportunity. They wanted to finish their education in the arts. “I thought, this is interesting,” she laughs. “Their husbands were paying their tuition as part of the settlement!”

Hammond created a program for them, the now-legendary post-baccalaureate program, which grew rapidly to include international students, career changers, and artists in transition. “It was flexible, tailored to each student’s interests and skills,” she says. “It gave them agency.”

As the program exploded, space became an issue. MICA was renting townhouses that were unsafe and inefficient. Hammond marched to the administration with a blunt message: “This is a liability waiting to happen. You need to centralize the programs.” Her persistence helped spur the purchase of what became key campus buildings, the old Cannon Shoe Factory and later the London Fog building. “Buy the building,” she told them. “Invest in the future.” And they did.

Her vision always extended beyond MICA’s walls. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, she turned a national tragedy into a campus-wide act of solidarity. She persuaded the administration to welcome displaced New Orleans art students and brought artist Willie Birch to campus as an artist-in-residence. The community’s response culminated in a New Orleans–style second line parade—complete with jazz, costumes, cocoa, and police escorts. “It was beautiful, joyful, and profoundly human,” she says. “That was MICA at its best.”

Hammond’s leadership has never been about titles or recognition. “I didn’t care if the credit went somewhere else,” she says. “As long as they didn’t cut my budget!” Her laughter fills the room, but the message is clear: the work was always for the students and the future.

Carrying the Torch into the Next Century

Now Professor Emerita, Hammond looks back at MICA not with nostalgia but with awe for its ongoing capacity to evolve. Her legacy is visible in the Leslie King-Hammond Graduate Award, which supports emerging artists committed to community engagement and social change. But for her, the award is less a monument than a mandate. “Being in the arts is about discovery and experimentation,” she says. “It’s an adventure.”

That spirit—adventurous, irreverent, deeply human—is what she hopes MICA carries into its third century. “Even today, people have forgotten what it means to be human,” she warns. “Why do we see injustice, greed, cruelty? Because we’ve lost that baseline. Being human is the most extraordinary thing, and we have to fight to remember it.”

As MICA approaches its 200th anniversary, Hammond sees continuity between the school’s founding ideals and its present mission: a refusal to separate art from humanity, or education from justice. “Every generation has to redefine what creativity means,” she says. “For me, it meant fighting for inclusion. For today’s students, it might mean fighting for the planet. But it’s all the same spirit. It’s about using your gifts to make the world more humane.”

In that way, MICA’s story mirrors Hammond’s own: rooted in anger, transformed by art, and sustained by an unyielding belief in the power of community. “You get to do things like that at MICA,” she says, smiling. “You get to make a difference.”

MICA, like Hammond, has always been a place of serendipitous surrender: open to chance, to change, to the urgent call of history. It’s a place that understands, as she does, that art is not only about what we make, but who we become.