Sheri Kahn is leading a shake-up at the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas, and she and the school are likely to get significant new cash. Now, the question is: In a digital age, who has the time or money to study classical art?

by Jess McCuan . portrait by Rimas Zailskas

“You don’t necessarily want artists running an art school,” says Sheri Kahn, an outspoken 49-year-old native New Yorker who took over as executive director of the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas in January.

But for years, her school was run by artists—and one artist in particular, Ben Long. In 2002, Long, a fresco painter from Statesville, North Carolina, founded an art school in Asheville based on traditions of the Old Masters. He and his artist friends conducted classical drawing and painting classes in his College Street studio downtown, then on Rankin Avenue, before moving the school to its current location, in half of a 6,400-square-foot building on Depot Street in the now-bustling River Arts District. Long, who apprenticed with Italian fresco master Pietro Annigoni, has painted the walls of famous churches around the world. He splits time between the U.S. and Europe, and his repertoire includes a gigantic three-panel painting in the lobby of the Bank of America headquarters in Charlotte, the largest secular fresco in the U.S.

Back in Asheville, he and his cronies eventually attracted a crop of around 25 students each year to the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas, but the school’s enrollment, in recent years, has plateaued.

This fall, the League, like the street it sits on, is about to get a facelift. A few months ago, the nonprofit hired Kahn, a former instructor at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City. In addition to cleaning up and reorganizing the building on Depot Street, Kahn is traveling to universities in Western North Carolina and around the state, making a new pitch to cash-strapped administrators: When there’s no budget to hire art faculty, why not outsource classes to the Fine Arts League? She and her staff are tweaking the school’s curriculum to create a comprehensive four-year program. (It has long been three years.) And, they’re making a new marketing pitch to students around the country: move to beautiful Asheville for classical art training with some of the country’s best realist painters. Though she has not yet nailed down funding, she’s working with a patron to secure an endowment for the school that would help her hire more faculty, buy equipment and house students—both in Asheville and in Italy. Still, even with a cash infusion, she and her board are battling a bit of a perception problem: In a digital age, who has the time or cash to study classical art?

It’s a problem that vexes Kahn, whose own resume seems split between the very old and the very new. Raised in the Bronx, Kahn was adopted by a conservative Jewish family that moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, when she was 8. She remembers getting teased for attending Hebrew school, and once, on the bus, was accused of killing Jesus. “Most people had never met a Jewish person in their life,” she recalls. Though she flunked out of her Greensboro high school, she enrolled in community college and then finished a bachelor’s degree at Northeastern Illinois University. Twenty years later, after raising two daughters, she got a master’s in history from East Tennessee State University and taught courses in Jewish history and Jewish law. “I think I ultimately went into teaching because of a lack of education—to help correct the lack of education I saw,” she says.

She did administrative work along with her teaching, which, toward the end of her time at ETSU, included quite modern topics. Through its Cross-Disciplinary Studies department, she led classes like Successful Online Learning, Multimedia Presentation and Building E-Portfolios. She says it showed her how quickly and dramatically technology is shaping the brains of the next generation. “They really can’t hold thoughts very well,” she says of text-happy teens and twenty-somethings that she observed in her classroom and elsewhere. “They get bored easily... They have been entertained most of their life.”

Because she noted that shift, Kahn is working on her first book, an e-book, about critical thinking. She’ll teach college-age kids about old-fashioned concepts like war, peace and morality using videos and hyperlinks. “If you don’t understand what a democracy is from the Greeks, how do you know if we’re a democracy or a republic?” she says. “I don’t want people to think like me. I just want them to think.”

In her opinion, that’s also where classical art training comes in. Classes at the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas—intense training in subjects like anatomy, perspective and spatial relations—help develop problem-solving skills, attention span and hand-eye coordination. When Long started the school, he intended to not only teach techniques, but also to show students how art materials are made. A class in stretching canvas, he says, is just as important as practicing portraiture. “I want to teach students how to make their own ink—and their own ink pen,” he says.

But in the midst of a long recession, even if parents are convinced of the value of such training, it might be tough to convince them (or their children) to pay for it. Long always wanted the school to become a four-year program. It simply lacked the infrastructure to make that work. In 2006, the League hired longtime nonprofit administrator Anne Rawson, whose job was to facilitate the move to the new Depot Street building and help give the curriculum more structure. But Rawson says partnering with local universities didn’t make sense at the time.

Today, full-time tuition at the school runs $2,500 for a 12-week semester, with four courses and one elective. Part-time classes cost $700 per course, per semester. Most classes meet for three-hour sessions twice a week. Kahn and others intend for the classes to supplement traditional college coursework, or to serve as an alternative for someone taking a year off before or after college. But therein lies the rub. “For people to be able to have the time and money—that’s always been the issue and I imagine will always be,” says Rawson.

The fees and intense time commitment have led some on the League board to lean toward pursuing retirees (who, presumably, have more time and cash) as students, rather than college-age kids. But Peace Sullivan, a board member since the school’s founding, says one of the League’s aims is to catch artists young, before they learn bad habits. “Studying this kind of art is like studying a foreign language,” says Sullivan, a retired psychotherapist. “You have to get it in your bones.”

For her part, Kahn believes the new approach—attracting college-age kids for four years of training—is nothing if not an experiment: “This is the pilot year for a four-year program,” she says. “We don’t want many students, and we don’t expect to make any money on it.”

Whether the school stands to profit from the new approach remains to be seen. For now, Kahn and her staff—including longtime Long student Christopher Holt and new administrative assistant Anita Adams—will be brainstorming ways to reinvigorate the school. The League put a blog on its website, and Kahn has been rallying high-profile academic speakers to visit. In April, Ken Robinson, a Brit who speaks about creativity and education, stopped by for a lunchtime discussion with students. In October, Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play and a popular TED speaker, will visit.

Kahn, who has never picked up a paintbrush, met Ben Long in an Asheville bar. She recalls sitting in the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar with him a few summers back, popping off about how much she loved frescoes. After that day, she started running into him more frequently, particularly after her second husband died and she moved to Asheville from Johnson City in 2009. Now that she’s settled in town, she’s thrown her full-time effort into revamping the Fine Arts League. “I’m a tsunami,” she says, referring to her first eight months as director. “It’s like clearing the room out before you rearrange things and move new stuff in.” To be sure, she won’t be remaking the school. She’s simply beefing it up—adding to the curriculum and faculty and, hopefully, the cash flow. “The school has great structure,” she says, standing in a drawing room full of anatomy charts. “It has great bones.”