The newest addition to Washington and Lee’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, Jordan Peimer, said he believes in the wide-spanning power of creativity.
“When you get beyond governments, there’s a well of creativity in the world that is almost universal,” he said.
Jordan Peimer is the new director for the Lenfest Center for the Arts. He succeeds Rob Mish, who retired in June. Mish, ’76, held the position since 2005, according to The Columns.
Before coming to work at W&L, Peimer was the executive director of ArtPower at the University of California, San Diego, where he created programming for the university’s performing arts department.
Peimer took an unorthodox route to the creative world. He never planned on working in the arts, he said. He started off as a lawyer.
“I hated being a lawyer,” he said. “Like I couldn’t stand it, and I was a lawyer for all of about four months, then I quit my job and didn’t know what to do.”
He said he spent the next couple of years doing odd jobs in freelance writing and movie production.
Then, in the 1990s, Republican senators threatened to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, and Peimer’s outlook changed, he said. The endowment’s government appropriations dropped from $162 million in 1995 to $99 million in 1996 — the lowest level of funding since 1975, according to the endowment’s website.
Peimer said he helped create the Los Angeles Coalition for Freedom of Expression, later known as the National Coalition for Freedom of Expression, to defend the endowment.
“Many of the artists who were under attack were friends of mine, and my background as a lawyer was in freedom of expression, so I just sort of fell in with [the coalition],” he said.
Peimer said while he doesn’t consider himself an artist, he enjoys working to help artists to protect or present their works.
“I love being around creatives. I love being able to help other people make work. It really makes me happy to know that I’ve fostered other people’s work,” Peimer said.
After working with the National Coalition for Freedom of Expression, he went on to work in fine art programming.
One of the most memorable places he worked, he said, was at the Skirball Cultural Center, a Jewish cultural institute that shares Jewish fine arts in Los Angeles, California.
During his 18 years at the Skirball Center, Peimer said he focused on creating cross cultural art programming.
“Jewish culture shares so much in common with so many different other parts of communal culture,” he said. “So a lot of what I did was create programs that compared Jewish culture with Latin culture, with Asian culture, with Black culture.”
While at the Skirball Cultural Center, Peimer received a fellowship to study performing arts festivals from all over the world.
“I found myself in some pretty amazing places like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. I’ve gotten to see and experience like just sublime performances,” Peimer said.
He said traveling around the world exposed him to a wide variety of performances. He found art everywhere, from Ramayana Monkey Chants in Bali to people making music with ship wreckage in the Solomon Islands.
“It changes you, and you change the world by traveling,” he said. “Whether it is going to Utah […] or whether it is going to Uzbekistan, you know, the more you experience, the more refined you become.”
As the new Lenfest director, Peimer said he is interested in using his experience as an avid traveler to bring art from different cultures to W&L. He said he wants to bring more international artists on the stage so students’ eyes can be opened to diverse voices in the arts.
“I am very interested in making sure that students see themselves represented on stage,” he said.
