Written by Colleen Miller, Photos by Nick Thomsen
Recounting their time at SCAD takes Steve and Deborah Mosch on a trip down memory lane to a time fresh out of school before their children were grown. Now, Steve has been a professor in the SCAD Photography Department for 37 years while Deborah specializes in teaching color theory in Foundation Studies.
The Moschs’ first met while attending undergraduate school at Penn State and married following graduation. After school, the pair worked odd jobs at a hair salon, record store, grocery store and more. After Steve finished graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology, Deborah’s brother spoke of a newly established school seeking professors in Savannah. Steve called SCAD and the school’s first president, Richard Rowan, answered the phone. A casual, friendly conversation ensued and “He [Rowan] was like, ‘sure, come on down.’ It was so casual and so fun,” Deborah said. Soon, the Moschs’ packed up and moved to Savannah with their six-week old baby in tow. “It was totally crazy, but we had youth on our side,” Deborah said.
In 1983, the year the Moschs’ moved to Savannah when SCAD was only 4 years old. “The school was tiny. Everything was in Poetter Hall, everything,” Deborah said. A close-knit staff and student body worked and studied in this single building in a city much different than the one seen today. “When we first came here, downtown was completely dead. The storefronts were boarded up along Broughton Street,” Steve said. “It was like a wasteland.”
Steve got a job with SCAD as a photography professor, eventually becoming the first chair of the photography department where he was able to build the program from the ground up with other professors. “I can’t think of another place I could have gone to that would have given me the opportunities I had here to help create a department, outfit the equipment and design the curriculum,” Steve said.
Deborah began taking classes at SCAD to earn an MFA in Illustration. Following graduation, she took a position as a professor with SCAD’s new Rising Star program. This position led to the opportunity to work as a full-time professor specializing in color theory in the Foundations Department.
This couple is proud to have seen SCAD grow so much. “I feel like we’re really in the blood of SCAD, part of the DNA of the whole place,” Steve said. Quite literally, the dedication of faculty and staff like Steve and Deborah built SCAD. “Myself and two other members of the department, Maureen Garvin and Joy Flynn, dug and planted the Garden for the Arts attached to Pei Ling Gallery,” Deborah said. “It’s all mature now with trees. Before there was nothing.”
As these saplings grew to the trees we see today, the Mosch family grew to include three children. One daughter even graduated from SCAD where she met her husband. “A second generation SCAD couple,” Steve said.
At the end of the day, SCAD has grown right along with the Mosch family. “We used to have faculty meetings around a table and now we fill the auditorium,” Steve said. “We were just inventing it [the school] as we went along. There’s been an amazing amount of growth and change.”
