In a corner of Mark Dixon’s ’96 Hege-Cox Hall classroom is a portable wooden table that wasn’t always a table. In another lifetime, the table’s top, sides and legs were part of an upright piano. That was before Mark extracted the soundboard from the piano’s innards, sketched out a blueprint, pulled out some tools and – voila! – a table.

Of course when you think about it – and here it should be noted Mark is always thinking this way – the piano wasn’t always a piano either. That soundboard was crafted from a centuries-old Sitka Spruce that once soared above the Pacific Northwest before musical instrument lovers coveting its resonant fine grain toppled her.

Occasionally Mark will carry his tree-cum-piano-cum-desk with him to his second office, which, too, lives a long double life as Guilford’s quad. There he unfolds the table’s legs in the shade of a leaning sycamore and goes to work, checking email on his laptop, fiddling with an upcoming class project and meeting with students. This outdoors time is less a luxury to Mark than it is a necessity. So many of us resist change, he says. Mark thrives on evolution. In his art and, because the two are so intricately attached, his life.

“When you think about it there’s no such thing as a stable state,” says Mark, who was promoted last spring from Associate Professor of Art to full Professor. “There are plateaus – I’ve had a few of those – but I think we’re always evolving and changing into something else. Some people are afraid of change, but why? Why would you want to be the same person you were last week? Last month? Five years ago? That to me is what we should be afraid of.”

This theme of constant change has always intrigued Mark. From the day he stepped on campus as a skinny first year in 1992 to every class he teaches. During his senior year in high school in Chapel Hill, N.C. Mark was accepted into Alfred University, a New York school held in high regard for its Ceramics program. He chose Guilford instead.

He knew he was going to be an artist. He just wasn’t ready for the specialization that accompanied four years at a renowned art school. In Guilford, he says, he found a safe place to grow up and try new things. “Guilford was absolutely transformative and it was transformative in ways that were totally unexpected,” says Mark.

For all the impact his Art instructors had on him at Guilford, they weren’t the faculty that changed him most. “I came in as an artist and left as an artist,” he says. “But I didn't come in as a writer and (former Associate Professor of English) Becky Gibson in really incredible ways showed me that I could write. I write to this day and it's a very important part of my life.”

He took Yoga classes with Alice Beecher. “Those Yoga classes changed my life, changed my body and my relationship to it,” he says. “So many classes I would have never been encouraged to take somewhere else I was participating in here. That was transformational for me.”

There’s that word again.  

“I'm really interested in all the magical things that happen when a thing turns into another thing,” he says. “I'm interested in the way that second thing tells the story of the first thing in some way.”

“I mean, look at this table,” he says, running his fingers across his creation. “Anybody knows it’s not a piano, but you can see how it once produced music and now it sits here quietly serving another purpose. I love that process of transformation.”

At 50, Mark is one of the College’s youngest full professors. He is lean and fit, with a trace of stubble to his face and head. He frequently roams Guilford’s quad in a signature ascot hat or vintage open-collared shirt. He is, despite his appearance, formal in his casualness.

The eccentric artist stereotype crumbles in Mark’s presence. He expresses opinions after great pause, sometimes only after being coaxed, as if he does not want to seem pushy. But those pregnant moments of silence frequently produce deep answers.

Art is Darwinian, he says. It evolves incrementally, building on itself. The only limits in his Art classes are those his students impose on themselves. Mark is constantly trying to chip away at those boundaries “because one of the beauties of art is that there should be no boundaries.”

He pauses again, which means it’s time to go deep. “In many disciplines,” he says, “there's a legitimate outside and an inside that's pretty robust. If I'm in Physics and somebody wants to talk about something mythological you know, that's outside – way outside.

“There’s no such thing as outside in art, no lines you cross that you need to step back inside of. The experiment of doing things and finding out what those things fetch and impact you and others? Sometimes we fail, but that’s okay. We try again, maybe in a little bit more focused way. We try different materials, maybe we, you know, we listen with new ears that might be better tuned to that frequency. That’s how I teach Art.”

Mark loves seeing those light-bulb moments or, as he calls them, “glimmers in a pan” when an Art student sees their world differently after a semester or even a class. “They’re transformed,” he says, “and they usually think, ‘wait, I’ve never seen this or thought this way before. I wonder what else I’m missing out on. Maybe there’s more. I want to learn more.’ ”

Those are the ah-ha moments Mark strives for, when a student, like Mark, is forever changed. He calls those moments “proof of concept” for Guilford’s purpose.

“When you see the lights turning on, when you see people waking up to their intelligence and gifts? That’s why I get out of bed in the morning,” he says. “The world needs people who are occupying their intelligence and their gifts and figuring out how those gifts connect with the world’s needs. That’s what a Guilford education does for you.”