Summer program welcomes high school students to explore art in college setting

Armed with charcoal pencils and paintbrushes, a select group of high school students crossed the threshold of the UCLA Broad Art Center, ready to get a taste of a college arts education.

The students arrived on campus two weeks ago to take part in the first session of UCLA art department’s sixth year of the Summer Art Institute, a program that offers high school students the opportunity to experience college-level art courses.

After a competitive application process, those who were accepted chose from courses in drawing, photography, painting or sculpture, which culminated in a final critique and showcase at the end of the program. The second session of the program begins today.

Broad first opened its doors to younger artists in the summer of 2008. Onya Hogan-Finlay, the current program director, said the UCLA art department wanted to inspire high school students to consider pursuing art school by allowing them to explore their discipline in depth in a university setting.

“It gives them a chance to spend five days a week in the studio, which for any practicing artist or student, is a really special opportunity,” Hogan-Finlay said. “There’s a lot of one-on-one attention because of the ratio we keep – one supervising adult to 10 students.”

The courses are taught by graduating or recently graduated UCLA master of fine arts students. Alumna Becky Kolsrud, who attended a similar program at the San Francisco Art Institute as a high school student, led a drawing course this summer. She currently works an artist in Los Angeles and is represented by JTT Gallery in New York City.

“Helping younger students find a way to express themselves and see that art isn’t just about technical skill is a really important part of being an artist,” Kolsrud said.

During this past session, Kolsrud said she instructed her students to draw one object like a pepper mill or a hole puncher in 100 different ways to encourage them to play with different styles of drawing.

In addition to college-level instruction, students have access to many of Broad’s state-of-the-art facilities, including the digital studio, photography darkrooms and an 8,000 square foot sculpture studio.

The beginning of each day is usually devoted to learning technical skills through slide shows, lectures and a class assignment. Christine Wang, a recent UCLA graduate student in painting, taught the painting course this summer and one of her assignments was a monochromatic landscape. The assignment taught her students how to produce different tones and shades of one color.

Of the eight and a half hours the students spend in class each day, a large portion is devoted to studio time during which they can finish class assignments and work on their own projects for the final showcase.

Kolsrud said some of her students spend 30-40 hours on one drawing and even with this summer’s extended studio time on Wednesdays, they are still pushing for more time to work on their art.

“I’ve never painted this much in my life,” said Lauren Terr, a senior at Palo Alto High School who took this summer’s painting course taught by Wang.

Terr said Wang taught students to break the rules by exposing them to pieces like Cézanne’s still life paintings which broke away from the traditional idea of still-lifes as exact representations of reality.

While the students are given a lot of opportunities to work independently, the instructors provide guidance and encourage them to try different approaches to their work and apply the new techniques they learned in class.

“I think the best way to help students develop their own style is to throw in obstructions to what they think they should be doing,” Kolsrud said.

Kolsrud said she likes to push her students to diverge from their usual approach to their work by telling them to start from a different place in the page or draw upside down.

Throughout the program, students are also exposed to the work and experiences of local artists through guest lectures and field trips to local art museums like the Getty and the Hammer Museum. Artists like James Welling, Frank Ryan and Adrian Saxe lent their expertise to this past session, sharing their work and advice with the young artists.

At the end of each session, students participate in a group critique facilitated by a faculty member from the UCLA art department. Hogan-Finlay said it mimics the kind of critique that students would encounter in an undergraduate art course and gives students the opportunity to learn from each other and gain an outside perspective from more experienced artists. Each student also showcases some of their artwork in the New Wight Gallery in a final reception that is open to family and friends.

Kolsrud and Wang said they wanted their students to leave with a sense of confidence and a commitment to practicing their craft.

“Aspiring artists need to believe in themselves and know that everything that they need to succeed is already in them,” Wang said. “It’s their minds, their skills, their time.”