Almost six decades after its founding, the Woodstock School of Art is marking an even older anniversary—the 150th birthday of the Art Students League, whose history has been intertwined with the school since shortly after World War II.
“In the Open Air: The Art Students League’s Woodstock School of Landscape Painting and Its Impact,” curated by local art historian Bruce Weber, celebrates more than 50 artists who attended the League’s summer programs in Woodstock as students or teachers before the school took possession of the premises in 1981. The show’s opening, on Oct. 11, drew 150 people who examined local landscapes painted in styles from realist to abstract by artists including Arnold Branche, Lucille Blanche, Richard Mayhew, Robert Angeloch, Bruce Dorfman, Earle B. Winslow.
“So many people have found community and family here,” said Nina Doyle, executive director of the not-for-profit, which funds an annual budget of under $1 million through state and local grants and donations.
The school offers low-cost classes and workshops in drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking without entrance requirements. Its instructors are working artists, and staffers are also arts professionals. While most of its 1,000 students are older, high school and college students can take advantage of full-tuition scholarships.
Among attendees at the show’s opening was Karen O’Neil, who came to the school from Boston in 1988 for a fellowship and has taught painting there ever since. Older students educated starting in the 1970s were steeped in the era’s postmodern movements and come to Woodstock to hone basic skills such as drawing and representational painting, she said.
“A lot of people are coming back and really relearning those kinds of things,” she said. “That’s the deep connection between the Art Students League and WSA. That’s what the show’s about–the sort of nuts and bolts learning that goes on in both institutions.”
During a recent tour of the WSA, Doyle said the school’s roots in Franklin Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration and the Art Students League inform the school’s commitment to top-tier arts instruction and also its culture as a sustained community.
Rough timber siding and bluestone give the studios and buildings a rustic charm that echoes the area’s natural beauty, reflecting a decision by the National Youth Organization in 1939 to commission a school built from locally sourced materials. The rural youth who did the stonework and carpentry went on to receive training in applied arts such as woodworking, masonry, blacksmithing, weaving and pottery, gaining much-needed career skills.
One sun-drenched 2,000-square-foot studio now used for drawing and painting was once filled with looms for wool-processing classes during the New Deal era. The Art Students League, which had run a summer landscape class in Woodstock from 1906 to 1922, leased the decommissioned site in 1947 for use as a summer school.
“The Art Students League came and they put those windows in,” Doyle said. “So now you have all this natural north light.”
Outdoors, a sculpture class led by Francisco Rivera was just getting started. A dozen students chiseled chunks of stone ranging from limestone and alabaster to travertine and marble.
“For the real beginners, I don’t encourage them to do marble,” Rivera said. “Although I have to say, the fellow here with a drill, he started right away with marble and now he’s addicted,” he said, pointing to a young man whose clothes were already getting dusted,
Over at the printshop, Florence Neal was leading an intensive workshop in Mokuhanga woodblock printing, a traditional Japanese technique in which artists cut a design into wood by hand and use the carved blocks to press pigments into paper in subtle layers of color.
“It’s a traditional skill and a lot of people are interested in it now because you can do it by hand and it uses wood,” Neal said.
“We’re actually taking it back to what this school was and what it will be in the future too,” Neal said. “We are learning skills again in our time, to share with people and enjoy.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of students at Woodstock School of Art. The school serves about 1,000 students annually, not 100.
Terry Roethlein is a contributing reporter. Send him an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.