This review has been a long time coming, but it has been a privilege for our 10th grader to take art (and until recently, Sewing) classes with Inspyr Arts on 4th Street in Long Beach. In the little over two years we've been with them, Inspyr Arts has been more than accommodating with our crazy schedule, and super-encouraging when it comes to trying new media, as well as fresh approaches to methods more familiar. Since adding Inspyr Arts to our weekly schedule, we've seen our daughter's work metamorphose in imagination and sophistication. It's strange to see the word "sophistication" used in charcoal and pastel drawings and aprons and upcycled tee-shirts, but there you have it.
To start with, the 4th Street studio is professionally equipped with proper artist tables, paints, brushes and (when they had Sewing) sewing machines. We've signed up with other art schools before, but none of them provided individual work stations for each child. The fact that Inspyr Arts does is integral to instilling our child with a sense of personal ownership of her work the minute she enters the classroom. That is not to say that Inspyr Arts does not encourage group work. On the contrary, in the two years we've been with them, our daughter has participated in myriad community activities, from painting a table-top for a local cafe to spending an afternoon at the Belmont Shore Art Walk event in Long Beach, to beautifying unsightly graffiti tagged on their wall (Note to tagger: you could benefit from lessons at Inspyr Arts) before cleaning it up per city regulations. What you do have that is obvious from the beginning is a sense of mission from the owner and staff of the school: Inspyr Arts seeks to not only make their students realise the visions they have in their minds, they seek to help each student do so in a thoughtful, creative and wondrous way, so that each piece of art produced is valuable, not just to the student artist and family, but to the community at large.
Which brings about two other important aspects of this fine art school: the teachers and the nature of the work produced by the kids. First, the teachers are very, very good. They are not only artists themselves and professionals in their field, they are also incredibly dedicated teachers. In addition to being extremely accommodating with our crazy schedule, they know how to work with the most stubborn of students, and part of their success lies in the fact that they actually *create* opportunities for students to be leaders. We're really grateful for the fact that they offer summer internships. Unpaid, true, but nevertheless an incredible opportunity for students. This is a place where artists learn to be more than just observers of their community: they are given the chance to actually improve their community, and other than the ways already mentioned above, also in the form of field trips to draw and paint on-site, both indoors and outdoors. We are also appreciative of the number of fun events they hold to encourage team-building and a sense of ohana, like their recent Teen Night and summer picnic.
The second aspect to touch on is the nature of the work produced by the students. They are impressively mature and evocative of emotion (excuse my excesses!) in an unexpectedly short time. Rather than the kind of work you see in a typical classroom where the kids produce work that only doting parents and relatives would put up on the wall, Inspyr Arts students put out work that can be appreciated professionally. Many parents don't treat art as something that can be learned or even something that should be considered as a career past middle school. Inspyr Arts conducts their classes with the mindset that every student is a hidden Van Gogh, Da Vinci, O'Keefe or Kahlo. It is this expectation of genius that the teachers have of the students that the students end up producing work that is way more complex than you would see in a more ordinary classroom.
To this end, the syllabus they have is comparable to college and university standards: the students are not just exposed to one medium when they sign up for classes. They are taught to draw not just what they think they should see, but also what they actually *see*. They are taught to express themselves on canvas, paper, wood, glass, cloth, mosiac, with pastels, chalk, water colour, graphite, thread, glue. They are taught not to be afraid: of sketching total strangers in a coffee shop, plein air painting by the Colorado Lagoon, book binding and anime drawing, fashion illustration, trying something different, something new. If you cut a piece of material differently from the pattern, it's not "wrong", it's putting on your personal touch. There is no freaking out, no restarting, no waste. It's two Christmases now that our daughter has surprised us with her hand-formed gifts, including a blouse she sewed for me - which has been uploaded to their Facebook page. We cannot wait for more! read more
