San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Art school, without the studio
With little access to in-person instruction and campus facilities, many art and design students are wary
Stephanie “Fifi” Martinez is feeling anxious these days. A local artist and cartoonist, she just secured a well-paying mural job in addition to working on portraits commissioned from her Instagram. Still, none of that seems to be weighing her down at the moment. Instead, she’s feeling stressed about her upcoming semester at San Diego City College.
“Because of COVID, I’m not even able to see or speak with a counselor so there’s a chance I may not be doing this correctly. I don’t know if I’m doing the transfer requirements,” says Martinez, who is preparing for what will be her final year at City College before transferring to a university for fine arts. After several attempts to speak with a counselor, she says she ended up having to ask a friend for their best guesses as to what classes she might need.
“As a working-class artist who’s trying to get a degree and make this a career, I don’t have a lot of time to mess around,” says Martinez. “I don’t have help outside of the school’s faculty.”
Just like Martinez, many local students beginning a new semester at college are finding themselves returning to a vastly different, mostly online curriculum due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. With guidance from the California Department of Public Health, schools at both the university and community college levels are adjusting their fall schedules, with the majority of courses being moved online.
Online learning isn’t ideal for many college students and professors, but the concept seems particularly dubious for fine arts and design students. Unlike students majoring in something like business or literature, arts majors rely heavily on in-person instruction and campus facilities in order to complete their coursework.
“It’s been really fun to share my art with my professors and classmates, and build a relationship as artists and peers,” says Martinez. “A lot of my learning comes from the relationships I build in the classroom setting, and obviously that won’t be the same online.”
And Martinez is not alone when it comes to these concerns.
“As far as studio classes, that’s very relevant. They can see your work in person and help you along the way,” agrees Sarah Cook, a second-year student at Mesa College who is majoring in fine arts with an emphasis in painting. She says she’s attempted to bypass taking any studio classes this semester because she fears the experience just won’t be the same online.
“Artwork does look very different in pictures and online. That was one aspect that I really did miss once we did the online transition. That’s the most enjoyable part, seeing the art in the space.”
The space in question is the Mesa College Art Gallery, where Alessandra Moctezuma works as a professor and as the gallery director. Moctezuma teaches museum studies and art history courses at Mesa, and while she has adapted her courses to a new online curriculum, she says courses like museum studies simply aren’t fully adaptable to video communications apps and software.
“The only way to get those practical skills is through working in
that gallery,” Moctezuma says. “It’s teaching how you measure and do the lighting. I can have students do measurements in their own home, but you’re not just putting a nail in a wall. So that is going to be lacking.”
Adapting to new guidelines
Still, arts instructors are doing their best to adapt courses that rely heavily on in-person instruction and on-campus facilities. According to the 34-page “COVID-19 Industry Guidance: Institutions of Higher Education,” released by the California Department of Public Health on Aug. 7, “use of shared objects (e.g., lab equipment, computer equipment, desks) should be limited when possible, or disinfected between use” and instructors need to “fully air out the space before people return.”
For Matthew Hebert and Adam Manley, assistant and associate professors at San Diego State University’s School of Art and Design (specifically, the furniture design and woodworking program), this has proved to be difficult, but not entirely impossible. While Hebert will be teaching his digital fabrication class entirely online, the two instructors have retooled their workshop courses as hybrid or “Hyflex” options, where the student can combine in-person and online learning.
“Obviously the expectations for the projects will be a little lower, because we can only have half the students in the space at one time,” says Manley, who says that they can only have nine people in the workshop at a time and that students will be limited to about three hours of hands-on work per week. “So we have to break the classes into halves, with one half coming in on one day and the others learning online.”
Manley says the woodworking projects will have to be scaled down, but he’s hopeful the level of design will “rise up” in the process.
“Yeah, the problem will be for the beginning students because there’s so much safety involved in that class,” adds Hebert. “It’s almost like this crash course on things like, how to use a table saw without hurting yourself, and that’s something that we might need to reteach or hope that they hold on to it.”
For many students, however, receiving in-person instruction within a studio or workshop space is irreplaceable. Hunter Ivanjack is preparing for his first full semester as a transfer from City and Mesa College to Cal State Fullerton, where he plans to major in animation. He had planned to take some studio classes once at the university, but changed his mind because he feared he wouldn’t have access to the materials and space.
“I am worried about not getting the same kind of experience, especially when it comes to art-making,” Ivanjack says. “Even if I had access to the equipment, there’s carpet everywhere in my new apartment, so if I did a painting class next semester, I would be worried about that.”
Sasha Koozel Reibstein, a local artist who has taught ceramics at Palomar College for 14 years, has also been forced to adapt her otherwise hands-on curriculum to a hybrid model. She has set up a no-contact system where students will be able to pick up materials such as clay, and then drop off finished pieces to be fired in the oncampus kiln. But even that approach she says will be “barebones.”
“For me, last spring, we went to remote learning halfway through March and I had a very different approach at that point,” says Reibstein, who was unfamiliar with much of the software and apps that are now being utilized for remote learning. “Going in knowing you have a full semester that will be entirely online is a very different proposition. So, I’m deep in building a program and also having to learn the technology.”
Reibstein says she’s been able to plan to incorporate other aspects to the ceramics medium that she wasn’t able to fit into her curriculum in the past, such as coldsurface techniques, and teaching students how to properly photograph their work or writing their artist statements.
Still, even while her hybrid-style courses are much more likely to go smoother than last semester, Reibstein says she’s still worried that many students will feel unmotivated within the online format. When she went online in the middle of the spring semester, nearly half the students she “never heard from again.” The ones she did hear from said that they simply couldn’t continue with the class, because they were dealing with personal issues such as becoming suddenly unemployed or having to take care of their children who were now at home full time.
Embrace the fear
Rizzhel Javier has similar concerns when it comes to the upcoming semester. She teaches photography classes at City College and Southwestern College. Back in March, she says she prepared what she calls “workshop boxes.” These boxes included most of the materials the students would need for the semester, as well as tips on how to tap into the issues that might be on their minds. She encouraged students to “embrace” the fear and uncertainty of the moment, and to make issues such as the pandemic and the recent social justice protests something they could channel into their work.
“It’s been a really traumatic experience for kids and families, and I think if we focus the learning on that, the relationships that might be lost in the virtual environment will actually be repaired.”
Most of the instructors agree that there have been a few other upsides when it comes to online learning. All have been able to schedule many more guest speakers for their classes, giving students the rare opportunity to speak with arts professionals who have turned their passion into a career. Part of Moctezuma’s PRECOVID-19 curriculum, for example, was taking students to galleries and museums to speak with artists or staff members. With almost all museums and galleries now closed, she found that many working artists and professionals were more readily available to speak with her classes.
“The students got a sense of not only these people’s jobs, but also the challenges they were facing in this moment,” Moctezuma says. “And that is valuable.”
Another upside that Moctezuma and others have noticed is that students who were otherwise more introverted in the past are now more open to participating in an online format.
“For some students, they could ask more questions on the chat,” says Moctezuma, referring to the in-meeting chat function on the Zoom app. “The students who were more shy about speaking up in a class, they felt more comfortable sending questions on the chat.”
For students like Fifi Marinez, however, adjusting to online learning may reap some benefits, but she fears that the scramble to adjust is keeping the focus off of other, more systemic problems within the college system that the COVID-19 crisis has helped expose.
“This virus is shedding light on a lot things and in a lot of different ways,” Martinez says. “One of those things is that the amount we pay to get educated in this country is ridiculous. There’s no reason it should be as expensive as it is. I think that once you take away the campus aspect, the professors and the classroom, and just have the curriculum on a computer to learn on your own terms, it’s going to make a lot of students think, ‘Why is this so expensive?’ ”