Co-curricular Activities

The ASUC Art Studio: A Creative Sanctuary

By Cathy Cockrell and Nancy Chapman

Jessica Tatara prepares display for a Push Pin Show of studio users’ art work. (Connie Torii photo)

Summer 2006 | The ASUC Art Studio, a campus fixture since its launch by student artists in 1961, is best known to many at Berkeley for its December and spring sales of student ceramics, photography, and other handmade gift items.

The rest of the year, including summer, it offers a robust schedule of classes taught by professional artists — including photography, ceramics, drawing and painting, video production, and knitting — and (for a modest membership fee) a collegial setting, seven days a week, for making art.

“The Art Studio is a refuge from the pressures of academia,” says Erica Terman, the arts administrator who manages the center. “It’s a safe place for beginners to become familiar with new processes and for more experienced artists to refine established skills.”

A few, says Terman, go on to careers as professional artists. Of the art studio’s photography alums, Richard Misrach is among the best known. “We just had a visit from Leonard Sussman, who discovered photography at the ASUC Art Studio 40 years ago while a chemistry student at Cal,” she says. “He’s now a professor of fine arts at Baruch College in New York, and exhibits his photographs in New York, Mexico City, and Berlin. That’s the kind of story that we hear often.”

Students from the photography and ceramics classes of the youth and adult programs enjoy the art studio's resources. (Connie Torii photos)

Some 5,000 individuals a year take classes at the studio, about 60 percent of them Berkeley students. The rest are members of the public, children enrolled in the new summer arts program offered in conjunction with Cal Rec Golden Adventures, and campus faculty and staff — many of whom value the studio as a sanctuary for right-brain activity.

Jessica Stankiewicz, who studied materials science and engineering at Berkeley, used the studio for just that purpose. “I took ceramics classes there and used the studio in its open-use hours,” she said. “It’s such a good way to clear your mind and de-stress. Once in my first semester I got really frustrated studying for finals, and I got up and went to the art studio.”

The ceramics facilities are particularly good. Jessica says there are four kilns, a staff to do the firing and mix up the 12 glazes the potters can choose among, and classes in basic ceramics and raku firing. Internships are available for those who want to learn glaze chemistry and be involved in the firing process.

“The raku classes are really fun,” says Jessica, talking about an ancient Japanese firing technique in which earthenware is fired, then glazed and quickly fired again, producing pots with unusual glazes. “The big fire outside the studio on Friday nights draws a big crowd.”

Another Jessica, Jessica Tatara, works part-time at the studio as a photography and digital lab technician when she’s not pursuing a double major in art practice and English. She paints in the art practice work space in Kroeber Hall but uses the art studio to supplement Kroeber’s offerings.

“I like that the art studio is always running classes in areas of concentration that are outside the university program,” she says. And because the studio is a community as well as a student space, she encounters artists who have been practicing for decades. “The artists are teaching one another techniques or discussing design obstacles, and sometimes engaged in good conversation,” she says. “I made my first friends in Berkeley at the studio. There is always, always someone creating, building, or practicing their art when the doors are open; it’s this energy that drew me here.”

Among the facilities that draw the public are 12 computers with software for photography, videos, and the web; two scanners; two printers; 15 potter’s wheels; darkrooms for black-and-white and color photography, and a digital laboratory for video editing. “Students and the public can come and edit their video projects at a very reasonable rate,” said Erica.

Campus staff use the studio, too, for much the same reasons that students do. On her lunch hour, Ann Moen leaves behind a “hectic” job in the basement of Moffitt Library — as operations supervisor in the Media Resources Center — to throw pots on the studio’s ceramics wheels or hand-build playful garden decorations from long “worms” of porcelain clay. Wheelwork has “a nice soothing feel, like playing with mud,” she says, while hand building offers its own version of relaxation: “You can smash, shape, roll, and poke to your heart’s content.”

The subtleties of clay and the storied uncertainties of kiln firings, for Moen, have also been a great practice in letting go. “You might have a vision, but anything can happen in the kiln.” Should a nearby piece drip or explode, “then your thing dies with it. You can’t set yourself up for heartbreak,” she adds.

ASUC Art Studio courses begin on rolling dates throughout the semester. For a schedule of classes, staff bios, equipment (including one of the Bay Area’s only large-format [20”x24”] color photo processors available for public use), and details on membership fees, see the studio’s web site, www.asucartstudio.org, or call 510/642-3065.