5 Reasons To Go To Art School
Here are my top five reasons you should go to art school.
1. Feedback and Class Critiques
These sessions, provide a supportive environment where you can receive constructive criticism from professors and peers alike. Most of the time you're going to be creating work in your studio and it's really easy to get in your head and stuck on an idea and not make any progress with what you're trying to work on.
A class critique is a chance for you to present this idea to a group of people, for you to get feedback, for you to hear someone else's point of view that you respect and that you trust with giving you their opinion.
You'll be forced to push yourself in this environment. If you're anything like me. You want to be the best. Even in art, there's competition.
A class critique is the chance for you to show yourself off. Your work will literally be side by side with your peers. People you know, people you like, people you maybe don't like. And your artwork is going to be compared one after the other.
Getting ready for feedback and critique will really force you to step up your game and make the best quality work possible.
Critique is also the hardest thing to find outside of college environment. It's really difficult to trust a group of strangers or a group of people you meet over the internet with your thoughts and your vision for your work. At least when you're in school together, you know you're all working towards a common goal.
BEFORE applying I highly recommend reaching out to one of the professors in the department you're interested in and asking if you can sit in on one of their critique sessions. This will give you a really good idea of what the environment is like in those classrooms and on that campus.
2. Studio Space and Facilities.
For me, the ultimate game changer. If you're like me, you're used to working out of your bedroom or an apartment or a cramped space that you're either sharing with someone else or maybe you're at your parent's place.
When I was in art school, the idea that I had these large facilities, dark rooms, painting studios, just massive rooms to create art in and experiment and create what I wanted to.
It elevated my artistic game. So much.
These spaces are hard to come by if you're not enrolled in school or you're a solo artist trying to finance a large studio practice is expensive in any city nowadays. The fact that art schools are willing to give students free rein and just make work in these spaces is a massive opportunity.
A lot of schools will even give you a space that is solely dedicated to you, your own little like 4x4, four by five room. You can immerse yourself in your practice and explore ideas in a safe environment that is all about you and your creativity and your experiences and your experimentation.
But it's important to note that not every major and not every school gives dedicated studio space to every single student who wants to be an artist. So do your research beforehand. Make sure you understand what you're paying for when you go to a school.
3. Dedicated Time to Work on a Specific Project or Idea.
Most of the time you're in school for 2 to 4 years.
Going in there with a plan, a specific project that you want to work on is going to help you out so much and it's going to make your application a lot stronger to.
This is one of the primary reasons to go to art school because a lot of times when you're not in a structured learning environment like college, most of the time you're too busy trying to make your life happen.
You are too busy trying to make rent and pay your bills to really work on a specific project or idea that you've had in your head for a long time.
It's hard to dedicate time when you have a social life or maybe even a family that you're trying to support. So art school really gives you that leeway and sets up this environment that allows you to succeed and create as an artist.
4. Exposure to New Mediums and Ideas.
Does learning and art experimentation, get you really excited? Me too.
One of the greatest parts about going to art school for me was learning about famous artists or artists I had never heard of and what kind of work they made, what materials they were using, how they were using their own body or strangers bodies or public spaces as artworks themselves.
And this is why I really recommend people taking art history classes outside of maybe the one or two that are required for your major because art history is like the gateway to knowledge about how to expand your own art practice.
The best way to picture yourself as an artist is to place yourself in the context of this great and long history. Experiment with ideas, motifs, mediums, what was done before, how you can expand on that and build upon that in your own practice and how that relates to you and your personal experiences. That's something that is really hard to do and to come by on your own without getting that foundational knowledge at school.
Art school also offers the opportunity of workshops, collaboration with your peers, visiting artists. I went to almost all of the visiting artist lectures because I wanted to learn as much as possible, whether it was from painters or sculptors or printmakers even though I was a photographer. The school will also offer classes in these other mediums and you can take them and see how they apply to the work that you're making.
5. Community
Arguably the most important thing that anyone gets out of any program like this and the underlying number one benefit to everything else that we talked about, art school offers a vibrant and supportive artistic community.
I cannot understate how important it is to surround yourself with like minded individuals who share your ambitions. School is the easiest place that's going to happen for you because you're all in these small rooms, these classrooms, workshops, lectures, together, you're talking to each other, you're bouncing ideas off of each other. You're hearing each other's perspective and opinion.
Those are the foundations. Those are the relationships that you're going to use and build off of for the rest of your career. Potentially. A lot of people drop off.
The greatest experience that came out of art school for me was finding people that I could learn and grow with, even if they weren't all art majors. And even though I didn't go to a big or super popular art school, I still made professional connections that I still maintain to this day and have supported me and guided me to where I am and what I'm able to do today.
The community aspect of it is not to be underestimated or taken lightly at all. And frankly, it's it's really hard to find and build and create a community outside of a space like that, especially if you're someone who wants to live and be in a big city like New York or L.A., people here let their egos get in the way. A lot people want to be seen as the best, and it's hard to find that genuine collaborative experience here.