Lauren RabainoIt may be small in size, but Cal Poly’s Studio Art Club is big on acquainting its members with the outside art world.
The Studio Art Club started out as a fundraiser for the university’s art and design department but has since evolved into a separate entity. The club meets once or twice a month with Cal Poly’s three main studio art professors and talks about contemporary issues in art.
“It exists to mainly bring students together to expose them to the contemporary art world outside of the classroom,” said club president Ashley Wertheimer. “I joined my freshman year, but I wasn’t very interested in organized events like this. I just wanted to draw because it was fun.”
The club is open to all students who are interested in art, but consists mostly of students from the art and design department.
Through the club, students are exposed at a younger age to the profession of the art world with an emphasis on the fact that students can make a living doing what they love, Wertheimer said.
The club also provides a chance for relationship between professors and students.
“It’s really unique because we’re a lot closer to our professors than most students at this university,” Wertheimer said, citing the fact that students call their professors by their first names and even have dinner with them.
Funds for the club are partially raised by the craft sales held during winter and open house. Parents help support the club and the department when they buy student-made ceramics and glass-blown pieces. Artists also make money from these events and it exposes the rest of the campus to what the art students are doing.
The department periodically hosts guest lecturers, who are usually artists themselves but the Studio Art Club usually meets to analyze their work with their professors. They get their professors’ expert opinions and extra insight, Wertheimer said.
The Studio Art Club also travels on field trips to larger cities to explore various art museums together. Last year, the club went to Cal Poly professor Daniel Dove’s show opening in Los Angeles. The trips are completely funded by the club and allow the members to get to know each other better.
“It’s nice to go in a group because we can analyze art together,” Wertheimer said.
She said she enjoys when the club gets to meet with specific artists and tour their studios. Many of these artists make a significant amount of money from their creativity.
“It’s really quite an honor to do that because it’s actually going into their working space,” Wertheimer said. “It’s confirming the fact that art should be taken more seriously as a profession that can actually make a sufficient amount of income.”
Wertheimer was asked to be vice president last year because there was no one else to take the job and it was then that she realized how beneficial the club is.
“I was forced into getting involved, but it’s been a wonderful experience,” she said.
The Studio Art Club members are new this year because many of the members graduated last year, but Wertheimer doesn’t view this as a negative for the group. She said she became president not really knowing what she was doing, but this year would be a good learning experience for the club. Only she and one other member are graduating this year so everyone else will have at least one more year to really get into the club.
“It’s definitely worth it and my main focus (as president) is to try and convince students as freshmen and sophomores to take it seriously right away,” Wertheimer said. “They’ll get so much out of it that I didn’t even realize.”