Maker Space

• One-week intensive
• Limit 6 students
• $50 materials fee

Glass is alive in fire.

At 6,500 degrees, borosilicate glass melts, stretches, and holds — pliable for a few seconds, then set for keeps. This week you learn to work inside that window. Using bench-mounted burners, you move through demonstrations and skill-building exercises until the movements become instinct: gathering, shaping, pulling, encasing.

By mid-week you're making finished work — marbles with depth, pendants that catch light, small sculptural forms that came entirely from your hands and the flame. The class runs in a dedicated studio three minutes across the canal, where the bench time is yours to fill.

Along the way: the history of glass as a material, where it lives in contemporary art and science, and — for students who want to go further — outside resources for continuing the work after the week ends.

Six students per session. The small group isn't a footnote — it's how the teaching works.

You leave with

Finished glass work — marbles, pendants, or sculptural forms — made by your hands in fire.

Led by

Ben Becker →

Print for Change is a week-long silkscreen printing workshop that introduces youth to the history, techniques, and power of printmaking through the lens of social justice movements. Participants will explore how artists, activists, and community organizations have used silkscreen printing as a tool for education, resistance, empowerment, and collective action.

Drawing inspiration from movements such as the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, anti-Vietnam War protests, labor movements, civil rights campaigns, environmental justice efforts, and contemporary social movements, students will investigate how printed posters, flyers, banners, and wearable art have helped shape public conversations and inspire change.

Throughout the week, youth will work collaboratively to create a collective design that reflects issues important to their own community and generation. The workshop culminates in a community print day where participants print their artwork on a variety of materials and take home their creations.

Print it. Wear it. Make it matter.

You will learn

• The history of silkscreen printing and its role in social movements
• How art, community organizing, and social change connect
• Basic silkscreen printing skills and techniques
• Collaboration, communication, and collective decision-making
• Confidence using art as a tool for self-expression and advocacy

You will make

• A large-scale collaborative artwork that reflects what your cohort cares about
• Prints on paper, tote bags, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and more — yours to take home

Led by

Carlos Peña →

In this hands-on design course, students transform cardboard — an overlooked, everyday material — into dimensional sculpture. Beginning with the fundamentals of measuring, cutting, scoring, folding, and joining, you'll learn how flat sheets become structural forms.

The course opens with a classic challenge: build a precise 3D cube using pattern-making and planning alone. From there, you design and construct an original sculpture of your own — using templates as a launching point and your instincts as the guide.

This isn't just making. It's thinking. You'll break complex builds into step-by-step processes, hit unexpected problems, revise your approach, and finish with something that reflects your vision — not a template's.

No experience needed. Just bring curiosity and a willingness to think differently.

Start flat. Think in three dimensions. Build something that stands.

You leave with

An original cardboard sculpture — taken from a flat sheet to a standing form that reflects your vision, not a template's.

Signature

• Original design thinking — concept to physical form
• Structural problem-solving through iteration
• Craftsmanship and persistence through the full arc of a build

Led by

Carlos Peña →

Students work with two materials most people rarely touch in an educational setting: foam and concrete. The process is deliberately physical — shapes emerge through subtractive carving, decisions happen in three dimensions, and what you build doesn't stay lightweight. Every design ends up cast in concrete: finished, permanent, and strong enough to live indoors or outside.

The week opens with a shared project. The whole class works through the same sequence together — carving technique, form planning, mold construction, and safe material handling. Once those fundamentals are solid, each student designs their own original piece. From there it's cycles of testing, refinement, and rebuilding until the form matches the intention. Then the pour. Then the finished object — yours.

Carve it. Mold it. Pour it. Keep it.

You leave with

A concrete sculpture, made start to finish, built to last.

Signature

• Carve it in foam, cast it in concrete — a sculpture built to last

Led by

Kamil Peters →