Studio Arts

• New to crochet? Register for two weeks

Crochet is one motion, repeated: hook through a loop, pull yarn through, make another loop. That's it. This class uses that single mechanic to build something with a face.

Students start from scratch — how to hold the hook, form a chain, and work single crochet stitches in continuous rounds. Those rounds are the foundation of every shape in this class: increase stitches and a flat circle becomes a sphere; decrease them and it closes. Stuff it, sew the seams, and add the details that make a character — eyes, ears, limbs — and you have something that didn't exist before you touched it.

One week gets you the skills. Two weeks gets you a finished stuffy you take home. If you're coming in with no crochet experience at all, register for two weeks — that's enough time to do the work properly and have something to show for it.

You leave with

A finished crochet stuffy — a character that didn't exist before you touched it.

Signature

• One stitch, repeated, until it becomes something with a face

Led by

Willow Caputo →

• One-week intensive

Before you make something, you find it.

This class starts with material — paper, fabric, photographs, text, printed packaging, anything with surface and texture — and asks what happens when you cut it apart and put it back together differently. Collage isn't decorating. It's editing: choosing what stays, what gets cut, what lands next to what. The meaning lives in the juxtaposition.

Willow Caputo will walk you through collage as a serious art form with deep roots — Dada, Surrealism, protest art, contemporary visual culture — and help you develop your own visual language from fragments. You'll work with analog materials all week, building technique and instinct alongside a growing body of work.

By Friday, you have a collection of finished pieces — or one large-scale collaborative work, if that's where the week goes.

No experience needed. If you can hold a pair of scissors, you can start here.

You leave with

A collection of finished collages — or one large-scale collaborative piece.

Signature

• Collage as editing, not decoration — the meaning lives in the juxtaposition

Led by

Willow Caputo →

On the first day, you're complete strangers. By the end of the week, you've made a friend for life. For a week, we explore new art mediums and techniques and build a practice around using our sketchbooks.

A sketchbook practice isn't just a creative outlet and a tool for self-expression — it's an exercise routine for your artistic muscles, and a powerful way to show what you're capable of (maybe to a college?).

WARNING! Sketchbooks may be habit-forming.

You leave with

A sketchbook practice and a toolkit of new mediums and techniques.

Signature

• A daily, habit-building studio practice

Led by

Julia Ro →

Most textile work is about construction. This class is about transformation.

Needle felting uses barbed needles to interlock raw wool fibers into dense, permanent structures — no heat, no sewing, no glue. The needle goes in, the barbs catch the wool's microscopic scales, and the fibers tangle and lock. It sounds mechanical, and the motion is — but what you build with that motion is entirely yours: how hard you press, what angle you hold the needle, how many times you return to the same spot. Those decisions control density, surface texture, and form.

Students begin flat: color studies, layered compositions, gradients that can't be mixed the way paint mixes but can be coaxed toward the same effect through repetition and layering. From there, work moves into three dimensions — sculptural forms, wearable art, figures, objects. Both paths teach the same underlying skill: how to make permanent marks in a medium that punishes rushing and rewards close attention.

By the end of the session, you'll take raw fiber and produce something that holds its shape, has a texture you designed, and will last.

You leave with

Something built from raw fiber — holding its shape, with a texture you designed, made to last.

Signature

• Raw wool into form — no heat, no sewing, no glue

Led by

Steph Zello →

Carve a stamp — this craft is seriously satisfying. We start by carving a stamp from a small Pink Pearl eraser, then branch out from there. You can carve stamps for block printing out of linoleum, wood, rubber, even styrofoam.

No printing press required: we print everything by hand with a baren.

You leave with

Hand-carved stamps and a set of block prints pulled by hand.

Signature

• Carve and print entirely by hand — no press

Led by

Julia Ro →

An altered book is a kind of mixed-media art where a discarded book is transformed into a new work of art — interactive, sculptural, and many things in between. We visit the library to find a book headed for destiny, then dive into modifying it.

Each day we look at a different example of an altered book and explore a couple of art techniques you can choose to fold into your own.

You leave with

A finished altered book — a sculptural, mixed-media work of your own.

Signature

• A library hunt, then a new technique each day

Led by

Julia Ro →

• One-week intensive

Long before spray cans, people used walls to say what mattered — from ancient markings in Egypt and Rome to the coded tags of 1970s New York. In this one-week intensive, Studio Arts students step into that lineage as practitioners: the subway writers who turned a transit system into a moving gallery, the hip-hop generation who made stylized lettering a visual language, and artists like Basquiat, Haring, Lady Pink, and Banksy who carried it from the street into the world's great institutions.

Then students go outside. Day trips through Holyoke put them face-to-face with the murals that define the city — reading a wall the way you'd read a poem, asking what it says and who it speaks for. Back in the studio, they build real skills: color theory, scale, stenciling, lettering, and the composition that makes a large-scale work land from a hundred feet away.

From day one, students are making. Original pieces develop across the week and come to scale, then go public at Beyond Armour Yard alongside installations by Beyond Walls — a real venue, a real audience, real stakes. Along the way, students interview visiting graffiti artists for a video podcast they shoot and edit themselves. By the end, they don't just understand graffiti's history — they've added to it.

You leave with

A large-scale original mural shown publicly at Beyond Armour Yard — plus a video podcast episode you shot and edited with working artists.

Signature

• A public mural exhibition at Beyond Armour Yard, with Beyond Walls
• Interviews with working graffiti artists → a student-made video podcast

Led by

Carlos REC McBride →

Design a world and make it visible.

For three days, you build: sketching maps, inventing cultures, writing the myths and histories that make a place feel lived-in. By mid-week you have a world rich enough to work with — and the back half of the week, you make something from it.

Choose your format: an illustrated guide to your world, a short comic set inside it, or a field guide cataloguing its creatures, factions, and strange geography. Then you write it, draw it, fold it, and copy it.

By Friday, you walk out with a finished zine — your own world, your own format, made by hand.

No experience required. If you've ever drawn a map in the margin of a notebook, you're already halfway there.

You leave with

A finished, printed zine — your own world, your own format, made by hand.

Signature

• Build a world from scratch — maps, cultures, myths — then make a zine from it

Led by

Steph Zello →