The Art Spot

The Art Spot is a School of Fine Arts offering Children and Adult classes, summer camps, workshops, art demos, special events, sharing our knowledge of art to educate, inspire and motivate.  The atmosphere is charged with creativity and support to those just beginning, focusing on process and technique vs. result.   And, experienced artists enjoy all that plus opportunity to hone skills though rigorous instruction and objective review of their body of works.

Pratt Institute grads, owners Joanne and Bruce Hunter are professional artists who teach, design, oversee all courses/community projects and are also well-respected creators of collaborative Public Art. This entails teaching and working with large, to very small groups: thousands of people in a city, to hundreds in hospitals, corporations, libraries, senior centers, all manners of schools, organizations, and social justice groups, fabricating mosaic murals, as a community effort.  These large interior or exterior murals are site-specific, designed to fulfill concepts of the organizing group and, cognizant of budget.  Often a steering committee convenes to offer them the project vision of the group. 

Working with people with existing comradery is invigorating; few have the experience creating large pieces of art in a group circumstance.  With passion and pride in the final piece, many memories are created of this shared outcome.  A creative place maker emerges, beautiful permanent piece of public art, speaking to the passions of the group mission, and the ability of the artists to bring people together to rely on their human art making. The murals become known as community landmarks because of the common group goal to create art while rallying around their collective meaningful theme.

At times, community groups work together who don’t know one another at all, a reason for the project just to accomplish team-building, commonality and beautiful art.  This is even more exciting as people work side-by-side transcending language, race, creed, age, ability, gender, and socio-economic differences.  It’s a level playing field where everyone relies on the person next to them.  There’s nothing richer than seeing hand gestures used to explain an art process, as participants may speak different languages.  Or seeing young and old, laborers and CEOs, government officials and students, collaborating on a piece of art.  The stories flow, the fears fall away, and humans are one with each other, in kindness and compassion.