Woodstock School of Art’s oldest building is nearly ready for its next life. After two years of work to turn its historic barn into a year-round space, the school still needs to put on the roof. Its October 2 art auction at Senate Garage in Kingston aims to help finish the job.
“We’re in the home stretch,” says executive director Nina Doyle. She hopes the barn will receive its certificate of occupancy by November, though work on the surrounding walkways, paths, and parking areas will remain. Once open, it will house visiting instructors on campus and give the school room to bring in artists for residencies and public programs.
The barn predates the bluestone and native-timber buildings that now make up much of the school’s 38-acre campus on Route 212. The property was once a working farm; in the 1930s, the National Youth Administration built studios there as part of a training program for young people. After the Art Students League moved onto the site in the 1940s, its summer school director lived in the barn. Woodstock School of Art later used it to house visiting artists during summer residencies.
The accommodations, Doyle says, were “very rustic.” Each spring brought another round of repairs, followed by another round of problems. The school decided to make the building usable in every season, with insulation and updated systems, while preserving a piece of its campus history. “It’s a labor of love,” Doyle says.
On October 2, auctioneer James Cox will take bids on 78 works by historic and contemporary artists. The selection spans paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists with ties to Woodstock and the wider region. Stone Soup will provide food; DJ Major Mayhem will provide music. Admission is $25, and proceeds will support the barn renovation.
There’s plenty happening in the other studios already. On a typical visit, Doyle might direct someone first to the gallery, where a current exhibition displays 74 monoprints made on site during an eight-day gathering of artists and master printers. From there, a walk across campus leads to drawing and painting studios with tall, north-facing windows; printmaking studios; and an expanded space for clay and encaustic work.
The school offers drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and encaustic classes at different levels, including options for someone who has never set foot in a studio. Weekly classes generally meet for three hours over four weeks, while workshops concentrate study into two to four days. Doyle says WSA now offers about 120 workshops, 20 weekly classes, and five online classes, with more evening and weekend options than when she arrived in 2017.
That schedule has changed who can attend. Doyle estimates that retired adults accounted for as much as 80 percent of students when she started; today, she puts the figure closer to 60 percent. The school served about 1,200 students last year, and newer offerings in stone carving, wood carving, and encaustic have introduced it to artists from farther afield. An international encaustic exhibition opens October 10.
Access also means helping students pay for classes. WSA awards about $20,000 a year in tuition scholarships, roughly half of it for high school and college-age students. It also offers adult scholarships, paid college internships, and work exchanges. A student might help maintain the gardens or assist an instructor as a class monitor in return for tuition.
Doyle would like to see more teenagers take advantage of those opportunities. About 15 high school students now attend regularly, she says, down from the numbers WSA saw before the pandemic. She wants to learn whether transportation, lack of awareness, or something else is keeping them away. One donor has already paid for bus transportation so a Hunter College group could visit.
For Doyle, those efforts carry forward the school’s long-standing work: teaching fine art while caring for the buildings and grounds where that teaching happens. The barn project brings both responsibilities together. If the auction helps get a roof over it, visiting artists will soon have a place to stay—and more people will have a reason to come through the studio doors.
The Woodstock School of Art’s live auction takes place Friday, October 2, at Senate Garage in Kingston.
