Santa Monica College Art Mentor Program

Santa Monica College Art Mentor Program Statement

The Mentor Program serves as a unique learning experience for a select group of students in the Santa monica College Art department. Students have the opportunity to work intensively with faculty members, visiting artists and fellow students toward the development of individual bodies of work. the program consists of frequent visits to galleries, museums and artist studios, in addition to focused discussions and critiques. The program features an open studios event in the spring, an annual group show in the summer, and a web site.

Some images of the 2008 Art Mentor Program

The Mentor Program, helmed by Professors Ronn Davis and Kavin Buck, is in the process of being completely redesigned. New approaches to educational and art making processes are being implemented in order to better reflect (a) the strategies used in the nation’s leading art schools, and (b) the ideas and issues discussed by art practitioners, educators, curators, and critics around the world.

Through conversation and interaction, students are challenged to explore their own work and those of others, and to solve problems in relevant and innovative ways. Students are also exposed to different aspects of becoming an artist including the preparation of individual portfolios, collaborative work in small groups, and gallery level preparation and installation practices. Students are also introduced to the art world and the dynamics of working with galleries, museums, curators and collectors.

One of the main objectives of the Mentor Program is to serve as a stepping stone; to help students become better prepared and more competitive at the University level, and to provide the intellectual tools and awareness to present themselves as professional artists in the local and international visual art communities.

Peter Frank – The Waking Dream: The Mentor Program 2007-08

When you create a different kind of learning experience, you get a different kind of learning. You don’t attract a different kind of student; there aren’t “different” kinds of students, only the same kinds there have always been – and the kinds you want to attract, and want to select into your program, are the kinds who need the different learning. These aren’t simply the burgeoning right-brained minorities who can only think outside the box, but the ones who are eager to get to work in that nebulous region, decorating the box itself and even rendering its walls transparent so that the rest of us can gaze out into the universe of the elaborated imagination.

The Mentor Program at Santa Monica College may not be the Bauhaus or Black Mountain, but in its own modest and focused way answers to the needs of the visually gifted and refines their skills so that their chops, manual and mental, come to equal their vision. This requires a different kind of learning, a tightened relationship between teacher and student that can awaken a coherent thought process in the student and inspire an understanding of and love for the discipline that brings the student’s vision to fruition. Art is a waking dream, after all; the Mentor Program shows its students how to sleepwalk deftly.The range of achievement among students in this year’s program is at least as broad as the range of styles. But apparently every student, even the most obstinate of underachievers, has proven capable of something while participating in this program. The Mentors Program may not be a boot camp for the imagination, much less an old-fashioned atelier, but it kicks just enough butt to alert the would-be artist to what must be, and it still coddles just enough spirit to encourage the stifled talent to blossom forth at last.

Whether what blossoms forth is what the world will celebrate is another question altogether. But, while mentors bring students to an at-least passing knowledge of contemporary artistic practice, they do not force students into styles – or, conversely, prevent them from emulating trends. A classroom is a place for experimentation, and the ephemera of the outside world, whether objects or ideas, are perfect grist for that mill. So if some of the work on view looks imitative and epigonal, well, it is. But that bespeaks not lack of imagination, but heightened sensitivity to the outside world – the waking dream.
– Peter Frank, May 2008