Since I was younger, I always found peace in arts and crafts, especially painting. When I came to Berkeley, I felt a bit of a distance with this form of expression and myself. I met quite a few people here too, who felt the same way as I did, and eventually I found out this place called the Berkeley Art Studio. Hello hello and welcome to the third episode of Bear Necessities.
Today we're going to talk about the Berkeley Art Studio, which is in the MLK building on campus. Despite being on campus, this place isn't limited to only students. Anyone from the area can take classes here. Do you ever feel, oh, I just want to create some art, but I don't have the materials?
Or, I want to try a new form of art, learn something new maybe. Well, this place is for you. I had the pleasure to talk to someone who works there, Isabella. She gave me the greatest insight on how the Berkeley Art Studio works.
So the Berkeley Art Studio is part of campus, though we're not affiliated with the Academic Department. We're part of the Student Union instead. So we serve like a whole student body regardless of your major, but we also serve the entire community. So people who live in the area, faculty, staff, alumni, they're all welcome to take our classes as well.
They're a little bit smaller as well. We only have eight to 14 people in a class at a time. We work on a quarter system, so our classes are typically seven weeks long. We also have a bunch of different media to choose from, so we have a large pottery studio, not large actually, it's pretty small, but working pottery studio, an active dark room, we have digital photography as well, design, drawing, painting, and printmaking as well.
I also had an opportunity to sneak with some people who were actually at the Berkeley Art Studio between their classes. I might not have been the most wanted interruption to their art, but they were kind enough to tell me why they love coming to the Berkeley Art Studio, and why it may have been close to their hearts. Yes, I feel like this place is really helpful for me because I'm a graduate student, and so much of my career in like day-to-day academic life is doing a really precise and important experiment, or like if you mess one thing up, the whole day could be wasted, and so I really like coming here to do ceramics because I feel like it's just pure creativity, and if I mess up my piece and make it too wide, I can just turn it into something else, or I can just be free to like invent on the fly rather than being precise or thinking really deeply about everything that I'm doing, so I feel like it's a really nice relaxing thing to do after a day of experiments and a counterbalance to that sort of scientific work that I'm doing for most of my time. As we heard from a graduate student, this place is special in a way that it gives you liberty to do what you want, and that I think is absolutely beautiful.
I also had the pleasure of talking to someone else who has been coming here for a while now, and is still discovering new things that she likes here. I am a fifth year PhD student here at Berkeley, and my very first semester here in 2017, I signed up for a class at the Berkeley Art Studio. The only one that was available was advanced wheel-throwing with Hugh, and I was like completely over my head, but Hugh was just like amazing, and since then every single session, summer, the two sessions of each semester, everything, I've taken classes here, and it's been really important to me. It's been a place that I come with in classes in the evening, and the community has been wonderful, and I've improved so much of my own pottery, and they've let me actually kind of come here now, so I'm able to like go work exchange where I help load kilns and make glaze and exchange for studio access.
And yeah, pretty much all of my close friends that I've made outside of my department have been from the studio here, so it's been a big part of my life, and I hope that pottery will be even once I'm not in Berkeley anymore. It is so interesting to me that one doesn't require to have taken a class before to jump onto something new or something else. This basically means that no matter if someone is a beginner or has been doing art for a long time, everyone is welcome here. The thing that's so special about this place is that you have this really huge mix of skill level, so you have a lot of people who are trying for the first time.
People from the community who come here and use the studio who've been practicing for decades, and so there's always someone to turn to when you need help. It's just like a really just a wonderful mix of people. The amazing thing about this place is that when I went there, I saw some people doing ceramics, others doing other forms of art, but the one thing that amazed me the most was that everyone there was a different age, and they were all working together, yet seem to be in their own little world just enjoying themselves. I have decided to become a regular at the Berkeley Art Studio from Nexamster, but if you want to give it a try, they have free trial classes on Fridays.
Here's the hoping that you all find more places where you can just be yourself and spend your time, and I will be back with another bare necessity real soon.