with Erlin Geffrard
Meaningful Marks is a contemporary painting workshop, wherein you will learn contemporary painting techniques, theory, and principles while exploring the power of marks to convey meaning and emotion in your artwork. In this course, you will create three paintings that build on the skills and concepts covered in class.
with Amber Imrie
This course is for artists who want to workshop projects and reinvigorate their creative practice, in a supportive critically engaged environment. Through this non-hierarchical workshop, artists exchange critical supportive feedback to develop new, vulnerable, or ongoing projects. Our feedback sessions are structured on a foundation of compassion – with the common goal to understand each other – in order to offer meaningful insights, relevant knowledge, and useful resources.
with Lexa Walsh
In this six-part class, we will get cracking on our career goals. We will cover the big picture of Goal Setting, Grants, Residencies, Budgets, CVs, Artist and Project Statements, Elevator Pitches, Documentation, Websites, Networking and Promotion, and the importance of Community. We will share tips and strategies to help define and finesse each of these, by identifying our audiences, contexts, processes, research and challenges.
When it comes to art, the question is not how do we make better art, but how do we make a better society? We at The Alternative Art School believe in a form of art that grapples with the lived experience of being an artist from rent to work. Rather than throwing a student out into the world hoping that the global landscape of business and art galleries takes them on, we want to equip them with the tools to consider and produce alternatives.
TAAS is for artists, makers, and doers at every stage of their artistic life. We believe strongly that this mixed-level experience is an incredible opportunity for any artist who wants to participate in a global community and learn from the best artists in the world. We believe in a community structure that is scaled so every artist is known by name. You are not a number, you are an artist that these world-class artists and curators know. Attending students must be eighteen years of age or older but TAAS students tend to be more mature with an average age of 45. Some of our artist have led robust careers in the arts, while others are getting back in-touch with their practice after raising children, or taking a career detour. TAAS is for creative who are never done learning and dream to connect with peers from all over the globe.
Spring Session is March 10th - May 26th 2023 Summer Courses will be announced in April 2023 Summer Session is June 16th - August 4th 2023 Fall Courses will be announced in June 2023 Fall Session is September 1st - November 10th 2023 Join our newsletter for enrollment email notifications and access to early enrollment.
Our fee structure at TAAS is based on careful consideration of two basic economic factors: affordable art education and paying faculty well. A percentage of your tuition goes directly to support our partial-scholarships and full fellowships. We often say, "we take money from the global north and apply it to the global south to create globally diverse classrooms." Each course specifies its price on its individual course page. Prices range from 1250 - 1750 depending on the instructor. All prices are in USD. We have discounts for multiple classes. Sign up for 2 classes and get $250 off, sign up for 3 classes and get $750 off Every course includes continuous membership to The Alternative Art School's online campus with weekly online events during our Sessions. The programming is structured to facilitate long-form critical exchange and community development among our artists around the globe. These sessions are open and FREE to all current and past students - so you can attend and participate, engage and discuss, grow and build long after your class or classes have ended.
We are a new school and it is our goal to make TAAS as affordable as possible and every student who pays tuition helps support our fellowship and scholarship program! Our financial model is simple, we pay our instructors a livable wage, keep a small admin team and apply the remaining portion of tuition dollars to support our TAAS Fellowships and Partial-scholarships. Every session we take your tuition dollars to support our partial-scholarships, which you can submit to with your application on our Apply page. During our Spring and Fall sessions, we partner with organizations and individuals to host full fellowships open calls. These calls expand our own support capabilities and we are always looking for institutions and individuals interested in partnering. You can find our full fellowships open calls on our website and sign up for our newsletter for keeping up to date. Our Full-fellowship open calls are always location based, and the locations are decided through conversations with our partnered organizations and individuals. Contact us via our contact page if you would like to know more about scholarship and fellowship opportunities!
There are no refunds once you have been accepted, signed your contract, and paid. Courses need to be paid in advance before your first class begins. Our instructors are giving their time no matter how many students are signed up, so our costs are fixed and as a new school, our flexibility on this front is limited.
TAAS is unique in that our instructors are often working artists with complex schedules, therefore you’ll see amazing artists come, go, and return from semester to semester. Sign up for our newsletter below so you never miss when we open enrollment and announce our course line-up.
TAAS is not accredited. We do not believe an education at TAAS should replace a basic holistic liberal arts education. We instead offer this as an opportunity for artists of any age to gain a solid foundation in an art practice that engages the world. We stand by the education we offer and are doing it to make the world a better place.
While TAAS is not a non-profit, we certainly encourage those with means and a big heart to support this initiative, its students, and instructors. We offer sponsorship opportunities at all levels.
Acceptance to a course means acceptance to our school. You don't need to apply again for a future course or to attend any Campus Life events happening in sessions when you're not enrolled. You're just apart of this global community! Returning students are given early enrollment and are automatically given a partial-scholarship.
Why is Campus Programming included? If you ask "successful" artists for advice, they will often speak about their community and the opportunities and individuals they have to thank for the continued support. We've all heard it before, "networking" is important for getting the work out, but Openings are no longer the only way to meet and grow community in the arts. Campus life encompasses several weekly online sessions for artists to meet, workshop, give and get feedback, engage in topic discussions, and attend artist talks. We offer campus programming free of charge to everyone at TAAS because we know that this is incredibly powerful for launching art careers. Just two years in we are seeing the success of our program through our members ongoing achievements.