Think back seven months. Flu’s everywhere, and there are stories about a novel coronavirus that’s forced a quarantine first in the Chinese city of Wuhan, then the area around Milan, and then Madrid.
Think back six months and a new name is on everyone’s lips: Covid 19. New York State has ordered lockdowns. Then other states did the same. Scheduled face-to-face meetings started getting abruptly canceled. Schools shut down. Everyone got talking: How long would this last? How deep would this pandemic run?
“I felt totally awkward that first month,” said Kate McGloughlin, long-time printing, painting and drawing instructor at the Woodstock School of Art as well as the institution’s former board president. “Then my partner Sarah and I decided to do a pilot class for online use.”
Everyone was talking about Zoom, a platform for digital calls, with images. McGloughlin reached out to some of her “crew,” students and fellow artists she’s led classes for at WSA, and other spots around the globe. All were closed because of the pandemic.
“Two other instructors jumped on the idea with their crews,” the effervescent McGloughlin added. “Our executive director, Nina [Doyle], has always been gutsy and scrappy and started a slow rollout of online classes that were pulling 20 to 30 students per class at first and kept growing. My highwater mark was 72!”
Let’s do this thing
Doyle, speaking from the living room where she’s been administering the School of Art for a majority of the past half-year, noted that most of the WSA instructional staff have their own studios.
“Several of them had been talking about doing online classes for awhile. Then Kate said, ‘Let’s do this thing’ and there we were,” she added. “Twelve instructors are leading classes now. We’ve got a vast array of courses and even our filming has gotten a little better.”
While still under budget for income, the online surge at WSA has kept the school afloat without impacting its endowment. It’s increased the school’s reputation on a global level.
“We’ve had students logging on from Japan and China, from all over Europe and the United States. There’ve been people who heard about us or participated before, and others who’d been dying to take classes with some of our better-known instructors for a while,” Doyle said. “We decided to limit classes to 90, but besides Kate’s 70-plus class most have been comfortable in the 15-to-30-student range.”
Students sign up for courses with four weekly classes. As with the school’s mission from its start as part of a longtime Woodstock tradition going back more than a century, the idea is “to build technique and skills.”
A need for assurance
McGloughlin described a recent course she taught that was focused on landscape painting that culminated in a plein-air class with everyone socially distanced and masked. Everyone not online, that is.
She also noted how she’s gotten better at teaching to a computer acting as a camera, not playing to its array of little faces in a grid until she’d finish up. This allowed her greatest focus, she said. But it also expanded her work scope by pushing her into more reading, into the creation of written essays on how this all fit into her own life as a career artist.
“I let myself go down any rabbit hole I’d find. It was like taking a series of humanities classes myself,” McGloughlin said. “All I wrote and put together for these classes is being edited by a friend now.”
Doyle pointed out her own administrative challenges, including a drastically increased inbox of inquiries and worries. The past six months have seen a constant demand for information and assurance. Doyle has held monthly staff meetings by Zoom, constant communication with instructors, plus talks with her colleagues at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Opus 40 and Women’s Studio Workshop.
“We were all doing all we could,” she said. “And now we all feel we’ve done great.”
By July, a studio was opened on the historic campus for Zoom purposes. It was a way to reinvigorate a sense of place and a re-normalized future for the school.
“It all adds up to about half the revenue we’d usually have,” added McGloughlin. “But it’s been a steady stream of income and we all know we’re going to be fine. We’ll keep a strong online presence even when we reopen. Hey, we’ve even had a great student exhibition on the website, and now have an excellent instructors’ exhibit, and are looking at an in-person instructors’ show at the Lockwood Gallery on Route 28 later in the fall.”
A time of improvisation
The hardest thing may be the impossibility, at the moment, of doing serious long-term planning, Doyle said. “Everything’s very incremental.”
She and the board of directors made a decision to stay closed through the end of the year rather than face a situation where WSA would reopen only to close again. “Usually, we’re doing our next year’s catalog now, but all we can do is have it ready to go in an abbreviated format and then keep adding on,” she explained. “Everything we do has to be doable at the time of implementation.”
McGloughlin pointed out how helpful it’s been that the WSA instructors teaching online have loyal followings. It’s also been nice for her to be able to spend so much time at home.
“From the surveys we’ve done, it seems people are loving the convenience of digital classes,” she added. “It’s brought in a wide range of people.”
Doyle concedes to getting a sad feeling coming onto a campus with a freshly repaved entirely empty parking lot with 26 new spaces, completed last autumn. The complex of stone buildings constructed with federal funds during the 1930s are also empty.
“The thing I miss the most are the happy faces of students doing their art work, the staff all working very hard, our instructors thinking creatively on their feet,” she said. “Yet the team that has evolved from this has really strengthened our bonds with our community. I don’t know if it’s right to use the word ‘stable,’ but we’ve had very generous support from our community, even while we’re changing the budget every two months.”
Doyle and McGloughlin are proud of the online instructors’ exhibit at woodstockschoolofart.org. Indeed, it’s impressive in its diverse aesthetics, its breadth of expression, and also the skill level an emotional reach.
Doyle had one more thing to share. “Versatile,” she said, with resolution. “That’s the word of the year. If you want to stay moving, you have to stay versatile.”
Join the family! 
