“We haven’t really quit the board, you know. We simply have not run for reelection. We’ll continue to be still involved with the school.” Thus does Paula Nelson – one of the surviving founders of the Woodstock School of Art, and a mainstay of its operation for more than five decades – downplay the recent decision by herself and her husband, John Kleinhans, to step down from WSA’s Board of Directors. Nonetheless, it’s nice to pay tribute to people who have contributed a great deal to a community while they’re still alive and kicking. So, this action seems as good an excuse as any to remind readers how much work and commitment it took to keep this amazing cultural resource alive for all these years.
Nelson, a painter, printmaker and lithographer, was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Oyster Bay. With classmates who included Lou Reed and Delmore Schwartz, she studied Liberal Arts in what she calls the “underbelly” of Syracuse University, but ultimately “flunked out” and moved to the Lower East Side to study at the Art Students League. In 1966 a Ford Foundation scholarship enabled her to take the ASL summer program in Woodstock – a fateful decision: “I came for summer school and that was it,” she says.
One of the ASL faculty members, Bob Angeloch, became Nelson’s mentor and eventual best friend. “I used to babysit for his kids,” she recalls. “I painted the trim on his house.” She bartered work in the ASL office for classes, then became its registrar – a post she held until the League shut down its Woodstock operation in 1979.
In 1968 she married a local artist named Bill Dooley, and together they became resident directors of the historic Jane Burr House on Speare Road, where the Woodstock Artists Association provided low-cost dormitory-style housing for young art students (“The boys slept in the barn with the bats,” Nelson says). They did that until 1974, while also raising a son, but later split up.
Meanwhile, Angeloch wanted Woodstock to have a year-round art school, not just the ASL summer program. Teaming up with a handful of other local artists, he founded the Woodstock School of Art in 1968, with classes originally taught in a studio on Millstream Road. Nelson became one of his first students, and she divided her year between doing office work for ASL in the summer and WSA the rest of the time.
When ASL ended its summer-school program, Angeloch made it his mission to winterize the dilapidated, overgrown campus of native bluestone and timber craft studios that had been built by the National Youth Administration to train artisans during the New Deal era – a project that Nelson describes as “Eleanor Roosevelt’s baby” – only to be abandoned after World War II. “Bob wanted to save the buildings,” says Nelson.
So, when ASL left, and the 47-acre site’s owners, the City of Kingston Board of Water Commissioners, put it up for lease for five years at $500 per year, WSA – by now a registered not-for-profit, with Nelson serving as vice president – won the bid in 1980. Then the real work began.“The League took everything, even the lightbulbs. We had to start from scratch, and we had absolutely no money,” Nelson remembers. “We scrounged around for all kinds of stuff.”
Luckily, Angeloch, whom Nelson characterizes as “perfectly reliable,” also had a gift for fundraising from individuals who supported the arts. “We went from nothing to an endowment fund of over a million dollars,” she says. But in the early days, board members, faculty and staff all had to pitch in to maintain the weathered buildings. There were no bathrooms, no running water, no heat. A then-anonymous donor, Richard Strain, provided the school with a major loan to purchase the buildings in the 1990s, but “Serious renovations didn’t happen until 2006,” when “somebody left us a house, which we sold for $300,000.”
By then, one of the volunteers being deployed to assist with the overhaul of the campus was John Kleinhans, a relative neophyte who had arrived in Woodstock in 1979 and gotten involved with the school by 1982. “I worked on the grounds; I cleaned the bathrooms. It was a great time,” he reminisces. A native of Pittsburgh, his mother was an artist: “I grew up with her teaching, crawling under easels and smelling turpentine.”
But Kleinhans started out wanting to be an oboist, getting his baccalaureate in Music at NYU. He married at the age of 19 and had a son. Then he switched to Experimental Psychology, earning a master’s at the New School and a doctorate at Rutgers, where he ended up teaching and doing research in visual perception. That led to a stint in the darkroom and an ever-growing fascination with photography.
Kleinhans moved on to teach at Manhattanville College and then the University of Connecticut, but “never got tenure,” and after 12 years, photography won out. A trip to France in 1979 led to a “rather successful show” sponsored by the Alliance Française that toured the US, Canada and France for two years. Familiar with Ulster County from weekends in Accord with his first wife, he decided to move to Woodstock, began taking news photos for the Woodstock Times and soon crossed paths with Bob Angeloch. He took his first WSA class in 1982, met and fell in love with Nelson, traveled with her and the Angelochs for an artmaking vacation on Maine’s Mohegan Island in 1984. They got married a year later, by which time he had already been recruited to the WSA board.
Fast-forward again to 2006, when Studios 1 and 2 on the WSA campus first acquired insulation, plumbing, radiant heating and air conditioning, spearheaded by Nelson and Kleinhans, followed by the Office and Gallery Building in 2008. “It was John and I who designed both of these renovations,” Nelson says. They planned the sculpture park on the school grounds as well. Over their years as board members, they also taught workshops, curated and hung exhibitions, organized slide lecture series, marketed the school, made and exhibited their own art, won various awards, started an art-book publishing company called Precipice Publications and held down other jobs that paid actual money: Nelson at Catskill Art and Office Supplies and Kleinhans at Woodstock Percussion.
Nelson served as WSA board president from 2004 to 2010, and as secretary for two years thereafter while handing the reins to Kate McGloughlin. Kleinhans put in some years as vice president and also served two stints as board chair at the Woodstock Artists Association. “We had done it a very long time,” he says of their decision to make room for a new generation of leadership at WSA. “I was on the board for 38 years, Paula for as long as it existed – 56 years.”
The couple will continue to live in West Hurley, with driving trips to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on the agenda once the pandemic subsides. “Travel is a thing we really like to do,” says Kleinhans. Nelson has had to adjust her artmaking styles and techniques to accommodate failing eyesight, but Kleinhans still does photography every day. In retirement, he has plans to publish a book on the history of the WSA and WAA, along with “Woodstock personalities I’ve known. I need to get my collection organized.”
Speaking of their legacies, both joint and separate, Nelson puts primary emphasis on “the importance of the school and the tradition, the continuum of the artistic heritage of Woodstock…the thousands of people who have attended it, who’ve come from all over the world. Many of them come to stay… It’s extraordinary, the lineage that we all come from,” she says. “The school is emblematic of this tradition that we all hope to carry on.”
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