I recently had the good fortune of visiting the Oxbow School in Napa, California. Oxbow offers a semester of intensive artistic and creative inquiry for juniors and seniors in High School. From what I have heard from students who attended Oxbow in the past and from what I could see during my brief visit, Oxbow offers the space and time for students to have a truly transformative experience, while working toward cultivating an authentic voice through visual media. I am left both impressed and inspired with what the program aspires toward and what it achieves.

These are a few of the studios on the Oxbow campus. Each space is committed to one or two disciplines, each has a good deal of natural light and each is rather idyllically aligned on the shore of a slow, serpentine river.

Above is the founding director and head of school (right), Stephen Thomas, working with a student on her Fortune Cookie assignment. This is an assignment whereby students are given a word, revealed to them in a fortune cookie, from which they are expected to produce a work of art.