Small School

Gap year, certificate and degree programs beginning Fall 2024.

Bringing people together to engage with all forms of art practice as a way of thinking about our society, culture, environment and economy

Initially offering lectures and performances, workshops, studio visits, K-12 engagements, corporate lunch-n-learns, and public projects.

12/11/2025

THIS WEEKEND Andy Slater artist talk + workshop

Artist Talk: Access Denied
In “Access Denied,” accessibility becomes a medium, not a checklist. The presentation features Slater’s own work and collaborations with disabled artists who weave access into their creative process—transforming it into something poetic, personal, and playful. Centering the artist’s voice and control of the narrative, this work reveals access as both form and meaning, inseparable from the art itself.

The presentation will include image and audio descriptions and ASL interpretation.

4pm Saturday Dec 13 Dix Chapel
Small School and Dix Park Conservancy are partners on this event
Registration link in bio

Workshop: Access Abilities Workshop Sensorial
Led by blind artist Andy Slater, participants will learn new ways to conceptualize and describe sound and image, using both objective and subjective approaches.

Open to all, including artists, curators, social mediators, dei advocates, access workers, teachers, other blind people, anyone interested in how to communicate with friends and family +++.

Participants are encouraged to bring in an image or object which they would be interested in understanding and describing in new ways. No other materials or tools required. Dress comfortably.

Coffee/tea and snack provided.

130 - 430pm Sunday Dec 14 at Arts Access
Small School and Arts Access are partners on this event
Registration link in bio.

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12/09/2025

Andy Slater
Access Denied
In “Access Denied,” accessibility becomes a medium, not a checklist. The presentation features Slater’s own work and collaborations with disabled artists who weave access into their creative process—transforming it into something poetic, personal, and playful. Centering the artist’s voice and control of the narrative, this work reveals access as both form and meaning, inseparable from the art itself.

4pm Saturday Dec 13 Dix Chapel
Register through Dix Park Conservancy

Bio
Andy is a United States Artist Fellow and media artist who is blind, working extensively with sound (installation, immersive, XR, sound design, soundtrack, music), sometimes image, sometimes video, sometimes text, and performance. He was the feature of an episode of BBC Outlook, and acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture”. Andy has been published in numerous journals, including for his research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination in McSweeney’s. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side”, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall.

Andy is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.

His current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design.

Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.

Small School and Dix Park Conservancy are partners on this and many other events.

12/01/2025

11/07/2025

One of the reasons we founded Small School, which offers a more affordable, accessible and realistic path to making art part of your life. Link in bio.

10/22/2025

Sam Van Aken artist talk 4pm Sunday 10/26 Dix Chapel: A Tree of 40 Fruit and a Hole in the Sky

Van Aken will present a talk on his past, current, and future work evolving out of David Hume’s quote that a miracle is transgression of the laws of nature. Working in the realms of agriculture, botany, climatology, and communication, Van Aken’s practice expands towards new genres in contemporary art.

Van Aken’s interventions in the natural and public realm are seen as metaphors that serve as the basis for narrative, sites of place making, and in some instances have even become the basis of scientific research.

in partnership with Dix Park Conservancy

Register thru Dix Park - link in bio

10/21/2025

Sam Van Aken artist talk 4pm Sunday 10/26 Dix Chapel: A Tree of 40 Fruit and a Hole in the Sky

Van Aken will present a talk on his past, current, and future work evolving out of David Hume’s quote that a miracle is transgression of the laws of nature. Working in the realms of agriculture, botany, climatology, and communication, Van Aken’s practice expands towards new genres in contemporary art.

Van Aken’s interventions in the natural and public realm are seen as metaphors that serve as the basis for narrative, sites of place making, and in some instances have even become the basis of scientific research.
in partnership with Dix Park Conservancy

Register thru Dix Park

10/14/2025

A Tree of 40 Fruit and a Hole in the Sky
Artist Sam Van Aken will present a talk on his past, current, and future work evolving out of David Hume’s quote that a miracle is transgression of the laws of nature. Working in the realms of agriculture, botany, climatology, and communication, Van Aken’s practice expands towards new genres in contemporary art.

Small School in partnership with Dix Park Conservancy
3pm Sunday, Oct 26 Dix Chapel

Sam Van Aken Bio
Sam Van Aken is a contemporary artist whose work melds traditional and
innovative modes of art making, developing artistic genres to create new
perspectives on such themes as agriculture, botany, climatology, and
communication. Van Aken’s interventions in the natural and public realm are
seen as metaphors that serve as the basis for narrative, sites of place making,
and in some instances have even become the basis of scientific research.
Born in Reading Pennsylvania, Sam Van Aken received his undergraduate
education in Art and Communication Theory. Immediately following his studies
he lived in Poland and worked with dissident artists under the former communist
regime through the auspices of the Andy Warhol Foundation and the United
States Information Agency. Van Aken received his MFA from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and since this time his work has been exhibited and
placed nationally and internationally. He has received numerous honors including
a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Association of International Curator’s of Art
Award and a Creative Capital Grant. His work has been presented as part of The
Smithsonian Design Triennial, at the World Economic Forum, at the Eli and
Edyth Broad Art Museum. His monumental work, The Open Orchard, is located
on Governors Island, New York City with an expansive orchard planted in
partnership with community gardens throughout the entire five boroughs. Sam
Van Aken lives and works in New York, and is currently the Associate Director of
the School of Art and an Associate Professor at Syracuse University.

Register thru Dix Park

08/06/2025

Whittling: The Poetics of Engagement
A Wood Carving Workshop with Visiting Artist Karl Burkheimer
9-12, Saturday August 16 at Birdland

This hands-on, three-hour workshop invites participants to explore the practice of thinking through doing. We’ll begin with a short reading and group discussion to frame the session, followed by instruction and a focused investigation of woodcarving.

Using whittling as both technique and metaphor, the workshop emphasizes attentiveness to material, the beauty of the ordinary, and the steady unfolding of skill. Participants will learn tool use, carving methods, safety protocols, and foundational approaches to creative practice and compositional problem-solving.

Ultimately, the act of making becomes a practice of presence—an invitation to engage more deeply with process, place, and possibility.

All materials and tools provided. Participants will leave with a Japanese Kiridashi Knife, thumb guard and their carved piece.

Register in bio (please email [email protected] if you are left handed, so we can provide the appropriate knife).

Karl Burkheimer is a practicing artist residing in Portland, Oregon. His artistic practice is founded on labor, skill and the built environment, reflecting varied experiences as a carpenter, artist, and educator. His work has been exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions in Seattle, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. His critical writing has been published in Ceramic Monthly, and he has received several awards of recognition as well as institutional funding, including project grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, a 2012 individual Artist Fellowship from OAC, 2013 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum, a 2013 U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2016, and a MacDowell Fellowship in 2021.

08/04/2025

Heidi Schwegler artist talk: Material Ju**ie
3pm Saturday August 9 at the North Carolina Museum of Art

Register in bio

Heidi Schwegler explores a wide range of materials in the service of her subject matter. Drawn to the peripheral ruin, she deftly incorporates found objects with traditional craft and sculpture media. “When [an object] is no longer contextualized by function and ownership, the discarded thing’s anonymity and ambiguity render it pervious to the imagination,” she says, approaching such things as a source of investigation. “I consider its formal qualities as raw material – but a very particular raw material that is both new and an indicator of past use, past value and past purpose.”

Small School is partnering with the NCMA on this event.

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