Courses are offered in 7 different studios, each designed to accommodate group learning and individual studio practice.
The Oakman Clinton School and Studios house Hyde Park Art Center studio art courses. The Art Center offers over 200 courses per year, allowing any artist to find the right individual course, series, or art learning experiences that best fit their needs. The Oakman Clinton School and Studios has seven different work areas, each one ready for groups of students or individual project work.
The Sagan-Hill Classroom is our largest studio, and houses our Ceramics programs. With roughly 1,500 square feet to work with, there is enough room for clay, tools, storage, potter’s wheels, glazes, five kilns…and students!
The Perlow Multimedia Studios are a set of rooms designed for painting, drawing, screenprinting, printmaking, and other mixed-media art-making. There are four different rooms as part of the Perlow studios and each accommodates different sets of art-making.
The Thurow Digital Art Lab features a line of Apple computers, printers, and scanners. The technology allows students to explore digital art areas such as photography, video, sound, and animation.
The Art Center’s photo darkroom is one the few remaining of its kind. In the darkroom, artists and students learn about film processing, developing, and printing.
Many of our studios, such as our Painting & Drawing Studio and our Ceramics Studios, also allow for storage of art, enabling students to leave work between class sessions and make it easier to work outside of class time, when artists take advantage of “open studio” access.
The Guida Family Creative Wing
After 75 years, we’re still growing! Thanks to the success of our 75th Anniversary Campaign and a leadership gift from Julie, John and Angelina Guida, the new Guida Family Creative Wing opened in the fall of 2015 to further the Art Center’s mission to support artists at every level.
The re-imagined space on the second floor is the new home of private and shared artist studios, a flexible learning environment for youth and adults, a teen learning center, the Thurow Digital Lab, and the Jackman Goldwasser Residency.
The aim of the new wing is to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration, build community, and spark new ways of working for artists. Our visitors are encouraged to interact with artists and be a part of the creative process in spaces built for artists and audiences to present and discuss work.
About the Architect
Architect Grant Gibson of CAMESgibson, Inc. led the transformation. As a student and collaborator of the late architect Doug Garofalo (who led the Art Center’s first design in 2007), Gibson was a part of Garofalo’s original design team for the building and shares the nuanced understanding of designing a space that embodies the central themes of the organization’s mission: accessibility between artists and the public, transparency of the process of art making and exhibiting and active experimentation with technology and concepts.
CAMESgibson, Inc. is an architecture and design practice based in Chicago, IL, founded in 2009. The firm is committed to the production of culturally relevant objects, buildings, environments, exhibitions and research that move across conventional areas of specialization. Under the direction of founder and architect, Grant Gibson, the office is capable of offering the full range of professional architectural services. In addition to his professional work, Gibson is the author of “A Performed Memoir” and is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture. Gibson was named the 2014 Chicago Architecture Club Emerging Vision and his work has been widely published and exhibited since the completion of his graduate education. He received his Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and holds degrees from Purdue University in architectural engineering and construction engineering technology.
