The Art Camp is Dead, Long Live the Art Camp

After a quarter century of arts education, the Oxbow School in Napa, California announced its closure this week to little fanfare. Only two news articles, both less than 400 words, have reported on the announcement. Having a distant, but fond, relationship to the school, I wanted a sopping, sappy, personal account of the school and what it means that it is closing, so I created one. 

Disclaimer: This is not hard journalism, nor is it the definitive text on the history of arts education in America. It’s also not an exhaustive history of the Oxbow School, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Founding Director and Head of School of the Oxbow School, Stephen Thomas, and his wife, Patricia Curtan, were pivotal to the establishment and success of the Oxbow School. Thank you, Stephen and Patricia. 

I found out about the Oxbow School because of digital marketing, incidentally. The director of the Oxbow Summer Art Program at that time had paid someone to improve the site’s SEO or for sponsored results or whatever was possible with paid search in 2010. 

My close friend and freshman year roommate from art school, Will, suggested that we find summer art camps to work at together. Before deciding to pursue a BFA, he had done a summer in high school at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts studying ceramics. A “Governor’s School” for art exists in some format in many states - in some places it’s a half-day high school program, in some a residential high school, in some a summer art intensive for teenagers. In Pennsylvania, it took the form of a summer camp for teens, though by 2009 it didn’t take any form - it was defunded and discontinued. The following year Will had decided that we should try to be camp counselors together, which I think of as a lovely and tender way of trying to envelope me in an experience that he loved so much and carry on our regular shenanigans in a potentially lucrative summer setting. 

So, in the Maryland Institute College of Art (“MICA”) library basement, we googled “summer art camp” and the first one that came up was the Oxbow School in Napa, California (not to be confused with the Ox-Bow School of Art, a residential art program for degree seeking students and other adults in Michigan). It so happened that Oxbow was hiring and we applied. We both interviewed over Skype, which was sort of wild for 2010. I got offered a job and he didn’t. I took it. In retrospect, I can’t believe that this is how it happened; I had never heard of this place and with no research and no connections, I had happened to Google them at the right time and apply and get offered a job across the country. That bit of uncalculated internet magic hardly seems possible anymore. 

The Oxbow School, founded in 1998 by Ann Hatch and Margrit and Robert Mondavi, is the only program in the United States where students can study art for one semester and receive credit for their high school graduation. Students come from all over the country, as well as locally, to live on the campus and take classes in state of the art studio buildings. Oxbow staff work diligently, I’m sure, to ensure that courses at Oxbow (all “accredited, honors level, and college preparatory” according to the website) will count towards earning a high school diploma. Aside from the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Southern California, it’s the only residential art program for high schoolers west of the Mississippi that I am aware of. Along with. places such as Interlochen Arts Academy, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Walnut Hill School for the Arts, it’s one of a handful of arts-focused boarding schools in the United States. The Oxbow Summer Art Program, at least in 2010 and 2011, before it was renamed and restructured to a 6-week Summer Art Institute, was not that serious. It was definitely art SUMMER CAMP - it had to cater to various ages (from 13-17), it did not require an application or portfolio, and the level of interest in art of any sort from the campers varied vastly. From what I can gather it had been open since 2003 and it served sort of a dual purpose: to be a recruiting tool for the semester program, but more importantly to generate income for the school when the more prestigious and rigorous semester programs were not in session. 

The year that I was hired there was some sort of changing of the guard so five or six new counselors were required. Counselors, together with faculty (for painting, photography, and sculpture), interns (unpaid artists who were lured with the promise of making their own work) and director/co-directors made up the summer staff. There were year-round staff such as the beloved groundskeeper and chefs (yes, chefs, not merely cooks or kitchen staff. There was some connection to Alice Waters or Chez Panisse, another hallmark of Oxbow) that were also integral to ensuring the success of the summer camp, but they knew the lay of the land and were a well oiled machine that didn’t necessitate much interaction from us. Full time faculty for the semester program lived on and around campus, but were probably mostly annoyed by our appearance in the summer. Seasonal staff were hired from different corners of the country and instructed on how to arrive at staff training, the newest of us having never met anyone else from Oxbow physically or even virtually. Directions were sent over email - I still have the messages coordinating rides from the San Francisco Airport to the Marin Airporter (with retro rainbow decal on the side) or to another counselor’s house in Oakland or to a park-and-ride in Sausalito or wherever. The first year, we did a ten day training program in the Marin Headlands, separated by gender into “boys” and “girls” rooms, counselors, interns, and faculty alike, crammed into bunk beds. We cooked together and spent days discussing the studios and dorms and the teenage brain and programming and what games to play and what the rules were, but mostly bonding, before heading up to Napa to set up camp. A favorite unofficial mantra picked up from another counselor during that time still resonates: “cap the fun”, meaning if everyone is having maximum fun it’s best to segway to the next activity before someone gets hurt or something bad happens. When fun is at its peak, the only way is down, after all. 

I don’t run often, but when I do it’s usually a sign that everything is pretty healthy and balanced in my life; the two summers that I worked at Oxbow, I ran. I woke up in the morning at the Headlands to run the paved paths, doused by the misty, foggy, spitty condensation before coming back to the community-center style building for a communal breakfast and public-pool locker room-style shower. I ran during the cloudy Napa mornings around the Tulocay Cemetery, before the sun had a chance to burn the coverage off, and then be back to make sure all of my boys had made it to breakfast. As counselors, the days were filled with planning and executing activities for the students between their appointed studio time - it was a balance of regular camp games and workshops on zines or papermaking, campfires and Space Prom. Everything had a wry little art school twist to it: exquisite corpse drawing games, a talent show night that devolved into a complete performance with celebrity impersonation, “punk rock” karaoke. One evening activity each session always took the form of a parade where the students were encouraged to put on the most outrageous costumes (one year, it was “Drag Night” paired with lessons on identity and Cindy Sherman photograph slideshow lecture, which certainly wouldn’t fly in today’s political climate I’m sure). We intervened into the real world by doing chalk drawings all over Napa in a “street art” themed lesson I taught - which prompted calls from angered local proprietors and resulted in me taking the campers back to the street to wash the chalk off. The Oxbow Summer Program was certainly not Black Mountain College or the Bauhaus or even art school “pre-college” - but in its unseriousness, it was playful and magical and invigorating. 

We took the kids to make a zombie movie at a pretty legitimate art collection and museum in Napa (di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art), so one day in 2011 there were dozens of teenagers dressed as zombies laying on the ground of this museum and emerging out of ponds in the sculpture garden. We did raku at the fire pits at Ocean Beach and photoshoots at Sutro Baths. We did field trips to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and hiked Lands End and the Napa hills (the campers hated hikes). We took the students to the San Francisco Dump to see the artist in residence program there and then to SCRAP SF to collect materials for a project based on the work they had just seen. During downtime at camp, we marveled at how every single year a teenager was discovering “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel for the first time, like we had at their age. I remember mostly listening to Katy Perry those summers myself; the release of the “Teenage Dream” album was really a time to be a camp counselor in California (I’ll fight anyone who wants to argue that the title track of that album is not the perfect pop song). 

Oxbow felt rare because there don’t seem to be many places where students from art schools and liberal arts colleges across the nation can come together to live, work, make, and play. The counselors and staff when I was there represented students and recent alum from (abbreviations, because if you know, you know) RISD, MICA, Cooper, SMFA, SAIC, CCA, Parsons, Pratt, SFAI, NYU, Wash U, Mills, Mount Holyoke, Evergreen, and Brown. I don’t recall anyone really actively making very seriously during those summer weeks, but we were sharing our work and exchanging ideas and connecting the dots. The first time I saw “The Holy Mountain” was with fellow staff at Oxbow. The first time I heard alternative pronouns (fe/fim, ze/zir) was at Oxbow. Somewhere buried in there is an experiment that someone could perform about removing creative individuals from programs of study all over the nation, putting them in an idyllic setting, giving them a common goal, and removing any financial burden. However, it’s probably not a very worthwhile experiment - I think people would report being pretty carefree and happy, and I’m sure that the powers that be won’t be working to implement the scenario that creates such a result anywhere anytime soon. 

The one thing that we weren’t really sharing were the sexier, fringe parts of being young and in art school. This was “Dry Hot American Summer.” Besides occasionally sneaking out to Billco’s Billiards and Darts to drink Racer 5s or hanging back briefly by the pool to smoke a cigarette, it was pretty monastic. The whole point of Oxbow was to be secure and wholesome. Not only did it have to present a squeaky clean image in order to entice parents to possibly send their children there for a full semester during the school year, but the summer program director at one point, to my knowledge, promised constant surveillance of the campers. Combine that with a hinted at incident on campus a previous year, and you got what I lovingly call “rich-kid rehab.” We watched those kids 24/7 on campus and therefore existed in the same safe and sound environment as they did. My time in Baltimore was all about pretending to be cooler than I was and inserting myself into dangerous situations. Oxbow, for me, and probably for others, it was a chance to be vulnerable and honest, sober and unadulterated. For the campers who would normally be doing MDMA on the Santa Monica pier all summer, or the counselors who were young adults embarking on the complexities and unpredictability of life, it was a swan song for innocence. Someone smarter than I can tell you what it means to a human when they get to let their inner child come out to play one last time. 

The promise of individual attention and strict oversight meant that counselors could never really have the same day off, so we took our time away in shifts. This meant that if you didn’t have a car in California and you didn’t have connections to the area, you were really left to your own devices. I remember using my days off to go to a really crappy local movie theater to watch whatever was playing with a tallboy (“Toy Story 3” stands out). We would have days off together or free of campers before, after, and in between camp sessions. We’d all go down to San Francisco together to sleep on the floor of someone’s apartment or surreptitiously drink and midnight swim on campus (we got caught that time by the camp director). I remember a teacher’s studio on Treasure Island in an old airplane hanger with sculptures for Burning Man and a counselor’s family home in the Mission where a lemon tree was within arms reach of the kitchen window. I don’t remember exactly the hot springs that we went to in Calistoga, but I remember them and the subsequent dinner at a Black Bear Diner.  

It was the first time I’d seen the West Coast. It was the first time I’d been to the Pacific Ocean. It was the farthest I’d ever been away from where I grew up in Wisconsin, actually. It was the first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “California” while driving through the golden hills of Northern California as the woman in the driver’s seat told me that she couldn’t be convinced the south of France was any more beautiful than here, where she grew up. It was the first time I had In-N-Out and an It’s-It and a real Mission burrito. On a camping trip with my dad after my first year, it was the first time I saw whales and redwoods. 

Like a lot of California, Oxbow stands out as a place of extremes and contrast, since I was sleeping on an air mattress at a camp attended by the offspring of famous directors and celebrity lawyers and New York Times bestselling authors and blue chip artists. It was sparing but lush. It was ever so tame but free. The physical footprint of the school is actually quite small at three acres but it is an entire world unto itself. It’s walking distance from “downtown” Napa (debatable if it can be called such a thing); it’s the furthest from reality I’ve ever been. That contrast must have always been part of Oxbow, and it must have been painfully obvious to those that were charged with running it; seven-figure donations and a wine mogul’s signature in the cement of the patio yet not enough of the right type of support or resources or participation to be able to sustain the type of program they envisioned (this story from the Napa Valley Register reports that the school indicated financial realities as a reason for closure). 

For so many people, the students that it sent on a course for creative careers and the faculty that taught and lived there and the staff that worked there year round, Oxbow (semester and summer) is of course incredibly significant and meaningful. I’m sure it is also incredibly meaningful for the parents, the donors, and the community that both gave to it and benefited from it. In my own little life of modest ambitions and insignificant efforts (which are no less important and meaningful to me), it’s one of the smallest things I’ve ever done. The summer art camp was not that serious, and while I know that at least a few campers ended up with fabulous creative careers, I don’t think my work to create the Oxbow Water Olympics or Punk Rock Karaoke can take any credit for that. I was merely a camp counselor and lifeguard almost 15 years ago and probably not even a very good or impactful one. I remember turning the pool green a couple times due to lack of knowledge about chemicals and upkeep. I angered the chefs by walking around barefoot in the kitchen. I admittedly never wanted to be a “good” counselor, but the “cool” counselor; I did disciplinary talks with popsicles and they weren’t very harsh. I had at least one tough moment my final summer, though I can’t remember what caused it, that resulted in some encouraging emails from the camp’s director. I have a habit of getting frustrated when growth is imminent but not yet fully realized, and by that end of my final session I’m sure I was tired of “playing nursemaid” to a bunch of goofy teens and my thoughts were on a long term relationship and thesis and graduation and an artistic career (something that I never even came close to achieving) and “serious things.” What’s funny is that none of those “big things” ended up mattering at all. Oxbow is the “smallest thing” that has stuck with me, like pencil lead in the skin. So for me, Oxbow is not my life or my livelihood or something that changed the course of my entire existence, nor did me being at Oxbow change anyone’s life materially, but that relationship that I have to it is tiny and precious like a jewel. It’s been easy to hold and carry and keep close my entire life since.  

Since I found Oxbow, I ping-ponged across the United States between Baltimore and Northern California. I bounced back and forth from Oxbow to school at MICA, then took a job in San Francisco, then relocated back to Baltimore for work. The job that brought me back to Baltimore was as an admission counselor for my alma mater, so I still got to travel to Oxbow to recruit students from the semester program for undergraduate studies at MICA. One time when scheduling a visit to Oxbow, I was left to my own devices by the staff who knew my familiarity with the campus (plus they probably still had my background check and fingerprints on record), and I ended up eating dinner with students in the dining hall. My last trip to Oxbow, I grabbed a bar-side lunch at Auberge du Soleil and an It’s-It from a gas station before doing portfolio reviews on the patio of the school. 

I found so many great things in email archives and old hard drives when I went on a nostalgia trip after hearing that Oxbow had announced its closure: the 100 page “Oxbook” manual for camp staff, complete with rules (“No smooching” for the campers - there was staff smooching, certainly), my original application written in blue pen and scanned, communications about which fruit we were allowed to eat from the campus (figs, peaches and apples - “ please let the tomatoes, nectarines, raspberries grow so that Patty has the material she needs for her project”), an email advising me to cease my overuse of a megaphone before 8 AM and after 10 PM. I was shocked by the photos of myself. I’m so skinny, tattooless, before getting hit by a car on Potrero Avenue and miles and miles from having my own health insurance or full-time job or marriage or anything very serious and permanent. Seeing myself so young I’m reminded of the thing that I was very close to: my grief. My only brother died when I was 17 and I started working at Oxbow the summer that I was 20. My grief was just three years old then; now it’s almost as old as I was when I spent that first summer in Napa. My grief now is an adult, it’s mature, and though it pretty much takes care of itself it is certainly alive and well and does drop by for a visit once in a while (like recently, when I watched “Iron Claw” by myself). Back then it was a toddler and it lived with me constantly, demanding my attention. Just like I find it impossible to imagine that I would be left alone with a bus full of minors or that I would randomly stumble upon this job on the internet, I cannot believe that I was out in the world, on my own, working with teenagers, and somehow fine. I look at the pictures and my immediate thought is “someone help him” and then I realize that Oxbow was doing just that. I didn’t have to live with my parents during the summer, but I also didn’t have to run through Baltimore at two in the morning with tips from my barback job shoved into my socks or underwear like I did after my first year of college. While it feels a little silly to be so fond of a place that I spent relatively little time at and that hasn’t had a monumental effect on my career or my relationships today, it makes total sense why I’m so enamored and why it looms so large in my memory. Shortly after my brother died, I was spending 24 hours a day tending to and forming relationships with boys his age. In a really big, bold, aggressive way, I was confronting that loss rather than running and hiding from it. I was super actively figuring out how to make sense of a world where other kids lived and he didn’t. When I look at photos of myself at Oxbow, a slight little guy dressed like a circus performer or some type of costume-box shaman for adolescents, I know that he wasn’t always doing the work gracefully or elegantly, but he would have stayed diminutive if he didn’t try. Oxbow gave me a place for grief and a place for growth when I really sorely needed it. 

My best self, the best that I can muster (which is far from perfect), is the version that I was during my time at Oxbow. It’s the version of me that agrees to take on an extra camper in my dorm for the good of the camp. It’s the version of me that sleeps on an air mattress and doesn’t complain. It’s the version of me that’s positive and upbeat and energetic. It’s the version of me that is eating right and physically active and in touch with nature, connected to my body, not caring what I’m wearing, not afraid to look stupid or silly. It’s easy to be all of these things, when your shelter is provided and food is just served to you three times a day and there’s no goal but to go on a hike, put on a fun costume, play some games, and teach a little drawing exercise. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the world and become cruel and hard and mean and selfish, but the Oxbow version of me is in fact always accessible to me if I can remember to tap into it. When a coworker or friend comments on my “camp counselor energy”, it’s the biggest compliment that I can receive. The energy is a little obnoxious, a little “Pollyanna”, but when it emerges I can recognize that it means I’m being genuine. Once while discussing a miserable day of weather during a heatwave in Italy, a woman told me that I was “emotionally resilient,” not something that I hear often, and I knew that she had met the Oxbow version of me. This week, while writing this, I’ve been blasting “Teenage Dream” a lot; I’ve been going for runs too. 

I found Oxbow because someone lost Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Soon, neither will exist. Just like how the Marin Headlands Hostel is no more. Just like how Mills (as an independent college at least) and SFAI are no more. Just like how Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts halted degree programs and Oregon College of Art and Craft, Lyme Academy College of Art, Memphis College of Art, and so many others shuttered, or got absorbed like the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design or Watkins College of Art. Just like how the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, which used to support summer programs for gifted high schoolers, no longer offers those sessions in Colorado. Just this week, Delaware College of Art and Design announced their closure, and sometimes it's hard to tell just who is doing well. (For what it’s worth, the movie theater that I used to go to on my off days in Napa is closed as well, but that place probably deserves to be closed based on this old Yelp page. “God I hate this place” is an incredible way to start a review). From where I sit, it’s tragic poetry that Oxbow should close after one last summer session. It’s like someone “capped the fun”, except that we’re left without a camp counselor to shepherd us through the transition. It happened without instructions for where we should go next. Without getting too into politics and economics and the cost of education and the state of the arts in America, and without knowing too much about how leadership managed the school or the challenges they faced, I’ll go ahead and say that places like Oxbow should exist. There is a Frank O’Hara poem where he talks about leaving oases for our hearts for when they’re thirsty “en route” and that’s what places like Oxbow are. Our hearts need places to go when they’re empty or when they’re full and have much to give. Our hearts need places to grow for a semester or to stop and rest for a summer. They’re not meant for the relentless pursuit of constant achievement or ruthless adherence to a linear path. Our hearts need places to play, to mourn, to gather, to create, or they’ll tire themselves out and they’ll forget why they’re beating to begin with. 

Yes, God is change, but let’s not mistake change for loss. So long live the Interlochens and Idyllwilds and Putneys and the remaining Governor’s Schools while we yet have them and any serious residential art programs or silly art summer camps. Those small beautiful things, they’re the saddest to lose. They’re the most precious, the things that we can hold closest to our chest, and the things most in need of protection. And when we begin to lose them, we’ll lose them piecemeal, and then we’ll look up and realize the extent of what is gone. For those who had found it, and for those who had yet to find it, there is a little less room in the world for a thirsty heart; three acres less, in fact, on the oxbow-shaped bend of the Napa River. 

-Tommy, Oxbow Summer 10 and 11 Dream Team, King of the Pool

P.S. For those Oxbow employees, there’s a wood sign that says “A Special Boy Lives Here” that might be somewhere on campus. The origin is impossible for me to know, but it was found in the “Magic Kingdom” one year by some of the staff and they placed it on my door. I left it for the boy counselor who would come after me, but I’m not sure if it ever got used, taken, or lost. If you see it, send it my way.