School Notes: School of Art
September/October 2006

No ordinary summer school

Another session of the Yale Summer Program of Music and Art has ended at the Ellen Battell Stoeckel estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. Since 1946, when the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Trust was set up, both the School of Music and the School of Art have sent premier faculty, students, and staff to Norfolk in the summer to pursue work in their fields and to teach a limited number of college seniors from schools across the country and abroad.

In recent years, the art program has begun bringing in the local community with a six-week drawing workshop and a two-week children’s workshop for Norfolk families. This past July, School of Art faculty also provided a free digital photography workshop for the local community over the final weekend of the program.

The 26 students in the program—drawn from a pool of more than 250 applicants who are nominated by their schools—receive academic credit for their six-week course. The School of Art curriculum at Norfolk focuses primarily on painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography, and it includes small exhibitions and impromptu site-specific constructions by current Yale MFA sculpture students. Alumni of the Yale Norfolk art program include William Bailey, Eva Hesse, Mark Strand, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Chuck Close, and Brice Marden, among others.