The Academy Center of the Arts partnered with Brett Thomas of Mobile Raku to offer a workshop about the unique process of raku. The students who enrolled in the workshop received a 25-pound bag of raku clay, with which they created stunning pieces by throwing on a pottery wheel and by hand building. The raku process is a low-fire method in which the clay is quickly heated in a kiln until the glaze has melted. The clay is then immediately transferred to a container filled with combustible material for the post-firing phase. This immersion beautifully affects the final outcome of the glaze and the raw clay. Normally, the firing process takes around 36 hours from firing up the kiln to cool down. With raku, the firing process only takes thirty minutes, from placing the clay in the kiln to dousing the pieces with water. The pieces sit in the kiln only until the glaze melts, which takes less than one hour. The beautiful glazes that Brett Thomas provided require about twenty minutes to melt in the kiln. Next, the fired clay spends about ten minutes in the post-firing containers. When that time is up, the pieces are then carefully transferred […]

Although our summer camps have come to an end, it’s nice to reflect on the thriving creativity that took place. For nine weeks, the Academy Center of the Arts hosted a diverse range of art camps, including theater, dance, DJ, improvisation, art, and pottery. The Academy Center was constantly brimming with creative youths, with a total of 556 students enrolled in 23 camps. This is a huge leap compared to last year’s enrollment of 299 students in 16 camps. For the first time, we collaborated with the YMCA’s Summer Learning Loss Prevention Program (SLLP), and it was an amazing success. One hundred and fifty students from Altavista, Amherst, Appomattox, and Lynchburg received free arts education at the Academy thanks to our scholarship fund. On entering the pottery studio for the first time, one of the YMCA campers looked around at the shelves full of clay pieces in awe and said, “This is gonna be the best day ever!” The Academy was full of this level of enthusiasm all summer. It is essential that children have the opportunity to explore the arts. Creative instruction helps children realize their tremendous potential. The arts inspire confidence, which often transfers to other areas of […]

The Academy Center of the Arts would like to thank our spring 2016 intern class. They were great to work with and helped us serve our community through arts and culture. If you wish to hear about future internship opportunities, please contact Evan Smith, Director of Community Outreach at 434-528-3556 x114.    

LCS and Homeschoolers – spend your February school break at the Academy! We are very excited to introduce a new winter break theatre camp (February 15-19, from 9am to 4pm each day). Students will rehearse and perform Alice in Wonderland in just one week as well as take classes in the afternoon in costuming, make up, character development and more. The age range for the camp is 9 to 13. We are also excited to welcome back instructor Lauren Barnes. Lauren has done excellent work for us, most recently instructing our fall break camp, The Jungle Book. *To participate, students must audition on February 9 from 6:30-7:30pm at the Academy’s Warehouse Theatre. This is a wonderful way to keep your child engaged and active during this time away from school! Don’t miss out! To register click here!  

This blog post comes from Artist Jon Roark’s personal blog. We are thrilled to feature it here. Since I am trying to make this a more regular venue for my random and sketchy observations, (get it? regular for random?) I am going to try to put down some more thoughts on recent projects. I am partway into my newest egg tempera, but not to a point where I wish to show it, so I am instead going to write about a new 3D construction I am putting together. A couple of years back I was mining a Beatles creative vein and built (at the suggestion of my writer/drummer/creative brother in law Mark Lindamood of Washington DC) an overlarge version of the Beatles Rubber Soulalbum cover. it is about 32″ x 32″ and about 5″ deep and is in a beautiful wooden frame built by my friend Jerry Dudley at Heritage HS. It was a particularly painful project because when I finished painting the cover and all four of it’s portraits on a piece of canvas, I had to cut them out. These were some of the best acrylic portraits I had done at this point (and along with a version of the Let […]

As a recent graduate of Randolph College, I know how important experience beyond the classroom can be. Young people need opportunities in professional settings to gain experience and to be competitive in the job market. During my first two months at the Academy Center, I have started to build connections with local high schools and colleges to engage students to offer such experiences through volunteer, internship, and service learning opportunities. Opportunities come about from need, and there is always work to be done at the Academy Center whether it is mailing thank you letters to our lovely donors, writing grants to fund our Outreach programs, or staffing productions in the Arts & Education Building. With so much work to do and with staff only able to do so much, the Academy Center has looked to the community to assist us in our everyday work. I have met with a number of people to discuss partnerships with the Academy Center including Mark Spaulding, Executive Director of Impact Living Services, and Lynchburg City Councilwoman Treney Tweedy about a potential volunteer and workforce development opportunities to support local youth. Partnerships like these would help the Academy Center fill some personnel needs while simultaneously […]