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Alexandra Quinn ’87, who as project coordinator helped Hatch launch Oxbow, enjoys mealtime in the school's dining hall, which emphasizes seasonal cuisine.

Sarah Cunningham poses with a student work, a human outline in twigs.

The same assignment on working with natural materials yielded these twig faces, arranged on a studio table.

FILLING THE EASELS
Where do the students come from? Some come from the Napa Valley, where the Mondavis have set up a substantial fund to endow local scholarships. Some come from Oxbow's four dues-paying member schools: Phillips Academy, the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the Fieldston School in New York, N.Y., and the Urban School of San Francisco. Others are recruited from public and private schools through a network of art teachers familiar with Oxbow, which recently engaged an admissions director to carry word of its mission from coast to coast. The tuition for each semester's program is $13,500, including room, board and art supplies, with financial aid available. Cunningham says the actual per-pupil expenditure is closer to $20,000.

The boys and girls whom Oxbow seeks to attract are not necessarily aspiring artists, but rather "students who are critical thinkers about the world and who realize their ideas about the world through their artwork," Cunningham states. "They might have fabulous skills and a lot of experience, or they might have little skill and no experience. Either way, they need to have shown, through their way of approaching things, that they really want to ask questions and find answers."

For evidence of what the dean terms this "outward view," the admissions team asks students to submit a self-portrait in any med-ium, and Oxbow's application poses probing questions like, "If you were to design a public art piece, what would you design?"

Last fall, Oxbow's class included Lillian Kingery ’02, the first Phillips Academy student to participate. Daughter to John Kingery ’75, the Portland, Ore., upper chose PA for its arts facilities, she confesses, and was thrilled to have a semester's immersion in her favorite passion.

"I'm a painter and photographer, and I also like to draw," says Kingery. "It's an amazing thing to be in an atmosphere where my entire life revolves around art."

As an example of how art is integrated into the curriculum, consider an assignment made by her history teacher. It involved creating a visual response to the Industrial Revolution and the impact of 19th century technological advances on people. Kingery did a painting that she cut into six pieces, with each spinning around on a wire.

DREAMING OF EINSTEIN
"The whole faculty meets each week to talk about how to integrate our lessons," Cunningham notes. When the art teachers were focusing on light, she assigned her English class to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Tanazaki's In Praise of Shadows, each rife with light metaphors. Another collaboration involved an Einstein unit for which students read MIT professor Alan Lightman's fanciful Einstein's Dreams and created an artwork reflecting on it prior to arrival in Napa. Once there, they studied imperialism, the growth of the atomic age and the theory of relativity, with complementary art projects throughout the term. "English, art, science and history all came right together," Cunningham recalls.

Oxbow's instructional staff includes teachers of printmaking, painting, digital art, photography, drawing and sculpture, as well as "context" teachers in English, history and science, plus two to three visiting artists each semester. The visitors range from those Quinn calls "emerging artists" to already established players in the art world like painter Wayne Thiebaud. Typically a residency occupies a week to 10 days during which the visitor works on his or her own art while also challenging students with daily assignments. A notable exception was the visit of art historian and critic Lucy Lippard ’54 (see Author, Author), who held a single but intense dialogue session with the teens. An important component of each visit is an evening lecture to which the public is invited, says Quinn, who now runs the artist-in-residence program and works in fund raising.

BAKING, BIKING, BOATING
Like the Mondavis, Oxbow has what Cunningham calls "a strong food philosophy." Vegetables and herbs grown by the students are consumed in the school's dining hall, temporarily housed in a building on the adjacent Napa County fairgrounds. The chef is Tracy Bates, who trained at Berkeley's famed Chez Panisse. Each student's two-week rotation in Bates' kitchen is deemed an exciting privilege, and dinner is nearly a sacred ritual. To help "get the students more in tune with their environment," the cuisine centers on fresh, pure seasonal foods, the dean says.

Beyond the cuisine and the courses, Oxbow arranges tutoring for students who need to progress in math or a foreign language, and all students take physical education, participating in either a bicycling or boating elective. Visits to museums and artists' studios take place each Friday.

"We only have the students for 16 weeks," Cunningham says, "so we like to pack as much into them as we can."

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© Phillips Academy, 2001