STUDIO's 35th Anniversary Gala brought hundreds of guests and supporters to the Seagram Building Plaza to celebrate the organization's major milestone. See what the Wall Street Journal, Women's Wear Daily, Bloomberg News, and Guest of a Guest had to say about the event.

STUDIO was featured on The Colbert Report on July 31st. Renowned artist Jeff Koons, who will be honored at STUDIO's 35th Anniversary Gala on October 2nd, was Stephen Colbert's guest and they talked about Koons' art, Studio in a School, and the importance of arts education. Watch the interview.

WABC's education reporter Art McFarland visited STUDIO's program at PS 196 in the Bronx today. STUDIO President & CEO, artist/instructor James Reynolds, and Principal Lizette Rivera were all interviewed. Click here to watch the segment.

Channel THIRTEEN's Metro Focus visited PS 112 in Manhattan as Jeff Koons kicked off Visual Arts Appreciation Week on June 4th. Here's a clip of the segment.

"I know a little about you," the striking woman with spiky hair and dressed in black told the group of third graders as she walked into their art classroom today at Manhattan's PS 75.  "I saw your art work."  Her voice was low and dramatic, almost reverential.  Ursula von Rydingsvard had come to school to talk about art -- about her intricate and monumental sculptures -- but first she wanted to talk about the art that these children were making with Studio in a School's teaching artist Kelly Martin.  Von Rydingsvard was taking part in Studio's Visual Arts Appreciation Week, the start of Studio's 35th Anniversary celebrations -- along with Jeff Koons, Claudia DeMonte and Fred Wilson, who visited other Studio school programs in New York City this week. 

Like all schools with Studio programming, the lobby and corridors of PS 75 are filled with art work -- paintings of their neighborhood, self-portraits in pastels, and a striking display of papier-mâché sculptures called "Figures in Motion," including a soccer goalie flying to block a goal, a skate boarder poised in mid air, a dancer locked in a spin. "Most art teaching today is so quick and rote," von Rydingsvard said to Martin and school principal, Bob O'Brien, after a tour of the hallways, "but here kids are thinking, figuring things out.  It's so moving, they're so honest in their art."

Von Rydingsvard makes sculptures that seem born of the earth -- many made from wood that she transforms into primitive, sensuous shapes, often monumental in size.  She described her artistic process to the third graders in a very physical way, moving about like a dancer while miming the carving, chipping and buzz-sawing movements she makes to create her art.  She showed them slides of her art in the making, beginning with the picture of an enormous flatbed truck pulling up outside her studio with a shipment of long cedar beams from Japan -- her favorite material.  "I like cedar because it's light," she explained, and gave the children samples to feel the softness and weight. 

Then came images of this strong, wiry woman coordinating a team of artisans in her huge studio to carve, cut, saw and glue together thousands of pieces of cedar into large circular slabs that she calls "doughnuts" -- which she then assembled in layers that create a rippling effect as they are placed on top of one another in a cascading upward surge. "The sides are layered into even unevenness," she explained.  "It's little at the bottom and gets bigger and bigger and bigger when you look up, you almost get dizzy.  The spaces between the ridges are like long streams so that light can shine on them and create patterns and shadows.  Over time the cedar turns silver."  When completed, this sculpture reached over 20 feet high and weighed nearly two tons, a creation of mathematically balanced precision and monumental delicacy. She called it "Ogromna," a Polish word that means "The vast." 

The third graders were mesmerized.  "What inspires you?" one asked. "I travel a lot -- to Japan, Turkey, China, India.  I love to look at ruins and religious objects.  I like to look at trees and old, old villages." Many of her sculptures look like they would be at home among ancient ruins.  She also showed slides of a huge cedar piece that she made by creating cedar doughnuts, as in the other work, then sliced into it diagonally, hammered thin cedar pieces into the slits, and laid it on its side so that "it feels like a big animal struggling to move along the ground."

"Why doesn't your floor break?" one third grader asked her.  "Because my floor is concrete and what's under that?  What's under Manhattan?  Rock!" she exclaimed exuberantly.

"When did you start making art?" another student asked.  "When I was 30, I waited too long.  I came to New York City when I was 33 and New York woke me up.  I went to Columbia and went to lots of exhibitions and it made me feel alive.  What inspired me?  I don't really know, but it gave me a good feeling.  Lots of things you don't really understand but if you need to do it, you should do it."

The third graders knew a little more about art by the end of their famous visitor's presentation -- and through her art they knew a little more about her.  Most had never thought about a woman making a two-ton piece of art.  "Is it hard?" one asked.

"It's a lot of fun to be an artist," she replied, "and a lot of fun to work."

The young artists nodded and smiled.  That they could understand.

When artist Fred Wilson visited PS 46 today as part of Studio's Visual Arts Appreciation Week, Principal George Young proudly showed him the art that fills his school's lobby and hallways -- a large mural, "Harlem of Mine," stained glass panels and pastel self portraits, all created by students in Studio's visual arts program over the past 13 years.  He told Wilson about Willie Mays' visit to the school a few years ago to receive an honor from the New York Giants (the school is located on the former home field of the Giants) and Mays had asked, "How do you get this kind of art out of kids?"

"Teachers here want the program, parents want it, and students want it," Young told Wilson.  The fifth-grade art students in Studio artist Robin Holder's art class were certainly excited to welcome guest artist Wilson and to learn that he had spent his childhood in the Bronx, only one subway stop away from this East Harlem school. Holder, who has worked at PS 46 since the late 1990s, predicted that her students would have "a wonderful adventure" with their visiting artist, and Wilson then led them on a journey into art, history and their own personal stories.

Fred Wilson describes himself as someone who likes to "look at things and decide to let the things I see tell the stories for me."  One picture, which Wilson titled "The Conversation," showed a seated baby doll and a much smaller salt shaker in the shape of a maid.  "What's the relationship?" Holder asked the children.  One student suggested, "The baby is getting more attention from the artist, is more important."  Wilson liked the answer:  "That's a reversal of reality, right?  Why?  Maybe the baby has some power over this person because the baby's parents hired the maid; in our society, it's not how big you are that's important but how much power you have." 

Wilson next showed a work from a museum show he did at the Maryland Historical Society, entitled "Mining the Museum, An Installation."  "I come into a museum and objects talk to me," Wilson explained.  He showed a picture of a painting that had been hanging in the museum since the 19th century, depicting five affluent-looking white children and two African-American children on the edges of the painting, so dark that they almost disappear into the background.  The label mentions only the five white children.  "Why not the black children?" Wilson asked.  "That painting hung for more than 100 years and no one saw those children.  Why?  What was going on?"  The class talked about slavery and the fact that those two children weren't "important enough" to get their names on the painting, or their faces made visible.  When Holder asked the students why Wilson might be so interested in a painting that was 150 years old, a student answered, "Because he's the same race and everyone deserves the same attention and equality."

 "I heard voices coming from the painting," said Wilson, "of children reacting to this.  So I recorded audio reactions from a group of children who imagined what those children might be saying and included those voices in the installation.  They asked things like, 'Where's my mother?'  and 'Who washed my back?'"  Wilson also showed the students the cover of his museum show catalog, where he had made paper cutouts revealing the two African-American children and covering up the white children.  "I try to make things pop out that you don't see," Wilson said.  "Mining means digging -- and blowing things up."

Wilson finished his presentation by "mining" the PS 46 art room, choosing objects that the children had made, combining them with other objects and inviting the children to share new perspectives and stories.  "You want other people to see your perspective, you want people to look and see a story," Wilson said.  "Everyone sees differently, it's not a story book, but you make people look and stop and think."  

One girl volunteered a painful personal story that Wilson's art had inspired her to share -- about being bullied by a sibling who told her she looked disgusting.  "I like the way I look," she said, "but my sister doesn't care about me."  Holder asked the girl to stand up:  "Isn't she beautiful?!" she asked the class and everyone applauded.  A classmate said, "You should love yourself and be motivated to look like you want. Mr. Wilson is telling us that art gives you a voice."  Wilson responded, "That's why I started making art.  It made me feel good about myself.  And I wanted to show other people that something is wrong.  Art comes from a truth you know deep inside of you."

The fifth graders at PS 46 seemed wise beyond their years and clearly appreciated Wilson's art.  "Do you want to try to heal the world?"  one 11-year-old asked him.  "I try to reveal things that people have been doing wrong," Wilson replied.  The student responded:  "You've been doing good with that." 

The fourth graders at PS 139 in Brooklyn were hooked from the moment the visual artist Claudia DeMonte walked in the door of their classroom this morning. The tall, dynamic woman with the long ponytail shared her life story while showing slides of her magical art.  "All my art comes from my own story," she said as a bronze sculpture of a woman draped in pocket books popped on the screen.  "I love pocket books but my husband says, 'why do you need another one when you have 10 already?' This work is from a show about abundance and the lack of it."  The next sculpture was of a very thin woman who had nothing.  "My parents were immigrants from Italy and my father was homeless when he came here.  He started working when he was eight.  I got to go to college because I had really good parents." 

DeMonte came to school to celebrate Studio in a School's Visual Arts Appreciation Week, just as Jeff Koons did yesterday in East Harlem.  Both artists wanted to bring attention to the work Studio has been doing for 35 years -- providing art to New York City schools that otherwise wouldn't have an arts program. PS 139 has partnered with Studio for the past seven years to create an ongoing visual arts program for their school.  

Studio artist instructor Virginia Levie has run the program from the start and teaches over 300 children every week.  Her classroom/art studio is jammed with her young artists' imaginative creations.  Over 100 papier-mâché self-portraits are strung along the walls, including a Pakistani baseball player with black marks under his eyes and a Yankee cap.  Super hero collages on paper, watercolor butterflies, spotted owls, rainbow-hued fish, and clay, wood and wire sculptures of gesture and balance, including a break-dancer in motion, compete for attention.

DeMonte was as smitten with the children and their art as they were with her. "I didn't have a school like this to go to when I was young, with all these wonderful supplies and this wonderful teacher," she told them.  "You're being taught like you're in college -- talking about your art, sharing your ideas with your friends."  When she learned that the children in the school speak over 30 languages, she told them about her extensive travels.  "I've been to over 100 countries all over the world; when you travel you learn that no place is better than another, just different."

DeMonte's art reflects her travels and her particular interest in women's lives and work.  One show she curated was images suggested by women artists in over 100 countries, when she had asked the artists, "What image means woman to you?"  She showed them an example of one of her most well known sculpture series -- a carved teddy bear decorated with delicate, shiny cast pewter objects that she calls "milagros" -- meaning miracles.  The milagros were inspired by Latin folk art and each pewter creation represents something of significance to her (from tennis balls to pocket books).

Before she finished her day at school, DeMonte helped the children work on their own art project of the day -- a collaborative collage of a baseball pitcher in motion.  They were discussing how to "scale up" their images so that they could recreate them on a very large canvas that was bigger than life-size.  Each child cut out a body part from painted paper and the group assembled the pieces and discussed their collaborative results.  The hour flew by and the children told DeMonte they hoped she would come back and teach them more art. 

DeMonte countered with "I'm the one who was lucky in getting to come here today.  I'm so impressed… you guys inspire me.  You're really artists.  Now I want to go home and make something bigger!"

"How did you make your sculptures?" a second-grader in East Harlem asked the smiling man in black jeans and sneakers who sat in a circle with 16 second-graders and their STUDIO artist/instructor.  He was asking about the famous balloon dog sculptures of Jeff Koons, one of America's most prominent living artists, who came today to help teach art class at Manhattan's PS 112.

"I used a balloon, twisted it into a shape like a dog," said Koons.   "Then I made a mold and filled the mold with polished metal, which creates a surface like a mirror.  And do you know why I made the dogs shiny?  To reflect you.  I did it to celebrate YOU."

Today Koons was also celebrating Studio in a School's Visual Arts Appreciation Week, kicking off the 35th anniversary festivities marking the founding of STUDIO.  A longtime friend and supporter of STUDIO, Koons said: "I'm really moved to be here, to see first hand the vast impact that STUDIO makes on these kids' lives.  The artwork here is amazing.  You can feel the sense of interior life developing and relating to the outside world.  Children are learning about their own possibilities, and art will carry them throughout their lives.  Art is a vocabulary that really lets people connect to the world." 

The Jose Celso Barbosa School has partnered with Studio in a School  for 22 years and the hallways and art room are  brimming with imaginative creations -- silver and black collograph prints of collage animals, a water color of a two-headed walrus/elephant, papier mache masks "inspired by Mascaras Vejigartes from Puerto Rico," oil pastel self-portraits and much more.  Longtime STUDIO artist/instructor Cathy Ramey is a professional painter who runs the visual arts program in this Title I School for over 300 students in pre-kindergarten through second grade and today Jeff Koons was helping her teach the children to make paper animals with moving parts. 

The second-graders were bursting with questions for Koons.  Eight-year-old Jonathan showed Koons a picture of three horses.  "I wanted to know something about horses and thought he would know how to make a horse sculpture." Koons told him they reminded him of his balloon dogs. "These New York City children are very curious and practical about art.  Art has reality in their lives."

"How do you get your mind ready for what you make?" one student asked.  Koons told them to "follow your interests.  The wonderful thing about art is that it’s a place of freedom.  You can make anything.  It's impossible to make anything wrong." 

Another student asked Koons how he became an artist. "When I was about three, my parents told me I was good at drawing.  It was the first time I can remember doing something better than my sister -- who was three years older. It gave me a sense of self.  You become who you are because of things like that."

STUDIO's Visual Arts Appreciation Week, a week-long celebration and awareness campaign for arts education,  will kick off on June 4th with Jeff Koons visiting our program at PS 112 in Manhattan. The New York Times has all of the details for the week. Click here to read more about the events!