Curriculum & Impact
The Firehouse Art Center provides visual arts education in-house each year to over 1,200 children, teens, and adults. Over 40 classes are offered by our talented faculty each semester in a variety of mediums, for all artistic aptitudes and skill levels. Classes focus on developing self-expression, building technical skills, and studying art history and master artists, with particular attention given to the individual needs and interests of the students.
The Firehouse's children's art education programming additionally follows the Firehouse's Creating with the Masters and Oklahoma Academic Standards for Fine Arts: Visual Arts guidelines. During the past decade, the Firehouse's strong approach towards primary education curriculum has been recognized with the Governor's Award for Arts in Education and the Norman Arts Council's Fowler Arts Education Award.
Class Schedule & Enrollment
Spring 2025
Spring Class Semester: March 31 - May 18
General Enrollment: February 17, 2025
Children’s Classes
Offered September through May in three semesters, the Art After School (AAS) classes at the Firehouse are structured by age group (5 - 6, 7 - 9, and 10 - 14 years). Every class includes instruction in a variety of mediums including painting, drawing, ceramics, collage, and mixed media. AAS is augmented through a field trip partnership with the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, which provides students with the opportunity to explore art in a formal museum setting and experience the work of master artists first-hand.
Offered June through August in four one or two-week sessions, Children’s Summer Art Program classes are structured by age group (5 - 6, 7 - 9, and 10 - 14 years), and meet Monday - Friday for two hours of art instruction in a variety of mediums.
Teen Classes
The Firehouse Art Center’s Youth & Teen programming provides intensive visual arts experiences for adolescents ages 13 - 18. Including youth ceramics and advanced drawing and multimedia courses offered during the quarterly class semesters, as well as special workshop opportunities, the classes follow an intensive multidisciplinary curricula.
Adult Classes
Students will learn the fundamentals of pottery through the lifecycle of clay. Students will learn how to throw pottery, trim feet, pull handles, and glaze their work, as well as the general safety of working with clay and ceramic glazes.
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From formal drawing and painting courses to open studio and open format workshops, these classes focus on developing and honing the technical skills of these 2-dimensional mediums. Beginning students will develop a strong foundation of skills, while intermediate and advanced students will build on their existing skills with guidance from their instructor.
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Offered for a variety of skill levels, Jewelry Making classes at the Firehouse begin with the basics of sawing sheet metal, filing, silver soldering, texturing, and forming and progress to more advanced techniques such as surface embellishment, stone setting, and polishing. Students will use these skills to learn how to make jewelry by hand, from raw metal to a finished work of art.
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Studying the elements of color, texture, line, shape, and form, students in the Glass department learn the properties of glass and how to create functional and decorative pieces using fused and kiln-formed glass techniques. Intermediate and advanced students are able to move beyond the basics and work with more experimental techniques.
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Classes in the fiber arts explore the elements of textiles as students learn the basics of color, composition, and the technical skills necessary to make hand-crafted art that communicates a meaning or emotion.
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Healing Studio is a supportive classroom environment for individuals with varying degrees of cognitive, physical, and learning disabilities to experiment with the creative process through self-expression. The Healing Studio operates as an open studio; instruction and activities are individualized and non-stressful.
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