Art Department Organizes Sketchbook Exchange Program with Lutheran High Schools

A sketchbook collaboration between Concordia art students and high schoolers. Photo by Jordyn Sturms.

by Rebecca Axford

Students in the art program are coordinating with Lutheran high schools across the country to participate in a semester-long sketchbook exchange program. Forty-five Concordia students turned in sketchbooks to Art Department Chair Don Robson on Oct. 18, who mailed them off to Crean Lutheran High School in Irvine, California, and Lutheran High School in Parker, Colorado.

Each sketchbook is given to an art student at one of those schools, who will keep it for two weeks before sending it back. This will happen four times over the course of the semester.

Robson came up with the idea of a sketchbook exchange last year while visiting high schools to recruit new students with Assistant Professor of Art Seth Boggs.

The exchange is coordinated with Crean Lutheran’s art instructor Anna Bloomfield and Lutheran High Parker’s Art Club Leader Mark Hollenbeck. Both are Concordia alumni.

Students can draw anything they want in their sketchbooks, from fan art to their professors, as long as it’s appropriate. There are very few guidelines.

“Do what you do,” Robson said. “Express the way you do, because hopefully that will open up the dialogue of comments about the work, and maybe they’ll find that they have something in common that way.”

Robson recruited most of the art majors individually.

“Professor Robson actually just emailed me near the beginning of the year,” sophomore Micah Symmank said. “He didn’t say what he wanted to talk about, just that he wanted to talk to me, and then he explained it when I got to his office.”

The sketchbook exchange functions as a recruiting tool, introducing high school students to Concordia and creating a relationship between the college student and the high schooler.

It is also one of the measures being adopted to revitalize Concordia’s art club. Students involved in the art club must do at least one service project each semester, and the sketchbook exchange counts as one.

“They are serving because they are giving of their time and sharing with someone they don’t even know,” Robson said. “They want to do that because they want to make a connection, and I think that’s pretty beautiful.

“I love seeing other people’s work,” Symmank said. “I love working with younger kids who are interested in art, because I want to be an art teacher. The thought that I could share some of my work with someone else and see their own take of sketching was just super cool to me.”

Although it is primarily an art club activity, students do not have to be involved with the art club to participate. Robson intends to continue the program for the foreseeable future.

The program is paid for entirely by the art department’s budget. Involved students do not need to provide their own sketchbook or pay for shipping.

It has not been decided which schools will receive the sketchbooks at the end of the semester.