New Haven-area students dive deep into the arts and humanities at Yale

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) is currently closed for renovations, but one morning this month, about a dozen high school students were granted special access to the museum’s Study Room.

There they hovered over the richly detailed satirical etchings of the 18^th-century English artist William Hogarth. One four-panel series laid out on the table, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” tells the story of a poor orphan who commits escalating acts of cruelty throughout his life until meeting his own cruel end. Hogarth, explained YCBA educator James Vanderberg, excelled at using intricately drawn comic art to “shed light on the ills of society.”

After getting a glimpse of Hogarth, whom Vanderberg, a comic artist himself, called “the great-great-grandfather of the comic narrative style,” they returned to their classroom at the Yale School of Art to work on drawing their own comic tales.

These students were taking a week-long workshop on British comic art taught by Vanderberg as part of Yale’s new Pathways to Arts and Humanities Summer Scholars Program, which just concluded its second year. The initiative is modeled after the Pathways to Science program, which since 2012 has invited students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math to explore Yale’s vast STEM resources.

Eshal Anwer, 16, said she signed up for the workshop on comic art because she loves comics – graphic novels were her introduction to reading. During the session, Vanderberg taught students to tell a story through comic drawings, like Hogarth did, but also to let go of the idea that it must be a work of art.

Anwer found this approach freeing.

“I feel like I’m a perfectionist, but comics aren’t supposed to be perfect,” said Anwer. “It’s nice we can just go with the pen.”

Katrina Reyes, 17, who returned to Pathways this year after attending last summer, had a similar revelation.

“Comics don’t have to be really elaborate,” she said. “They can be really simple and you can still get your story across.”

Like the Pathways to Science program, Pathways to Arts and Humanities offers high school students from New Haven, West Haven, and Orange access to the university’s vast array of resources, all at no charge. This year’s program, held in one two-week session in July and August, attracted 59 students to 11 different workshops, as well as shorter enrichment sessions, offered in partnership with the YCBA, Yale School of Art, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

They used Adobe Photoshop to create digital collages, practiced foundational painting techniques, and sampled the works of poets old and new. They scoured old maps for details of the history of New Haven and tapped primary sources at the Beinecke to learn about African Americans who went to the United Kingdom during the 19^th century to build support for abolition.

The overall goal of the program is to provide local high school students “with a similar learning experience to the one that Yale students have been able to have for over 300 years,” said Maria Parente, associate director of public-school partnerships in Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs, which hosts Pathways.

“The summer workshops give students 10 full days to immerse themselves in an area they already knew they liked, or to discover a whole new area that they had no idea existed,” she said, “and to be in community with like-minded students from high schools across the city.”

‘Pathways is a win-win’

The Pathways programs are two of more than 200 programs offered at Yale annually for Greater New Haven students. Pathways to Science, which is much larger and operates year-round, invites middle school and high school students to explore STEM subjects on campus through demonstrations, lectures, and laboratory visits. More than 1,900 students currently participate, and more than 1,000 alumni are currently enrolled in college.

The Office of New Haven Affairs, with strong support from the Beinecke Library and special collections, began exploring the idea of a summer program for Pathways in the arts and humanities in 2022. That summer, they conducted a beta test, in which 17 high school students attended a color theory workshop taught by a School of Art graduate student. Kymberly Pinder, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the School of Art, was an early and enthusiastic supporter, as she has long been a believer in getting art students out into the community.

“Art students should learn about practices outside of their studios,” Pinder said. “Our Yale artists are very engaged in New Haven and many are interested in teaching, so Pathways is a win-win for the high school students and our students.”

The program officially opened in the summer of 2023 with 55 students and nine workshops. The daily schedule goes like this: every morning the students meet at the Office of New Haven Affairs’ summer home base on Hillhouse Avenue and then walk with their assigned undergraduate teaching assistant to their first 90-minute workshop. After that, the TA takes them to an hour-long enrichment session (which varies daily). Next comes lunch at Morse Dining Hall, and then a second 90-minute workshop.

Parente said they hope to increase the program to 100 students next summer. They recently hired a new full-time program coordinator, who will help build out the program to operate much like Pathways to Science, expanding the year-round offerings and bringing on a new cohort of students each year.

“The idea is to expose students to a wide variety of subjects and if they find an area of interest, offer them a chance to go incrementally deeper over time,” she said.

A space for storytelling

The timing of the rollout of the new Pathways program, officials say, was perfect for the YCBA, which was looking for ways to expand its public outreach and maintain an active presence while the building is closed for renovations. (The museum anticipates reopening in early spring of next year.)

Vanderberg, who taught high school and university-level art for 10 years before coming to YCBA in 2020 to work in community engagement, said he was immediately excited about Pathways when Parente approached him about it. He hit upon the idea of tapping into the YCBA’s extensive collection of British satire and caricature work from the 18^th and 19^th centuries to create a workshop on comic art, as a way to “give students space to tell their own stories.”

“I think they often have a preconceived notion of what comics are — it’s either the Sunday funnies or superheroes — and there’s a whole other range of independent and alternative personal narratives,” Vanderberg said. “There are all these different avenues they can take once they understand the structure of the medium.”

Nour Biada, 16, expected to enjoy the comic art workshop — she is an artist herself — but she didn’t expect to be so engaged by the history of tap, one of the rotating enrichment sessions held in between workshops.

Taught by Rachel Gain, a Yale Ph.D. student in music theory as well as a rhythm tap dancer, the session gave students an overview of the evolution of tap from its 1930s heyday at the Cotton Club in Harlem up through the present day (think Syncopated Ladies), using a series of video clips to bring the dance to life. Then, students were invited to pull on tap shoes provided for them by Yale and take their places on square-shaped boards on the floor.

Following Gain’s lead at the front of the class, the students scuffed, knocked, brushed, and slapped their hearts out for the remainder of the session.

Changing out of her tap shoes, Biada said she found tapping so fun she was going to take her shoes home and continue practicing a little shuffle-ball-change on her own. While eager to keep the tap going herself, her parents might not be so thrilled, she joked, if her efforts result in “a scuffed floor.”