The Fresno State Department of Art, Design and Art History is providing students with multiple workshop webinars this year. “Art Education: Thriving through the arts” are webinars with different forms of art activities, focusing on therapy.

The next one will be held over Zoom at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16. The Art department encourages students to register before the event. 

AhRan Koo is the organizer of the workshops. The series of webinars is a collaboration between Fresno State College of Arts and Humanities and The California Art Project. 

“I organized this series of workshops last semester, and the first session was on Oct. 27, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic-related consequences. I invited five mental health professionals/art therapists to lead the mental health workshops this 2022-2023 academic year.” 

Koo told The Collegian the theme for this week’s workshop will be “community transformations through the arts.” 

These workshops are an activity for students to feel relieved of stress by tapping into their artistic skills. Attendees will be assisted with the help of five webinar guests. 

The panel therapist assisting in the workshop will provide advice through different forms of art. For example, some of the therapists attending will include art, drama, music, expressive arts, and dance movement. 

The scholars and art therapists attending will be Dr. Kelvin Ramirez, Dr. Sojung Park, Dr. Laura Woods, Christine Joseph and Ebony Nichols. 

Some supplies needed before attending the webinar workshop include: letter-size paper and basic drawing materials, like colored pencils or markers. 

All of the webinar sessions are free and open to everyone within the campus or community.

Each workshop will be a different theme with about four to five breakout rooms with a specialized therapist in those designated fields. 

In October, the first theme of the workshop series was “Using the arts to emerge from a Global Pandemic.” In January, the theme was “Imagining Activism in a Bifurcated Society.” 

The next workshop will be on March 23 with the theme “Nurturing our Social Emotional Selves.”