Camden County College fosters art hopes

Perfecting her artistic statement on debt, Ryan McFadden arranged cut-up credit cards over dollar signs cut from magazines on a wooden base covered in waxy paint.

After an unhappy semester at Daytona State College in Florida, she's back at Camden County College, building a portfolio with the hope of transferring to a Philadelphia art school.

"I've been coming here since 2007," said McFadden, 20, of Westville. She said her painting professor, Kay Klotzbach, "is tough, but good."

McFadden is the kind of serious artist Camden County College hoped to attract with its decade-long curriculum makeover, which has culminated with agreements from Philadelphia's Moore College of Art and Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) to accept academic and studio credits from the school.

Driving the effort is Klotzbach, the college's visual-arts coordinator and a painter, illustrator, and dog-lover from Lindenwold.

"We want art majors to get the foundation here and move on," said Klotzbach, illustrator of the children's book Everyone Loves Elwood, by Karen Quigley of Sewell, about the local winner of the 2007 world's ugliest dog contest.

In terms of costs, county college makes a lot of sense, said assistant professor Gregory Brellochs, who earned his degrees at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at PAFA. "I kind of wish I had taken the time and explored a bit. I could have saved my parents a lot of money."

Annual tuition at Camden County College is about $3,000 for full-time students; at the Philadelphia art schools it ranges from $21,000 to $29,500.

Money is an issue for many at the two-year college. The University of the Arts in Philadelphia has twice accepted Chris Grover, 20, of Gloucester City, he said, but he can't afford the tuition. He's at Camden County, building his portfolio until he can transfer.

Back in school after her New York business failed, Tracy Steele, 41, of Cherry Hill, aspires to attend Moore or PAFA ("if I can afford it") and eventually teach high school art.

Camden County's reputation attracted Elimar Mateo, 25, of Willingboro, who transferred from Burlington County College, where he had taken three art classes. His private instructor thought Camden County would help him sharpen his skills for his tattoo and air-brush businesses.

The students are among 15 taking one of the school's three-hour studio classes - the core of its beefed-up curriculum - from Klotzbach this semester.

"If you were to sit in a lecture class for 3 1/2 hours, it would be mind-numbing and counterproductive," said Brellochs, who has taught sculpture and design for four years. But longer studio times, typical of four-year art schools, allow hands-on demonstrations and more private consultation.

Klotzbach, in her distinctive red-rimmed glasses and matching red apron, circled her class Monday, complimenting, questioning, and challenging. She avoided giving the harsh criticism she said she had received at Moore in the 1970s.

"In art school, you can thin the herd," Klotzbach said. At community college, "your job is not to eliminate; your job is to grow."

In addition to fine-arts majors, Klotzbach's class contains students such as Ryan Righter, 22, of Collingswood, an international-studies major who views art as a release from subjects such as Arabic. There also is an autistic student, Katherine Highet of Voorhees, who learns with her mother, Danuta, by her side.

The affable Klotzbach jumps into her students' projects. She helped Tina Panna, 37, of Blackwood, mix the perfect brown to paint the border of a five-panel tea-bag-theme series, and suggested a sealant for the tea leaves Panna was piling onto a canvas.

"She inspires me as an artist," said Panna, who returned to school after a career in advertising and marketing.

Determined to be an artist since "age 2," Klotzbach graduated from Moore in 1975 and earned a master's degree in fine arts from Vermont College in 1996. She taught at the Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown and at Cumberland County College before arriving at Camden County College in 2000.

Once a year, Klotzbach teaches a class that incorporates community service, such as a mural painting in 2001 at the Food Bank of South Jersey in Pennsauken, an Egyptian exhibit in 2003 at the Garden State Discovery Museum in Cherry Hill, and last fall's mosaic project on the exterior of Cathedral Kitchen in Camden.

"The students were really dedicated, and so was Kay," said Karen Talarico, Cathedral Kitchen's executive director. "The outcome was tremendous."

Panna said working on the mosaic "was not only moving because it helped the community, but it brought us together as a group of artists." She said she often took visitors to see the 14-by-17-foot piece outside the kitchen's new home at 1514 Federal St.

To keep her skills fresh, Klotzbach devotes summers to her own work, which has been exhibited around the country. Last year, she took a break from her five-course class load for a midcareer fellowship at Princeton University.

"If you didn't have summers off, you'd die," she said. "There's no way an art person can't do art."