Linda Fuller, beloved art teacher, is the third speaker in the Throwback Summer Lecture Series to be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 15, at the Krone Library on the Idyllwild Arts campus. The idea of the lectures is to learn about and celebrate the past 70 years of this successful, creative arts academy.
Linda first came to the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts (ISOMATA), the school’s original name, in the 1980s. Her husband, Michael Fuller, taught theater there. The Children’s Center director was Althea Pratt. She asked Linda to be an art teacher for the center. “I was so afraid she was just hiring me because of my husband that I insisted on giving her my résumé and doing a demonstration with the children before I was hired,” Linda said.
Linda’s credentials are many. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, she received her master’s degree in art at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, studying under the famous painter Charles White. “He was very grueling and disciplined, but he taught me how to work with people.” She uses these skills when she gives workshops and teaches art throughout the United States.
While her summer is spent at the Children’s Center teaching art to children under high school age, the rest of the year she is working at the 92nd Street Y, a world-class cultural and community center in New York City, the L.A. Museum of Art or consulting. She was a teacher at Crossroads School for Art and Science were she taught the son of world-prominent artist, Sam Francis, who gave her many opportunities to share her artistic talents.
Linda will show many pictures of the people she knew and admired at ISOMATA as well as the stories that accompany them at the talk, including famous sculptor and the school’s first ceramic teacher Lora Steere. “She was in her 90s when I told my students that we would be going from the school through the meadow to visit her at her cabin,” Linda said. “The boys were nudging each other and the girls were fidgety. We were working in clay, and I thought they might want to meet her, but they clearly wanted to stay and do art. As we proceeded to walk through the meadow we saw her sitting and waiting for us. She had the children sit around her while she demonstrated how to take apart a mold. The kids were entranced. Afterwards she invited them in for cookies and lemonade. As we walked back, the students asked when are we going to see Mrs. Steere again?”
She also remembers when Bea Krone, one of the founders of ISOMATA, came to the Children’s Center. “We were making life-size stuffed people. Bea came and sat right in the middle of the people. The students were delighted.” Linda’s students designed and made costumes for Shirley Robbins’ Renaissance productions.
One of her students was Nate Lowman, son of Bill Lowman, the Academy’s founding president. “Nate did not want to take art. He took a stick and fiddled with it in the dirt. I gave him some wood and started him on a project. Bill jokingly tells me, ‘Linda, you are the reason my son is a successful artist today.’” Today Nate is nationally known professional artist.
Linda said art for younger children is more important today than ever. With all of the technological gadgets they are exposed to, kids don’t have experience with hands-on materials. Art is dwindling in the schools. She exposes them to all kinds of materials, gives them the license to be free to use their own originality, gives guidance when needed and lets them do the problem solving.
This has been her mantra for 20-plus years. She loves the school, the people, the surroundings and the openness. Kids come here ready to do art.
The final lecture of the Throwback Summer Lecture Series features the Academy’s founding president, Bill Lowman, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 22, in the Krone Library.
