Education & Classes in Monrovia

Having noticed cuts in local arts programming, founders and father-daughter duo J. Thomas and Sara Hunsucker wanted to ensure that all students have access to arts education. Celebrated local artists, they created a center that gives adults and children the tools to communicate more through visual creations and less through crayoned Rorschach drawings. Their squad of professional artists teaches all the center's classes, which move along at each individual’s self-enforced pace. While the instructors watch, children can dabble in exploration of ceramics, painting, sculpture, or mold making. The school's 1,100-square-foot facility also serves as a multiuse space, hosting birthday parties, special events, and seasonal children's art camps. Adults can stop by for erudite education in the form of exhibitions, lectures, and workshops on how to win a stare-off against Van Gogh’s self-portrait.

With a mission to educate consumers on the mystifying subtleties of wine, Learn About Wine hosts more than 100 classes, trade tastings, and consumer events each year. Since its beginnings in 1995, the organization has helped more than 25,000 students deepen their appreciation and understanding of the old-world drink through socially centered programs. Wine Camp, Learn About Wine’s introductory course, encourages guests to absorb wine-drinking terminology and critical lessons in storing and serving. Regional tours lead groups through various growing regions, allowing visitors to observe processes such as fermenting and picking bottles at the peak of glossiness. Click here for a complete listing of program types.

[[m:####Xpress Art Center

For seven years, Xpress Art Center's founders, Lyudmila Garayan and Armen Atomts, have taught youngsters and adults alike how to unearth their innate creativity through paints, charcoals, pastels, and watercolors. During classes and art camps, the Art Center teaches its students not only how create beautiful artwork but also how to unleash their imaginations to problem solve, build self-confidence, and map out a future as self-drawn cartoon characters. The programs have helped the center become a community mainstay, winning an impressive array of awards and recognition from the City of Los Angeles and the California Legislature Assembly.:m]]

Though he enjoys playing with the latest toys of the trade as much as the next photographer, Ibarionex Perello's love of the art stems from its ability to transform the mundane into the remarkable. After years of writing instructional articles and technical reviews, Perello kicked off his podcast, The Candid Frame, to interview fellow photographers and place a finger on the creative—rather than the mechanical—pulse of the art. In the broadcast's five-year history, Perello has interviewed such stars of the field as Gerd Ludwig of National Geographic, William George Wadman of Time, Bill Frakes of Sports Illustrated, and the Hubble Telescope. Besides his hands-on broadcasts on the state of the art, Perello is a notable instructor of photography, both at his own workshops across Southern California and as an adjunct professor at the Art Center College of Design.

As the instructors at California Survival School, brothers Dan and Michael Baird impart decades of wilderness-survival know-how during outdoor, hands-on courses. Participants prepare themselves to live self sufficiently off the land using both modern and primitive techniques, which can come in handy when lost in the woods or the year 1412. During the Core Survival Skills Adventure Clinic, up to 30 students spend five hours learning to create fire using only sticks, build shelters with natural materials, purify water, and feed themselves off the land. The Ancient Artisans Workshop teaches novices how to fashion crude implements from scratch with materials found in nature, including stone blades, tools and containers, and binding materials.

Stinging nettle, lambsquarters, and mugwort: as ubiquitous weeds around the LA area, it’s a rare sight to see them celebrated as elements of gourmet cuisine. But the duo behind Transitional Gastronomy, Pascal Baudar and Mia Wasilevich, are changing that with their inventive approach to foraged food. Baudar combines his background in French and Belgian country cuisine with more than a decade of experience teaching survivalist classes and studying wild food in Southern California. On the other hand, Wasilevich’s own diverse heritage informs her more modern approach to the culinary arts, which incorporates molecular gastronomy as well as more traditional methods. Each dish they create depends on whatever seasonal botany they come across, in addition to careful research on how each ingredient was used through history.

The pair has been celebrated in local and national media for their educational excursions and culinary innovation, from mentions in Time and the Los Angeles Times to features on NBC and ABC. Their experiments have yielded dishes as diverse as lambsquarters bisque and mousse to flatbreads topped with acorn, nettle pesto, and homemade preserved lemons. Transitional Gastronomy’s team shares their passions through small-group foraging hikes and cooking classes, which also include Baudar’s expertise in Old World styles of preservation and fermentation. Elderberry wine and mugwort beer make frequent appearances at each workshop, proving that you can even celebrate happy hour if you were stranded in the forest or on a spaceship that harvests elderberries and mugwort.