Ann Arbor Art Center

This rating is purely for the wheel-​throwing ceramic class I took.
All the staff are nice and will help you as much as they can. There are people with all levels of experience and it’s helpful to discuss ideas and throwing techniques with others. I definitely learned a lot more from this studio because there’s so much guidance. The teacher (I had Daria Kim) was extremely patient and even in her busy schedule, tried to accommodate her students to the best of her ability. She has such great ideas and is a wonderful artist. She really knows what she’s doing and wants to help her students improve as much as possible.
There’s plenty of open studio hours to work on your projects and you are free to make what you want, when you want. I’d say it’s well worth the price to take a class.

Handcuff your children before entering this place!
Delicate, fragile artwork is displayed throughout the facility — all beautiful and reasonably priced. Staff is extremely friendly and knowledgable of their artists.
They have this sweet eggs and bacon necklace for sale — OMG, obsessed.
I signed my sons up for art classes here, and they seemed to really enjoy it. Very family-​friendly atmosphere and so much better than Chuck-​E-​Cheese.

Love everything about The Art Center!
It is nice to see the support for the arts in the Ann Arbor community! The art education for the children and adults is wonderful.

Rounding up from 3 ½ stars but honestly, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by this place.
I decided getting a PhD in architecture without being able to draw anything but a stick figure would be really embarrassing. It was the summer and instead of picking my nose and procrastinating on research, I thought, hey! Time to enroll in a drawing class.
Classes here are generally held in the late evening which is great for people who school and/​or work in the day. They are indeed pricey (come out to about $ 40 bucks per class session, not including all the supplies you need). Parking can be a pain in the bum since it’s right downtown. Supposedly you can park in their lot but I find it always to be full (either that or I’m getting the lots confused).
All that said, the class sizes are a nice size at about 12 students — this gives you plenty of instructor attention while still keeping the energy up in the class room. In the summer, my classmates spanned from age 18 to 60, from Australian to Pakistani to Dutch to Midwestern. The last two classes we had a live nude model for life figure drawing and she was very professional with remarkable poses. All in all the drawing class for me was very worthwhile both in the skills I learned and in the overall experience.
I really like the building — it has that great inhabited feeling that all art studios have — it’s just the smell and light, the brick and the wood floors, the creaks and groans while still being sturdy and charming.
The first floor has the ceramic studio (that I’d love to take a class in one day), and the gift store. The second floor has a gallery with some fairly decent work! It’s open to the public so definitely take a peek up there if you’re inside. The third floor has three studio spaces — one of which has a bunch of metal working machinery which looks fun.
Great vibe, great staff, great facilities. Give it a whirl.

Usually I walk into a gallery and think, wow, there’s some great stuff in here and some, well, not so great stuff. The stuff here is always consistently good. So it’s worth it to stop in to browse.
I’ve never taken the classes but a friend did and said though it was a bit expensive, she really enjoyed it.
One thing to note is that the Ann Arbor Art Center presents itself as a school and gallery with a gift shop, however, the retail thing is definitely the focus here while the gallery and classes seem to be secondary. The art is very expensive, some is overly priced. In fact, everything in the shop is pretty expensive — I did get a one of a kind card for a friend’s wedding that they loved. So in some cases it’s probably worth it to shell out that kind of money.
A nice bonus is that exhibited art does change fairly frequently, so you can stop in here regularly and see different stuff each time.

My child (second grader) took a drawing class here during the summer. It was just glorified babysitting. These are not educational classes. I would not reccommend their kid’s programs.

I come in here and have a quick browse. The gift cards are unique and unusual.
You can also hire the whole place out for functions like weddings and parties, which we have done on several occasions. The number one glitch is the perennial parking migraine that bedevils downtown Ann Arbor.
Even though there is a school and a gallery, Ann Arbor Art Center’s front and center focus is that of a purely retail store. Make no mistake. They’ve done something very clever in making the space mulit-​functional.
When we’re well lubed up at wine appreciation evenings, it’s so much easier to part with money. The art is local but I’ve regretted paying too much for pieces that have no intrinsic artistic merit.
‘Art Center’ is an interesting name. There’s nothing wrong with being a retail store and that is what the Art Center is, FIRST AND FOREMOST. And there’s nothing whatever wrong with that. If you want to offer other services that’s great, but do realise you haven’t quite bamboozled all of us just yet. There’s a carefully fostered impression out there that this is more of a philanthrophic concern and that the retail part is almost a second thought. Quite the opposite. It’s a retail gallery and store like Selo Shevel, Barclay’s and others selling to those of us who have disposable dollars to spend on non-​essential but aesthetically pleasing items.

I went to a Wine Appreciation class at the Art Center and had a really great experience. The class was «Buying for Value: How To Get The Most For Your Wine-​Budget Dollars» and it was lead by Dick Scheer from the Village Corner wine store. It was $ 70 total for my husband and I ($ 23 each for a non-​member registration plus $ 12 each for the lab fee). It was a little steep and not something we could do regularly, but well worth the price for nearly 3 hours of discussion and tasting 34 wines. Dick knows his stuff and is super excited about what he does. We left with a hefty list of low-​priced wines that we will most certainly seek out.
I think he’s doing a South American wine appreciation class in March at the Art Center that I will most likely sign up for.

I’ve browsed through half a dozen art galleries in southeast Michigan this summer, and this one was, by far, my favorite. And there’s two floors worth of it.
The building itself is pretty, with tall ceilings, a big glass front to let in natural light, and a sweeping wooden staircase up to the second floor. The shop is full of some nice pottery and other craft items.
The art is some of the best I’ve seen around. Other galleries tend to have a mix of stuff I like and some stuff that has me scratching my head, wondering how much the «artist» paid to have his or her stuff displayed. The quality at the Arts Center is consistently better than any other place I’ve looked at this summer, from the art photography to the sculptures to the paintings.
Viewing the gallery is free, though they do accept donations.

The art center combines a gallery, a shop and a school.
Exhibits are worth a look when you’re on Liberty Street, but the center also sponsors classes in pottery, jewelry, drawing and other things.
I never know what to make of shops like the one in the Art Center. The merchandise is obviously made by artists, but some of it screams «commerce» because several identical pieces are for sale, where there’s no reason to make several except to stock the shelves. And «art» is a nebulous enough term already without this added level of complication and doubt, it makes my eyes spin around in my head.
But if you happend to be in the shop, check out the well-​stocked shelf of hand-​painted eggs – they’re really cool.

A combination of a gallery and an art school, the Art Center is an example of the best of Ann Arbor culture:
1 People learning throughout life.
2 Demand for high-​quality hand made objects.
3 Value of local endeavors.
Unlike many typical Ann Arbor places, this is genuine.