Success Stories
Art
leads Alex San Pedro to a scholarship and a future
story by Gloria Biersdorff
 |
| Art
student Alex San Pedro with President Mary Spilde in the ceramics
studio at Lane Community College. - Photo by Daniel Moret. |
Lane Community College art student Alex San Pedro loves the bronze sculpture on Lane's campus depicting a boy in an oversized chair, with a tree growing from his head. "It really speaks to me where I am now," says the recipient of a $30,000 per year for two years transfer scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Now everything is so happy, so great. I didn't even know what happiness was."
Abused as a child, addicted to alcohol in adolescence, and homeless on the streets of San Francisco at age 15, San Pedro says of this award, "I feel like I'm getting a second chance." This fall, the 26-year-old native of Mexico will attend the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York to pursue a bachelor of fine arts degree.
San Pedro had no art training prior to fall 2002, when he took Rebecca Chance's beginning drawing class at Lane at the urging of his girlfriend. The couple moved to Eugene from Oakland, California three and a half years ago. Chance, who helped San Pedro compile his application portfolio, observes, "Alex of course deserved to get into any school of his choice, having surmounted many barriers and also having gotten to the point where he was thinking in a sufficiently conceptual and sophisticated way to pursue art. I believe his personal artistic bent is very much informed by his ethnic heritage and in an authentic, rather subconscious way. It is in him and comes through his art without contrivance."
This year San Pedro has been exploring metalwork, woodwork, bronze and ceramics. Ceramics has become his passion. "Eric Land, he's phenomenal," San Pedro says of his ceramics instructor. "I had never even touched clay. He taught me how to touch, feel." Land remembers his first piece, a "rustic" mug concocted from three pounds of clay. Now he creates exquisite macro-crystalline bowls that shimmer with star forms in river-stone hues. Land describes the process of creating these pieces as a "complex labyrinth of time, heat and luck."
The process whereby San Pedro secured the highly competitive Jack Kent Cooke scholarship could be described in those terms. In late January he embarked on an intensive Internet scholarship search. "I surfed and surfed and surfed the internet. This scholarship was very buried," he admits. The deadline for submission to Lane's selection committee was February 2. He hammered out six essays within days, and submitted his packet. His longest essay focused on the urgent need for literacy education among America's burgeoning Hispanic population.
"There was no question that Alex would be one of two candidates that Lane sent to Jack Kent Cooke," says Career and Employment Advisor Jackie Bryson, who assisted San Pedro's pursuit of more 30 awards this year. "Out of 863 nominees from 559 community colleges throughout the country, 27 were chosen, and Alex was one of those elite 27."
Through San Pedro's intense dedication to both his craft and his community, Land sees his student forging the tools that will ensure his success not only as an artist, but as a mentor. "When he completes his educational journey and makes his way back to where he started to help others, the world will be a better place, and the next generation will profit."
For more information on Lane's art program visit http://2011sitearchive.lanecc.edu/artad/artdept.htm
Published by Lane Community College Marketing and Public Relations, June 2004.
