Barley Vogel created the art capital of Lake Highlands

Photography by Shelby Tauber.

Barley Vogel was singing in a Christmas pageant choir in sixth grade.

“I’d never met the choir director,” she says. “We were all singing and he said, ‘What’s your name? Vogel? You’re off-key.’ In front of the entire sixth grade. I didn’t sing again.”

In high school, Vogel asked her father what he thought of some of her paintings.

“He would critique it,” she says. “He’d say, ‘Well, you’re gonna get better. You’ll figure this out.’ He only said the very small things he would say, but I got shut down. As a kid, it’s impossible to be as good as a grown up.”

Her father, Donald S. Vogel, was a renowned painter who managed the Valley House Art Gallery, which Barley calls her “childhood home.”

“I really do understand any criticism about a kid’s artwork can just turn the tap off,” Vogel says. “I talk to many artists who are shut down by their parents. It’s just not a good thing, leave them alone with their art.”

To Vogel, this is a tragedy. Everyone has the capacity to create, forgoing it because of an exterior negative influence shouldn’t happen. She sets out to make sure it doesn’t.

Vogel was resilient. She pushed through and forged a decades-long career as a multi-hyphenate visual artist, with work in drawing, painting and sculpting.

But Studio Arts is perhaps her magnum opus. Created in 2005, Vogel’s all-encompassing art school inserts her into the lives of young artists at their most formative time, teaching them to hone their craft and to stick with it.

Her teaching space is something of a destination spot. It’s tucked away on Shoreview Road in Lake Highlands, occupying a building that used to be a Whataburger. The interior is eclectic, with original paintings decorating the walls and half-finished projects resting on tables for her students to come back to.

“I tell them that I have created a bubble around them,” Vogel says. “I tell them my story, I told your parents to try and not make criticism. Let us do the criticism, because we’re not your parents and you don’t care.”

This isn’t some kind of phony environment, though. Vogel is intentional about exposing the children to the pressures of being a professional artist.

“You’ve got to learn how to take criticism,” she says. “We put our work up every class and learn to safely criticize so that kids don’t get so scared of it. What happens in my class is incredible.”

These days, Vogel only makes the trek to Studio Arts twice a week. She lives deep in the woods of Poetry, Texas, along with a stable of horses and art galore. When she’s not around, she employs a teaching staff that keeps the building active with classes even when she’s gone.

“Studio Arts is one of those magical places where you walk in and you are inspired,” says Studio Arts teacher Naomi Cabrera. “Time stops, allowing your mind to open up to your own ideas. It’s one of those places that every child should experience.”

Cabrera teaches general art to five to seven-year-olds, touching on all mediums to get the kids artistically involved early. She’s worked with Vogel for 17 years, and sent her son through the portfolio class.

“Barley’s calling and her legacy is the portfolio class,” Cabrera says. “She has a sensitive and respectful way of instructing, inspiring and harnessing their talent beyond their expectations of themselves.”

Vogel’s portfolio class has garnered quite the reputation in the Dallas arts community. In it, she works intimately with high school or college bound students to prepare their portfolio for entry into art schools at the collegiate or high school level. The class helps prepare for any college, but the high school class is designed specifically for students applying to Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

“So many students audition for not very many spots,” says Isla Ryan, who took Vogel’s portfolio class ahead of her audition for Booker T. as an incoming freshman.

Auditions ran from January 27 to February 3.

“She had us practice all of the different aspects of the audition as we got closer to our scheduled time at the school, including the interview,” Ryan says. “Every week we had homework, and Barley had high expectations of us but always had our best interest at heart.”

When the school sent notification letters on March 1, Ryan was accepted.

“I feel very lucky to have been chosen,” she says. “I grew as an artist under Barley’s tutelage and am at my highest level of creativity going into my freshman year.

Ryan’s story is one of many. Vogel has spent time with hundreds of artists in Dallas, shaping them into the artists they want to become. Art is hard; it always will be. Sometimes it takes a teacher that understands to push forward.

“I get all of the angst and the drama,” Vogel says. “Artists are sensitive. So I love getting them at their most sensitive and crucial time to become people.”