Is this something that ever happens outside of TV?
“Cocoran School of Art” doesn’t sound like a high school to me. Typically, grades 9 through 12 involve subjects other than art.
Far as I know no high school in the US allows nude models.
However, jr high & HS students can attend art classes with live naked models outside of school. My son said he was taking art classes there at USC soon, he is only 14 & said they bring in the nude models later in the semester. Hmmmm.
My high school art teacher said that once (in the 1980s I think) they did have a life drawing class there with nude models. He said that only the serious art students remained in the class; those who snickered while signing up discovered that they were uncomfortable with the whole thing and dropped the class.
Sure enough, I glossed over the words “high school”. I doubt there would be live models in high school; in my HS we used a life-like dummy when drawing human forms, but it was okay for our renditions of that form to be nude.
What they (I’m assuming they’re general males, heh) don’t realize is that for every drool-worthy nude girl they get to oogle, there’s a fat hairy old nude guy too. 
We never had nude models in High School (our art teacher wasn’t against it, but parents would have been up in arms over it…we used to be able to hang nude drawings around the school and in the art shows and stuff, but of course, parents went ape, and so it suddenly wasn’t allowed anymore…sad thing, because half the time the nudes are some of the best work of people). We just drew from nude drawings (from some book of like a zillion poses), and from eachother (random people go stand in front of the rest of the class posing…wearing clothes, heh).
Now in college we have nude people posing. We’re all supposedly “mature” now, heh. While having nude models in high school may excessively increase the enrollment in art classes, I don’t think it’s a good idea, heh…The “serious” people are the ones that go sign up outside of school or go to college to do it.
- Tsugumo (for the record I live in Canada, heh)
Most high schools where I’m from (New Zealand) were allowed to have special art classes outside of the school property with nude models. However, my school was too small to be allowed that (some bizarre rule there) so the best we got was swimsuited folk.
However, rather typically, I got sick that week so never got to be there.
In my high school, our models (volunteer students) wore swimsuits.
My modeling experiences:
High school art classes - absolutely no nudity, costumes only (the teacher was a friend of mine, so I modeled for his classes as a favor).
College and private art classes - both costumed and nude. Had only one problem with a high school student who had brought an obnoxious/immature friend to class (Steve didn’t drive, so his friend brought him - I was okay with the non-artist in the room, but he proved he couldn’t control his commentary).
At the high school I went to in Toronto, Canada we had male and female nude models (I don’t think you could really call them models in the aesthetic sense however) every year on campus for art class (I don’t remember what grade level).
I went to a private high school (Harvard-Westlake) in Los Angeles, divided into two campuses (6-9 on one, 10-12 on another)…there were live nude models for the 10-12 art classes. As a matter of fact, the portraits of the nudes were often displayed throughout the school as exhibits of traditional art and photography. It never seemed to bother anyone.
sethdallob, how old were those models?
They were in their mid-20’s I’d guess. FWIR, they had to sign a contract saying that they knew what they were getting into etc.
That’s similar to the models at the high school I went to. And we had the drawings up in the art room for some time afterwards and later in an art show. The funny thing is this was a Catholic high school.
I got nude for an art class once at Denver Community College to pick up some extra $$. Didn’t have to sign anything. The teacher demanded twisty poses (to make it more challenging for the students?) so I did yoga and that seemed to work.
My Catholic high school didn’t use nudes, but when I was 12 in 1971 I noticed students’ drawings of nudes displayed in the hallways at (Cleveland) Heights High. Just another reminder that the 1970s were in many ways more sexually liberated than the present which is feeling the backlash of neopuritanism. I was looking at drawing classes for adults in my local public school system’s evening class schedule. They specified clothed models only. This is in Fairfax County, the most highly educated and one of the most affluent counties in the United States.
What’s up with the neopuritanism nowadays? What will they do next, shut down all the theaters like Cromwell did? Brand adulteresses with a big red A?
(It’s hard to say what the scene is like nowadays. In some ways, public sexuality is more blatant than ever, but in some ways things have turned bluenose. I don’t know what to make of it. Not to hijack this thread, but that’s why I started a thread about American puritanism.)