Lawrence High School senior Allie Fischer, pictured here on Friday, April 21 at Lawrence Arts Center, checks out some of the prints she created for her upcoming May Final Friday show.

Allie Fischer already has access to a darkroom through her photography class at Lawrence High School. So when the aspiring photographer began work on her first solo exhibit earlier this year, through an experimental Lawrence Arts Center entrepreneurship program called “stARTup,” she figured it was time to try something new.

So, too, did her friend and fellow photography enthusiast Storm Auchenbach, who’s currently working on a series of ceramic pieces — his first serious foray into the medium since elementary school — overlaid with his own photographs. The LHS seniors are among 14 Lawrence-area high school students displaying their work in local galleries this spring through the Arts Center’s “stARTup” program.

“We both mostly do photo, so coming here where there’s so many resources, we didn’t want to just take photos and print them,” says Fischer, taking a break from the Arts Center’s downstairs print studio last Friday afternoon. “We were kind of using the idea of putting photography into a new medium.”

The name of her experimental photography exhibit, slated to debut during May’s Final Friday art walk, is “Pushing Past.” It’s a fitting title, says teacher Neal Barbour, who launched the Arts Center’s “stARTup” workshops last fall.

The goal behind the fledgling program is to arm students with the kinds of entrepreneurial skills — among them budgeting, marketing, grant writing and networking with galleries — that often aren’t taught in high school or even university-level art classes, Barbour says.

Lawrence High School senior Allie Fischer, pictured here on Friday, April 21 at Lawrence Arts Center, checks out some of the prints she created for her upcoming May Final Friday show.

“A lot of this is just what I wish I would’ve been told 20 years ago,” says Barbour, who taught art at Topeka West High School before joining the Arts Center as director of youth education. “When I was in high school, it was ‘Just make art, and the rest will follow.’ But it’s different than that.”

Carving out a successful career in the arts, Barbour says, requires more than just talent. “There’s an industry behind it, or there are standards that you need to do along the way, whether it’s marketing or website design or all the supplemental materials like show cards and the title cards for the pieces,” he says. “And how do you write an artist’s statement, and what does that do, and what’s its purpose?”

Barbour’s students spent the first half semester of “stARTup,” which began in September, “exploring their own work and their own aesthetics,” he said, receiving feedback along the way from faculty members of the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Kansas department of visual art. Throughout, there were foundation workshops on entrepreneurial skills and plenty of portfolio development, culminating in a group exhibit in December.

The program’s second semester focused on further developing those entrepreneurial skills, as well as getting students into Arts Center studios to create work for the year-end solo shows. The first handful of exhibits will make their debut, at the Arts Center and at local businesses and galleries, during April’s Final Friday, coming up this week.

With his pilot program finally coming to a successful end, Barbour says he’s been encouraged by the progress students have made over the last several months. He and the other “stARTup” instructors and mentors have asked students to venture outside their artistic comfort zones — and now, with weeks to go before the program wraps, Barbour says they’ve delivered.

Lawrence High School senior Storm Auchenbach, pictured here on Friday, April 21 at Lawrence Arts Center, works on one of his ceramic pieces for his upcoming May Final Friday show. Auchenbach is one of 14 Lawrence high school students to show his work in solo exhibitions capping off the first year of the Arts Center's stARTup entrepreneurial program for young artists.

“These students are really exploring mediums and pushing the boundaries,” says Barbour, who plans to offer the program again next year.

Allie Fischer and Storm Auchenbach have a little more time to perfect their pieces before their shows, which will take place during May’s Final Friday. Both creative types, they plan to pursue careers in the arts (or related fields) after high school — he as an architecture and design major at KU, she as a photography and fine arts major at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Before the “stARTup” program, “all I did was make art,” Aubenbach says.

“I never sold it. I never hung it up in a show or anything. So, this is all new to me,” he says. “You don’t get that at the high school, but when you come here, they tell you, ‘Oh, this is how the real world works, this is how you sell your stuff and this is how you get people to come to your show,’ which is really nice.”

Fischer agrees. She’d had some experiencing organizing art shows before, as part of the Arts Center’s Hang12 youth curatorial board, but never with an exhibit of her own.

Her pieces for next month’s solo show involve experimental photography and printmaking, using solar plates to transpose her textured images onto delicate sheets of Japanese lace paper. Fischer’s work contains images of fragmented faces, which she says represent her place in her family as she leaves Lawrence to attend college in Wisconsin — the group will be fragmented with her away, Fischer says, but they still form a complete family even when separated by distance.

As she grapples with the reality of leaving her high school and hometown behind, Fischer says she feels more confident knowing there’s a future for her in the arts. She’s been encouraged throughout “stARTup” by the young artists living and working in Lawrence who spoke about their professional experiences with students during the workshops.

“I think that was the most helpful for me, because it gave me a bit of a real-world connection,” Fischer says.

“There are people out there hanging shows every month. They’re not all starving artists. Even if they’re doing this on the side, they still commit a lot of time to it,” she says. “It’s kind of reassuring — I’m on the right path.”

For more information the “stARTup” program and this spring’s Final Friday student exhibitions, visit www.lawrenceartscenter.org.