Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, a summer school of the arts located on a 1,300 acre campus in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, offers fine arts education for all ages. The summer camp annually serves more than 5,000 gifted elementary, junior high, and high school students with diverse programs in music, art, dance, and drama while offering more than 175 performances during its Summer Arts Festival. Blue Lake also operates a widely acclaimed International Exchange Program and two public radio stations. Since its inception in 1966, Blue Lake has provided cultural enrichment to over 300,000 gifted students and countless concert-goers.

Programs at Blue Lake are designed to educate through a carefully developed and balanced curriculum. Elective courses in art, drama, dance, or music are also offered. Organized recreation, practice time, recitals, master classes, evening activities, and regular attendance at performances complete the camp experience.

Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp draws its inspiration from the Arens Art Colony that was located in Door County, Wisconsin and founded in 1922 by Ludolph Arens. Arens, who served as a piano professor at the Lawrence Conservatory and conductor of the Green Bay Symphony, was the grandfather of Blue Lake’s founder and president, Fritz Stansell. The Arens Art Colony may have been the first summer camp in America dedicated to the idea that an arts school in a secluded, natural setting can shelter gifted young people from the influences of the outside world and allow them to study with concentrated effort.

The spirit of the Arens Art Colony continues to flourish at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. The fundamental mission to motivate students to pursue their art with new enthusiasm continues to drive those who have worked to make Blue Lake Fine Arts
Camp what it is today.