Seaside’s Open Ground Studio celebrates a productive year.

It’s been one year since artist Denise Sanders, with friends, opened the doors of Open Ground Studios in the former Alternative Cafe space in Seaside. Its mission is to be a big-city community studio in a smaller pond, a place for professional artists to teach, amateur artists to improve, regular folks to do art with their own hands. People can get a closer look at their free open house Saturday, with live music, demos, facepainting and raffle.

“I’m a community builder,” Sanders says. “My target audience is creative adults or adults who have never been given the opportunity to be creative.”

But young people figure into the mix, too: Students from Monterey Peninsula College and CSUMB have come for field trips, and Sanders wants to cultivate a relationship with Youth Arts Collective.

The template for Open Ground Studios can be traced back to 1989-99, when she operated a collective printmaking studio called Below the Surface in Minneapolis. One recent catalyst came from her teaching at MPC, when she learned that classes would be limited to degree-seeking students and could not be repeated. Where would the others go?

“I knew the community college changes were coming down the pike,” she says.

Then she won the Monterey Bay Regional Business Plan Competition’s Innovator of the Year award for the idea of Open Ground Studios. Others rallied around it, helping to remodel the space.

The 2,000 square-foot studio contains three etching presses, a water tray (to soak paper before printing), an acid room (which Sanders hopes to convert into a darkroom), lockers and flat file drawers, drawing tables and a framing room. People don't have to become members to use the facilities, although members can get a discount on usage. People can sign up for individual workshops and classes ($25-$325), of which there were 20 last year in printmaking, experimental relief printing, monotypes and copper etching, book art and binding, drawing.

In the past year they’ve racked up 88 regular members, 17 artist members, eight gatherings they call Art Jams (one revolved around origami), 11 gallery exhibitions, a dozen community projects (an etching exhibition is still showing at Museum of Monterey). For their second year, they have summer classes, more partnerships they’re pursuing, and more awareness to spread via their frog mascot.

“Since frogs are an ecological indicator species,” reads the newsletter, “the more frogs in an ecosystem, the healthier the environment.”

OPEN GROUND STUDIOS free open house is 11am-4pm Saturday at 1230 Fremont St., Seaside. Free. 241-6919, OpenGroundStudios.com. Regular hours: 1-5pm Tue, 1-6pm Wed, 1-5pm Thu, noon-4pm Sat.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the URL for Open Ground Studios and to clarify people don't have to be members to use the facilities, although members receive a discount.