In 1998 the Eureka Springs School of the Arts had no building. Local artists lent their own studios, a class met wherever its host worked, and the school existed only in those rooms. A few years on it got one building on an acre. Today it sits on 55 acres off Hwy 62 West with seven teaching studios, the Windgate Iron Studio and Windgate Wood Studio among them, and puts its own tally at close to a hundred workshops a year, open to any age and any level. Eureka Springs shows art on every street; ESSA hands the making over, the forge and the lathe put into the hands of whoever signs up. The school places itself in a line back to Elsie and Louis Freund, whose 1940s school it calls the town's first, but what it stands on is the thing it built from borrowed studios outward. Go if you leave a gallery wanting to make the thing rather than own it.