The Art Barn School of Art sits on 69 acres of rolling woodlands, pond, gardens and open space northeast of Valparaiso, and for two days in October its campus becomes something closer to a rummage sale for the creatively inclined. On Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, the school hosts its Art Supplies Garage Sale, running 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. Shoppers can dig through canvas, paper, brushes, markers, paints, frames and books, most of it new or gently used, priced at garage-sale rates.
The sale is not just a clearing-out of a studio closet. It is a recycling project in the most literal sense, and the school has built a small ritual around it. Recycle Porter County will be on site during the sale with an upcycled make-and-take craft open to all ages, turning the idea of reuse into something you can carry home in your hands. The pairing is deliberate: the same instinct that makes someone donate a half-used tube of paint or a stack of watercolor paper is the instinct behind a craft table built from cast-off material.
The donations themselves are part of the machinery. Art Barn collects new and gently used supplies ahead of the sale on designated drop-off dates, and the proceeds from what sells benefit the school's programs. That means a shopper hunting for a cheap set of brushes is also, indirectly, funding classes, exhibitions and workshops at a nonprofit that has been teaching in Porter County for decades.
That history is worth knowing before you walk onto the grounds. The Art Barn was founded by Jan Sullivan, who spent a career as a supervisor of art education for the Chicago schools and later taught art at Valparaiso University. She was also a plein air painter who returned to the villages around Lake Chapala in Mexico for many years, drawn to the old adobe structures and the hills climbing above the water. Her oil paintings still appear in the school's online store, including one titled "Chickens on the Path," a nod to the birds the Art Barn raised each year to strut around the farm.
Her founding premise, as the school's own telling has it, was that anyone can create art. That idea shows up in the institution's structure as much as its marketing. Art Barn describes its mission as providing quality art education for all ages in a supportive, creative environment, and it explicitly prioritizes access for people with limited financial means or with disabilities, through free events, scholarships and ADA-accessible facilities. The campus, with its trails, pond and sunflower patch, is designed to be painted as much as visited.
The garage sale is not a standalone fundraiser so much as a piece of a larger annual rhythm. Art Barn's signature event is the Art Blitz, a one-day festival that in 2026 marks its tenth year, set for September 19. Art Blitz fills the grounds with hands-on art activities, exhibits, hayrides, live music, food and sunflower picking, with free admission and parking and activity tickets sold on site. Each year the festival includes a collective mural project: visitors paint a block of wood on a theme, and the blocks are assembled into a mural that returns to the campus afterward. Past themes have included sunflowers in 2019 and chickens in a later year, with a cow mural in 2018 built a little differently. The art supply sale is part of that same weekend tradition, which makes the October garage sale something of an encore -- a second chance at the supplies, and a quieter, bargain-hunting version of the festival's communal spirit.
There is a practical appeal here that goes beyond nostalgia. Art supplies are expensive, and the gap between wanting to make things and being able to afford the materials is real for students, classroom teachers and hobbyists alike. A sale held on a nonprofit campus that already commits to free and low-cost access functions as a small piece of arts infrastructure. A teacher restocking a classroom, a teenager building a first toolkit and a working painter looking for a cheap frame all end up in the same room, sorting through the same tables.
The setting does some of the work too. The Art Barn is a little off the beaten path, which visitors consistently describe as part of its charm -- a place where the drive in through surrounding trees sets a calmer tone than a typical errand. Nature trails wind through the property, and guests are welcome to bring their own supplies and paint what they see. On a Friday or Saturday in October, with the leaves turning, the trip out to 695 North 400 East is as much a small escape as a shopping trip.
Admission to the sale is free, and there is no reserved seating or ticketed entry to worry about -- it is an open-gate, walk-in affair. The event runs both days from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the craft with Recycle Porter County is available during the sale for all ages. Whether the draw is a bargain on canvas or the chance to see what a nineteenth-century farm barn looks like when it has spent decades as an art school, the answer is the same: show up, dig through the tables, and make an offer.