Change is what inspired the museum's newest exhibit, says Diana Argabrite, director of arts and schools programs for the museum at De Anza Community College.

The current student art show, which began Jan. 23 and runs until Feb. 23, is part of a larger, rotating exhibit called Change 2005/2006.

Change will be noticeable in March when the museum moves for the first of three times over the next two years while plans for a new building are finalized and eventually built. Current plans place the new museum within a complex of the school's campus that is expected to include a 400-seat theatre and a classroom for art history, furthering the interrelationship between the school and the museum.

The broader scope of Change 2005/2006 includes lectures and discussions that delve into change in the arts and academic community. It also features, among other art, some 50 pair of clay feet designed and decorated by students, staff, faculty and others.

Linda Mau, a ceramics instructor at the college, came up with the idea for the clay feet, which will be on display throughout the show.

Metaphorically speaking, she says the feet will help show the way to the new museum, but she wants even more clay feet tiles to guide the way.

"The clay people are the ones who are leading the march to the new Euphrat Museum," Mau says.

The art show and the whole "Change" program is like a drum roll for what's to come for Euphrat and the De Anza Community College campus.

The first step will be the museum's move to temporary facilities for an unspecified time, but most likely less than a year. While in the temporary location, the museum's existing building will be altered, and the museum will return to smaller quarters and stay there for about two years.

The back-and-forth movement gives the museum good footing for the next step, which will occur sometime in 2008 when the museum moves into its new building, in a new complex on campus.

Over the years, as education budgets have constricted, so too has the museum's space, and it gave up bits and pieces of its real estate to college classrooms. Thanks to passage of Measure E in 1999--a $248 million bond to renovate and expand college facilities to meet current health, safety and instruction standards--the Euphrat Museum will eventually be given some elbow room.

"Overall the [museum's] space should be larger, but we're not talking huge numbers," says Janet Rindfleisch, executive director of the museum.

Rindfleisch says the new complex will relate to the overall objective of combining arts, culture and history.

Argabrite and Mau hope to make the clay feet tiles part of Euphrat's and De Anza's history.

They aren't quite sure how the "footwear" will be included in the design, but they have put their collective foot down and say clay feet "tiles" are a sure footprint somewhere in the design. One idea they've kicked around is grouting some of the clay feet into a path that leads to the doors of Euphrat's new building.

The clay feet project evolved on its own.

The "footwear" comes in a wide range of sizes, and the designs and decorations are equally as varied. Mau says there were no rules about how to create one's clay foot design, but progressively they got more creative.

When people first started making the clay feet, some just stamped on the moist, rolled clay while wearing shoes and left a sole imprint. Some added color. Some added words. Some did nothing at all.

But some of the footwear looks as if it is ready for take-off.

For example, Inna Razmakhova traced her bare feet and cut out the clay around the image. Left behind was a canvas for Razmakhova to etch in all her toes and toenails and add a pair of wings to each foot. They look as if they are heaven-bound.

Joanne Vadeboncouer took a different approach. She used the X-ray image of her nephew's broken foot to help her draw on all the tiny bones of a foot. She's partial to creating bone-art, and she says she does a lot of bone-inspired sculpture, but not in a morbid or dark way.

In all 50-plus pairs of clay feet, Mau says no two have had the same shoe sole imprint.

In a previous time, instead of leaving footprints in clay, students would have found themselves walking through a setting of orchards of apricots and prunes.

"When I go back I can still feel the old orchard. I smell the apricot. I smell a little of the plum. I smell the wisteria," Fred Euphrat says.

Euphrat, who lives in Healdsburg, owns a forest management company called Forest, Soil & Water Inc. He is the grandson of E.F. and Helen Euphrat.

His grandparents sold the property to Foothill College in 1959. The property had been the San Franciscan couple's weekend retreat and Fred Euphrat, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, remembers spending summers there with his mother, Susan.

His childhood memories are of the land. He remembers the orchards, vegetable gardens and some of what still remains, the cottages and the Le Petit Trianon--a building originally constructed by another family for its own use and entertainment. Le Petite Trianon currently houses the California History Center, a program of the social science division of De Anza College, and the California History Center Foundation, a community-based, nonprofit organization.

Eating warm prunes off the ground remains Fred Euphrat's strongest memory. The prunes are gone now, but he says he also remembers "running around" the winery--a building which at one time served as the school's bookstore. The winery was a leftover from a previous owner, Harriett Pullman, who lived there with her husbands, Francis Carolan, and, after his death, Arthur Schermerhorn.

An oak cork tree used by the winery to make bottle corks still stands next to the Flint Center, Rindfleisch says.

E.F. and Helen Euphrat, who owned the Pacific Can Company in San Francisco, bought the property from Pullman in 1940.

"I think [my father] paid $68,000 for it," says Jack Euphrat.

The property stretched across what is now Highway 85 and included a ranch with the Le Petit Trianon, cottages and orchards.

The couple was friends with Foothill College's founding superintendent, Cal Flint, who convinced them to sell the property for a new community college school site.

"My parents were older, and they enjoyed the company of the Flints," says Jack Euphrat. "Dr. Flint was one of the sweetest guys you'd ever meet. He was like a snake medicine man, he could sell anybody anything. Mrs. Flint was a lovely lady in her own right."

Jack Euphrat is uncle to Fred, and son of the couple who sold the property to the college.

They got an offer they couldn't refuse, says Fred Euphrat.

E.F. and Helen Euphrat were guaranteed they could live on the property for life, which they did.

Jack and Fred Euphrat don't remember any interest in arts on the part of E.F. or Helen. Nevertheless, shortly after Helen died, the Helen Euphrat Gallery was born thanks to a grant from the family. It was renamed the Euphrat Museum of Art to avoid the commercial connotation connected with galleries and better reflect its purpose--to research, produce and present challenging exhibitions and educational materials that provide a resource of visual ideas and a platform for communications.

One of the museum's most active and successful programs is the arts and schools program that Argabrite runs. It includes an after-school art program for elementary schools with large numbers of "at risk" students, a fee-based art program, teaching tours of Euphrat exhibitions, school assemblies and collaborations including public art projects and exhibits of student work at schools and community venues.

Students from De Anza are encouraged to participate in the programs as it gives them an opportunity to try working in a teaching or classroom atmosphere, and it provides the younger students with whom they are working some time with a mentor.

The arts and schools program is responsible for myriad projects in Cupertino and Sunnyvale, including an installment at the Quinlan Center that focused on friendship and sharing. The most recent art installment is a collaborative mural at Braly Elementary School in Sunnyvale.

A project "near and dear" to the heart of Argabrite was the Fair Housing for All project that involved children from Cupertino and Sunnyvale Union School districts. The collaborative series of projects helped children learn about the Fair Housing Act and the importance of the laws. The projects included a large-scale folding book, a mixed-media sculpture, a polymer clay assemblage and a large-scale group block print with interactive elements.

Another popular program at the museum is family day. Three to four thousand people come to the event for hands-on activities that include cross-cultural art projects and performances for the young.

To support the museum and its programs, Rindfleisch, who has been at the museum since its beginnings, says a yearly fundraiser is held at a private home in Los Altos hills, and the museum's website has a "donate now" button.

For more information on Euphrat Museum of Art, or the student art show, go to http://www.deanza.edu/euphrat/.