Imagine if famous artists could help us guide art discussions in the classroom. In "The Second Life Artist Project", digital avatars for three legendary artists: Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, & Vincent Van Gogh. each respond to three pieces of art by living artists., Those artist avatars model the "Visual Thinking Strategy", or "VTS", to discuss selected art work in the "Second Life" environment, a free 3D world on the Internet. "The Artist Colony" is an idyllic sea side learning space created in "Second Life" especially for the project. The objective was to create an extraordinary new possibility for authentic communication in visual arts education through alternate identities within a "Relational Aesthetics" theoretical context. We designed our research to provide a new twist on Metropolitan Museum of Art's online series, "The Artist Project -- What Artists See When They Look at the Met". There, contemporary artists responded to selected objects in the museum. We re-imagined this process in the opposite, so that avatars of historical artists commented on contemporary art in a virtual artist colony. Using "Relational Aesthetics" methodology, we invited participants to create their own avatars and select their own artists and art works to join us in "The Artist Colony" in "Second Life".