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Art

For more than 50 years, the Art Department has been at the forefront of art production and scholarship, with faculty and students actively contributing to and challenging the fields of studio art and art history. Our facilities include painting and drawing rooms, darkroom photography, sculpture studios (in ceramics, wood, and metal), spacious digital labs, a state-of-the-art printmaking shop, a polymedia lab, and a design studio. Students can study digital art in a focused concentration. We provide our students with a solid foundation while constantly updating our course offerings to reflect the ever-changing field. Experimental courses include fabric art, interactive media, and cartoon illustration. Students can opt to expand their studies through our B.F.A. program. We champion a diverse understanding of art history, with an emphasis on global art and interdisciplinary connections. Our art history courses feature multiple forms of artistic expression, including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, visual culture, and fashion.

We pride ourselves on introducing our diverse student body to a wide variety of artistic studio practices and innovative art historical scholarship and training them for successful careers in these areas. To this end we facilitate numerous internships and opportunities for professional development. We support our students by funding annual awards for artists and art historians. B.F.A. students exhibit together in various venues for their culminating capstone project. Art history majors present their capstone research in a lively public symposium. The most successful of these papers have been subsequently published.

The Art Department strives to create a learning community that acknowledges, values, and celebrates diversity in all its forms, including race, gender, religion, sexuality, cultural heritage, and differing physical and linguistic abilities. Inspired by the activism of our students, in fall 2020 the Art Department created the Anti-Racist and Inclusivity Committee to ensure these values are being upheld by our students, staff, and faculty and that necessary changes continue to be made.