The Fine Arts BA provides a rigorous undergraduate program in professional art making within the context of a liberal arts education. The Fine Arts major is designed to support students with various interests and abilities. It serves students who expect to become professional artists and welcomes those who plan to pursue careers in fields requiring creative, spatial, and design abilities. The department of Art and Art History offers a variety of courses in drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and new genre and new media art. Students are exposed to and work in more than one medium over the course of the major in order to expand their creative options. The BA provides a great opportunity for broadly interested artmakers to double degree or minor in fields such as art history, photography, graphic design, poetry, arts education, visual arts management, entrepreneurship, and more. The program’s interdisciplinary structure leads to a unique and personal level of investigation and rigorous creative expression.

As a result of successfully completing program requirements, students should be able to:

• demonstrate a developed visual, media, and material sensitivity;
• establish technical skills and a growing awareness of the principles of visual organization within a range of art and design materials, methods and media;
• demonstrate an ability to make and understand basic connections between concept and form;
• understand the nature of contemporary thinking on art, and gain a basic discernment of quality in works of art;
• be familiar with the works and intentions of major artists and movements of the past, in both Western and non-Western worlds; and

• have an awareness of how artistic concerns are mobilized in the contemporary art world.