The Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art allows students to explore a studio area or areas of interest, including ceramics, metals and jewelry design, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, allowing students to create a hybrid experience as they apply their artistic interests and aspects of their broader liberal arts education to a contemporary studio art practice. The Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art has six different concentration choices for students: ceramics, metals, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. Students pursuing a B.A. in Studio Art become fluent in the practice of visual arts. Students will gain critical and analytical thinking skills, as well as conceptual rigor, technical expertise, and methods as a means to explore intellectual and human experience through visual arts modes. Students pursuing a B.F.A. in Studio Art will choose in-depth study in one or more studio areas, learn traditional areas of artistic craftsmanship as well as innovative trends and technologies, and develop a professional portfolio for their career or post-graduate study. (Students cannot earn both the BA in Studio Art and the BFA in Studio Art.)
Our studio art graduates seek careers in many areas. Some become professional artists, such as art directors, web designers, illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, printmakers, painters, sculptors, metalsmiths, and ceramists. Graduates may also go on to graduate school to prepare them to be university faculty, private-sector teachers, art therapists, gallery directors, museum curators, or art critics.
If you are interested in a professional career as a potter or ceramic artist, our program moves from the foundation courses to an introduction of the various construction, decoration, and firing processes as part of the ceramic curriculum. Our curriculum provides you with a background in hand-building, wheel-thrown construction methods, low- and high-temperature firing processes, oxidation/reduction atmospheres and raku, soda, and wood firings, and ceramics materials and their contributions to clay bodies, slips, and glazes. As you begin to master your methods, we emphasize content and the development of your personal expression. Professional competitive exhibitions are encouraged and many of our students, alumni, and faculty have been prizewinners. Our graduates have opportunities to continue their work through graduate school as well as artist's residencies.
