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.
Beginning with a focus primarily on wood block printing with additional work in monotype and etching, our printmaking program provides in-depth studio work in etching and lithography with an emphasis on the development of drawing and individual imagery. You may also work in related fields such as photo-etching and papermaking, leading to the development of a cohesive and mature body of work for a professional portfolio and exhibition. Such possibilities lead to careers as printmakers, as teachers, as well as to museum and gallery work. Many of our printmaking students have exhibited work at regional and national professional exhibitions.