Our courses engage students in the visual arts by combining Theory and Practice, while offering them a creative philosophy that emphasizes research, vision, planning and reflection. Our mission is to present our students with an understanding of all the tools available to them and how to effectively apply this knowledge critically, creatively and practically. In principle, we want to provide an extensive general knowledge base through course work and artistic development and subsequently guide students’ intellectual curiosity and passion into advanced work. Along with formal approaches we also see the development of socially aware production as being part of defining one’s practice. Through the general learning process of research, production, reflection and critique, we strive to challenge our students to think creatively, conceptually and expansively and use the technical and conceptual tools available to them to engage deeply in the visual world. The advanced development of the individual, their sense of aesthetics, modes of authorship, social relation and creative “voice” is paramount to our teaching practice.
We strive to create a rich artistic environment that supports a broad selection of traditional to digital practices, offering our students skill sets for both breadth and depth, and acuity of craft. Through our teaching practices we hope to cultivate contemporary artists well versed across aesthetic domains and media potentials while simultaneously developing conceptual, historical, theoretical, social/cultural and critical competencies. Along with our focus on developing the individual as a critical, aesthetic practitioner, we also foster collaborative approaches across disciplinary domains, including art-oriented and non-traditionally art oriented fields that include the humanities, music, theater/performance, engineering, computer science and environmental studies.
