Program Overview
It provides technical skills in woodworking, welding, mold-making, and digital fabrication, fostering creativity, self-discipline, and cultural awareness.
Program Outline
Degree Overview:
The Sculpture Studio Art Minor is a program designed to encourage students from all areas of the university to explore working in this art form. It supports traditional, experimental, and trans-disciplinary approaches to studio art practice by broadening students' understanding and increasing their capacity to think beyond convention. The minor aims to empower students to develop a personal voice, a professional and creative practice, self-discipline, and cultural awareness.
Outline:
The Sculpture Studio Art Minor requires 18 credit hours and can be completed in 2-3 semesters. The curriculum exposes students to all aspects of 3D art and the different media in which to work, including computer-based design for digital fabrication. Students gain technical skills including woodworking, welding, metal fabrication, mold-making, casting, digital fabrication, public art proposals, and installation practice.
Specific Courses:
- Beginning Sculpture: Digital Methods (3 hrs): Introduces concepts and processes involved in producing sculptural objects, focusing on digital fabrication tools and techniques like 3D modeling, scanning and printing, CNC routing, and CNC plasma cutting.
- Foundations: Space (Physical, Temporal and Virtual) (3 hrs): Explores multiple conceptions of space, ranging from physical objects to metaphorical space.
- Foundations: Narrative and Representation (3 hrs): Emphasizes multiple levels of representation ranging from the physical to the intangible.
- Intermediate Sculpture: Multiples and Monuments (3 hrs): Builds upon the fundamental principles of mold-making and casting learned in Beginning Sculpture.
- Intermediate Sculpture: Art in Public (3 hrs): Explores how art can exist in public spaces, from temporary interventions to formal proposal-based projects.
- Beginning Sculpture: Traditional Methods (3 hrs): Introduces concepts and processes involved in producing sculptural objects, focusing on tools, materials, and techniques used in basic woodworking, metal fabrication, mold-making, and casting techniques.
Teaching:
The program is led by active and accomplished faculty and staff who instruct students on and through the technical skills, conceptual strategies, aesthetic presentation, and formal issues of sculpture. Students are encouraged to develop their individual voice through a process of creative inquiry, conceptualization, realization, and critique.
Other:
- Sculpture faculty members are nationally and internationally acclaimed artists and scholars.
- Students are connected to internships and a strong visiting artist and scholar program.
- The College of Visual Arts and Design is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.
