About Painting and Drawing
Adapting skills-based learning and research methodologies as pedagogical models, the Painting and Drawing area supports multiple visual perspectives. Students pursue art making as a process of inquiry that is continually sharpened by experience, knowledge and practice. Area faculty counsel students to be actively engaged in their studios while also considering their work within international, national and regional contexts.
Our research model begins with essential visual tools for creating pictorial space and understanding painting and drawing media. At beginning levels, representation is the measure. Working from observation conveys visual principles such as form, space, facture and edge that are essential to visual communication. Intermediate courses expand the curriculum by focusing on a single topic or process in depth, such as the figure, aqueous media, or conceptual strategies. Intermediate courses introduce theoretical and cultural ideas in course projects, preparing students for the tutorial nature of advanced coursework. In advanced courses, painting and drawing disciplines combine. Students develop a body of work and in their research, develop a conceptual framework for their visual practice. Advanced students compete for ten private studios with 24-hour access. Our graduate students work closely with faculty, often assisting in these courses before teaching their own. All of our graduate students receive focused individual attention on their research from a compelling faculty, themselves committed and practicing artists.
For graduate and undergraduate students, exhibition opportunities abound in a lively local scene galvanized by the Miami art fairs and burgeoning gallery scene. MFA.Org and Filberts are student-run graduate and undergraduate organizations that receive University funds for a roster of visiting artists, travel, and exhibitions. The Painting and Drawing area works with these clubs supporting trips to major urban art centers including Miami, New York and Chicago. Additionally, we sponsor an ambitious roster of visiting artists including in the last several years Dana Schutz, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Dave Hickey and Jerry Saltz. When artists pass through town we invite them for informal lunchtime lectures in the studio classrooms. When traveling on student trips we visit artist studios in other cities. It is important to us that our students encounter what it is like to make art professionally in as many ways as possible, which is ensured by the number and range of artists they meet.
Our students have attended and been given scholarships to programs including the Vermont Studio School, Yale Norfolk, Skowhegan, and are accepted into graduate programs including the San Francisco Art Institute, Boston University, and School of Visual Arts in New York.
