|
History of Department
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
In
1976 the Art Department at Wake Forest University moved into its own
space in a brand new building, the Scales Fine Arts Center. The year
also marked the first year that an art major was offered at Wake Forest
and the true beginnings of a new phase of the Art Department. Now, twenty
years later, there are over 50 art majors and minors. There are currently
some nine resident faculty members with adjunct faculty in Venice, London,
and Vienna. The curriculum has also expanded and now includes a full
range of offerings in art history from ancient to contemporary as well
as studio courses in drawing and design, painting, printmaking, sculpture,
digital art, and photography. As an integral part of the overall liberal
arts curriculum at Wake Forest, the Art Department emphasizes critical
thinking at all levels of instruction. While many art majors in both
studio and art history have gone one to graduate school and then to
productive careers specifically in the arts, equally as many have gone
on to pursue careers in business, medicine, law or other professions
outside the field of art.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Wake Forest prides itself on its undergraduate teaching, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Art Department where one-to-one instruction is the rule rather than the exception. Students have the opportunity to curate exhibitions, write catalogues, and work with professors on overseas research projects. Every four years there is the opportunity for a small group of students to go to New York to select and purchase contemporary art which becomes part of the Student Union Collection displayed in the Benson Center. Students can also gain practical experience by working in our Scales Fine Arts Center Art Gallery or during internships at local museums such as the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, or the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem. Many opporunities for study abroad are available, including semester residencies at Wake Forest campuses at Worrell House in London, Flow Haus in Vienna, and Casa Artom adjacent to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum on the Grand Canal in Venice. Students in the studio area work closely with our own faculty as well as with visiting artists on special projects. Each spring there is a juried student exhibition as well as individual Honors exhibitions, and from these exhibitions works are purchased which are added to the permanent university collection and are displayed in the main administration building, Reynolda Hall. |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Art Department is continually incorporating new technologies into the way it teaches while maintaining an emphasis on traditional skills and critical thinking. Students in art history are able to access digital images for study or use state-of-the art classroom presentation equipment for special projects, while students in the studio area use the Art Department's Digital Studio to create images, multimedia and web-based materials related to courses ranging from beginning design classes to more advanced classes in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography and digital art. In a time of rapid changes in the way we communicate visually, the Wake Forest University Art Department is meeting the challenge to move with the times.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
