The B.F.A. program supports artist-scholars in their development of a creative practice informed by intensive studios, critical seminars, and areas of study and research across the university. The department offers studio classes in the following areas of study on a regular basis:
Media Arts, Performance, Sound (MAPS)
Media Arts, performance, and sound touch every corner of our lives today, creating new modes of expression and new ways of interacting and connecting. Through creative assignments, exercises, and projects, students develop a critical eye and learn how to articulate their ideas while sharpening their technical skills in digital media. MAPS students also attend workshops, lectures, presentations, and guest artist talks to explore how contemporary artists use computation, networks, and digitized data for production and expression.
Drawing
Introductory-level drawing classes expand technical expertise and address contemporary image making with traditional and nontraditional materials and methods. Advanced classes utilize drawing as a means of conducting research into how a range of disciplines can inform artistic studio practice and investigate the medium’s potential for communicating complex ideas.
Painting
Painting studios provide students with various techniques and processes within a topical study structure that encourages the development of conceptual, formal, and aesthetic concerns within both traditional and experimental frameworks. Examples of possible topics include contemporary issues in the mediation of spatiality; genres of film that address narrative, appropriation, temporality, framing, and scale; the historical legacies of material presence and research into formulation and application; and pictorial languages, scale of production, and modes of delivery, ranging from a two-dimensional picture plane to site-specific installation.
Photography
We use photography to examine the world, culture, perception, and creative inquiry itself. Through making, choosing, amending, and refining images, students build coherent visual experiences with a range of both analog and digital tools available in the department and college. Through a progression of creative exercises and critique, faculty and students create a dialogue with photographic practices past and present.
Print Media
Studies in print media embrace the pluralism of printed matter through history and across modes of production, allowing students to explore a range of human experiences in art, design, and science. Our printmaking studios seek the potential of all analog and digital print processes in producing singular, variable, and editions of prints, artists’ publications, zines, installation, and multiples. Sources for studying print-based work abound at Cornell, and opportunities for integrating print processes, including hand-craft and machine-craft, visual communication, social engagement, new narratives, mixed media, public practice, and lens and screen-based work are present across all of the department’s areas of study.
Sculpture
The study of sculpture offers students opportunities to develop work through traditional and experimental media and to gain technical proficiency while being both supported and challenged in their consideration of the medium in broad terms and through a critical lens. The college provides state-of-the-art fabrication facilities for students to explore interdisciplinary projects, site-specific installation, social practice, and public art. Group and one-on-one critiques push students to grow as artists and independent, critical thinkers.