As an Art major at St. Edward's University, y'all'll learn to shift your perspective and push yourself to the edge of your comfort zone.

Y'all'll develop a core knowledge of design, drawing and fine art history and explore mediums including drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture.

And the lessons you acquire will extend far beyond the subjects yous explore. In the Drawing Methods course, for example, you'll stretch your mind and gain confidence in your artistic abilities by completing perspective-shifting projects — 20 themed drawings in 20 hours; cartoon the same object x times, filling the whole sheet each time and turning the newspaper xc degrees every four minutes — that challenge you to refine your artistic process. And as you lot piece of work through the projects, you'll start to trust the process and embrace mistakes, an approach that extends far across the art world.

Every bit you advance through the program, y'all'll discover your ain style and learn to critique your own work. Y'all'll create interactive installations, ask questions of professional artists who visit campus and study at museums across Texas. The Fine Arts Gallery on campus will become your lab, where you lot'll acquire exhibition design and installation and accept an opportunity to evidence your own work.

And in Austin — a creative city with a vibrant art scene — yous'll apply what y'all're learning. Intern at established galleries, The Contemporary art museum, and the city's Cultural Arts department, including the drome public art program. And in your spare time, take advantage of the Blanton Museum, dozens of established galleries, the interdisciplinary Fusebox Festival, and the two jam-packed weekends of the East Austin Studio Tour, plus more than street murals than you can Instagram in a yr.

What do our graduates do?

Art majors keep to a diversity of careers and graduate schools from St. Edward's. Here's a sample.

  • Exhibitor at Austin's Wally Workman Gallery
  • Project lead at MoonArk, the get-go museum for the moon, in Paris
  • Associate professor in the School of Blueprint at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn.
  • MFA student at Columbia Academy
  • Recipient of the University Graduate Scholarship at the University of Saskatchewan for MFA studies

For more information on the Art major, please contact Hollis Hammonds, chair of the Visual Studies department. The Art major is function of the Section of Visual Studies.

Through applied learning in your courses, internships in the fine art earth, interaction with visiting artists, and exhibitions in the Fine Arts Gallery on campus, you'll learn near the mural of arts careers and discover your niche.

Experiential Education

In Installation and Public Art, you'll acquire past participating in the full process of being a public artist. Piece of work with stakeholders and create a existent-earth public fine art project on or off campus. A previous class created work for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.

In Fine art and Activism, yous'll learn nigh art making equally a means of social action and activism. You'll study artists working in social practice, political art, and other art activism projects, and and so engage with stakeholders, such as a nonprofit, on a existent project.

In your Senior Studio courses, you lot'll develop an independent artistic projection and install your work in the Fine Arts Gallery on campus.

In Professional person Practices course, you'll interact with working artists in the Austin community and learn about career options, document your creative work, create a personal website and expand your professional network.

Throughout the yr, you lot'll learn from visiting artists who share their artistic vision and experiences in the field. Past visiting artists include:

  • African American artist Letitia Huckaby
  • Turkish American artist Tulu Bayar
  • David Mack, artist and writer for Marvel Comics®
  • Artist-activists Robert Shetterly and Lily Yeh
  • Social practice artist Pato Hebert

Internships

Expand your career options by interning with local artists and fine art organizations. Art majors recently have interned with the following:

  • San Antonio contemporary art gallery Artpace
  • The studio of internationally acclaimed, Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts
  • MOHA (Museum of Man Achievement), a multidisciplinary art space in Austin
  • The Gimmicky Austin
  • City of Austin public fine art department
  • Women & Their Work gallery in East Austin

You also can volunteer with fine art organizations to larn fifty-fifty more than about the field.

Research and Creative Opportunities

The studio art faculty at St. Edward's are well-known artists whose work has been exhibited widely at galleries and museums. Yous might aid 1 of your professors, or a professional creative person in their network, in their studios or with the installation of exhibitions. In your free time, you'll have the vast Austin fine art scene to explore: visiting local galleries and museums, attending artist lectures and workshops, even exhibiting at local galleries.

Student Organizations

Chroma Fine art Guild is a infinite for learning artists who want to abound in their exercise and network with other artists. Members make and collaborate on creative works, visit galleries and hash out their ain and others' work. Recently the club has attended an exhibition opening, held a "Paint with Bob Ross" upshot, made hand-illustrated postcards, hosted life drawing and charcoal drawing sessions, and collaborated with the St. Edward's New Literati literary magazine to create artwork inspired past verse.

Control G design lodge arranges workshops and roundtables and provides opportunities to explore careers in the field through studio visits. The gild has held several screen printing workshops and an all-mediums critique night.

Major Requirements: The Available of Arts with a major in Art requires 58 hours of core coursework. The Art program offers students a strong foundation year which encourages skill development, experimentation and independent thought. In the sophomore year students focus on media exploration and skill evolution through courses in painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Art history courses support both contextual and conceptual development that is essential for emerging artists. Upper level courses include Figuration (the study of the human being figure), Professional Practices, and Art and Inquiry (an arts-based research course). Students conclude their studies through the culminating experience course sequence, Senior Studio I and II, which require the evolution of an independent artistic projection, a senior exhibition in the Fine Arts Gallery, and a thesis paper.

Electives: Art majors typically take betwixt six and 12 hours of elective courses. Case constituent courses include Sequential Art, Screenprinting, Installation Art, and Video.

General Instruction Requirements: The Fine art degree requires an average of 38-44 hours of full general education courses that students complete over four years in improver to their major courses and electives.

View and download the full degree plan for the Art major (PDF).

A few examples of the Art major courses students take:

  • Issues in Contemporary Fine art – Focuses on recent art, artists and art world (from museums to the market). Materials will exist framed in the context of the era, including introductions to formalist, feminist, psychological, and deconstructivist criticism.
  • Painting: Methods – Focuses on fundamental painting techniques from direct observation. Emphasis is placed on the plastic medium of pigment as information technology relates to pictorial representation, colour, form, texture, and space.
  • Clay: Handbuilding – Introduces handbuilding techniques involved in the ceramics process. Through demonstrations and discussions, students will learn fundamental handbuilding methods, surface treatments, and the use of tools and equipment. Students complete projects employing coil, compression, slab, and additive/subtractive modeling techniques.

Our distinguished kinesthesia members are scholar-practitioners with years of experience and artistic passions of their own. They stay active in their fields and bring their expertise to the classroom.

Hollis Hammonds

Across providing young people with technical know-how, I promise to open their minds to new ideas and successful approaches to problem solving, brainstorming techniques and experimenting without reservation.

— Hollis Hammonds,
Chair of Visual Studies & Associate Professor of Art

Mary Brantl

I teach my students by providing context to the globe of fine art — from the availability of materials to market place strategies, from the vocalization of the individual to the goals of lodge. I encourage young people to written report with these much larger bug in mind. Nonetheless, I also believe that the study of fine art must come up back to the object itself.

​— Mary Thou. Brantl,
PhD, Acquaintance Professor of Art History

Alexandra Robinson

I encourage them to seek opportunities that challenge them artistically, both in and outside of the classroom. This reinforcement of their talent makes a precious connection between theory and practice.

— Alexandra Robinson,
Associate Professor of Art, Director of Fine Arts Gallery

Tammie Rubin

My goal is that each student leaves my class with increased understanding of how to express their ideas clearly in three-dimensional forms, using technical skills, denoting thought processes, and an sensation of context.

— Tammie Rubin,
Assistant Professor of Art, Sculpture and Ceramics

Forth with personal attending and mentorship from their professors, our students have admission to offices and programs outside of the classroom that support their success. We encourage students to take advantage of these resources that help them thrive and excel:Learn more well-nigh these services.

Students who wish to earn an Fine art small-scale must have the following coursework, totaling 24 hours, with at to the lowest degree nine hours of upper-division coursework. This includes 4 required courses:

  • Foundations of Fine art and Design
  • Cartoon I
  • Clay: Handbuilding
  • Fine art History I or Fine art History II

Students select 3 constituent courses in Fine art History I, Art History 2, Drawing Two or Watercolor I, Sculpture: Materials, od Dirt: Bicycle Throwing.

Are y'all a current pupil? Contact your advisor for side by side steps on declaring your major or minor.