The Sculpture concentration provides students with their primary experience in manipulating form, structure, and space in three dimensions, while learning the expressive potential of materials. The ability to observe and manipulate physical reality counterbalances contemporary culture’s emphasis on image manipulation in virtual reality. The Department’s curricular approach strikes a balance between design and crafting of materials, and historical and theoretical discussions that inform the students’ understanding of their role in creating their own culture. The faculty recognizes sculpture to be broadly defined and inclusive of functional forms, sculptural objects, installation, site specific, public, and performance art.

Undergraduate instruction at all levels emphasizes relationships that help students think beyond the traditional pedestal object--relationships between maker and materials, between materials and forms, between forms and spatial and cultural context. The Foundation section begins by heightening the students’ awareness of their bodies in space, and the effect of mental intention on materials by means of the body. Basic and advanced level classes in Sculpture introduce specific sculptural tools and techniques. They incorporate slide presentations and research projects that point students to the larger cultural, historical and material reality around them. Above all, the Sculpture program encourages students to rigorously question their intentions as art makers, and points them toward methods of realizing those intentions.

Regularly offered courses include Sculpture: Wood (ART 216), Sculpture: Metals (ART 217), Sculpture: Moldmaking/Casting (ART 219), and Sculpture Seminar (ART 220)—several of which may be repeated with a change in course content. At the introductory level, Sculpture students gain drawing skills to support their sculptural work, and in the basic studio, they explore a range of media and assignments that emphasize both non-representational formal abstraction and spatial relationships to explore the possibilities and limitations of the materials themselves. Students learn to use a wide variety of tools and techniques in a fully equipped wood-working, metal working, mold-making, a casting, and ceramics studios. Overseen by faculty and a full-time technician, students take responsibility for every stage of production. Advanced sculpture courses focus on specific media and processes such as wood, metal, clay and mold-making and casting as well as mixed-media solutions, content concerns and presentation strategies. Studio assignments, slide lectures, and research projects underline the history of the medium as do required foundation courses in critical issues as well as survey and topic-specific art history classes.

The curriculum develops creative experience and professional practices in contemporary and traditional approaches, working in media that range from clay, wood, metals, fiber, and found objects to mixed and cross-media investigations. The high quality of student work as well as the advanced degrees and professional stature of Department students attest to the strength of the curriculum and the facilities that support it.

Please take a look at some student work >