It’s now official — the new Art Major is here! We’re very excited to offer a broader course of study in the visual arts. From the press release:
NORTH ADAMS, MA – Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) has announced that the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education on Wednesday unanimously approved two new Bachelor of Arts degree programs – in art, and in political science/public policy.
According to MCLA Art Professor Gregory Scheckler, the new art major differs from art programs at other state colleges not only because advanced students can design their own pathway through the program, but because of the regional arts scene, which includes Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Clark.
“We started building towards this kind of program in the fall of 2000, incrementally increasing our arts courses and offerings until we could support an arts management degree, MCLA Gallery 51 and now the new art degree,” Scheckler said. “The combinations are very exciting because as students learn to master their craft in the art major, they can also learn the best of business savvy in the arts management program by double-majoring or minoring. The art major is an important building block towards the college’s larger goals of creating new programs with unique emphases and possibilities that link with the Berkshires.”
Scheckler said the program will facilitate students’ entry into careers as creative innovators. Courses will include those in a wide array of media such as drawing, painting, graphic design, photography, film, broadcast communications, computer graphics and costume design.
For those of you interested in which courses will count towards earning the Art Major, there’s two main sequences for the degree, foundations and your own student-designed upper-level concentration area:
Part 1: Art Major Foundations: all students complete the following: Intro Drawing, Intermediate Drawing, Intro Painting, Form & Composition, Intro Graphic Design or Photo or Computing, Intermediate Graphic Design or Photo or Computing, Great Monuments 1, Great Monuments 2, Intro to Mass Media, Intro Art History Seminar, and Senior Art Project
Part 2: Student-designed concentrations: select seven courses, five in artmaking and two in cultural contexts. Studio courses include: cartooning, storytelling in words and images, landscape painting, figure drawing, intermediate and advanced art lab, the concrete poem, broadcast communications, computer graphics, photojournalism, film-making, costume design, etc.; cultural contexts courses include: intermediate and advanced art history seminars, museum studies, film studies. Art Majors will also be eligible for internships and independent studies. The full list of eligible courses from which you can build your concentration is a lot longer than written here.
