Visiting Artist Exhibits and Events
The Art and Art History Department provides experiences in the practice and history of the visual arts, with a vibrant studio program that includes ceramics, film photography, digital imaging, drawing, painting, sculpture, and more. We offer a major in Art with a Studio or Art History focus, and minors in Art and Art History. Our program affords students a broad base in the study of visual art by offering courses in a variety of media, as well as in art history. Students assemble these building blocks to serve their unique goals. The Art History program focuses on teaching students how to analyze and interpret art within historical contexts. Through its points of contact with literature, history, philosophy, religion, economics, music, biology, political science, and physics, for example, art history builds bridges between the visual arts and other disciplines. For those students who are interested in pursuing graduate work or a career in visual art or art history, we are able to provide a high level of individualized attention.
Why study Art at Austin College?
Our alumni apply their educations to a wide array of careers, including museum and gallery work, art education, art therapy, medical illustration, architecture, and even unexpected occupations like prosthetics design and custom guitar fabrication. Students who study art at Austin College do not just become skilled technicians; the skills and abilities learned by studying art and art history – creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, synthesis, and interpreting visual information – are all highly valuable, and serve students in careers both within and outside of the arts.
Why Study Art & Art History?
A note from the Chair, Mark Monroe, Associate Professor of Art
Through the making of visual art and its analysis in historical context, the Art and Art History Department develops and illuminates the creative human mind. Works of visual art may be generated deliberately as a means of personal expression, yet may also reflect subconscious desires. Pieces may result from individual motivations to document, comment upon, or even change the natural or social world, and they may also be shaped by external circumstances beyond artists’ control. Art speaks to the time of its creation, but it may also communicate to future generations. Our department assists students to experience and understand with greater self-awareness how humans create from their positions geographically, culturally, and historically; how we forge new pathways while finding a place relative to existing traditions.