Art

“Making Art as if the World Mattered. To Search for the good and make it matter; this is the real challenge for the artist today. Not simply to transform ideas or revelations into matter, but to make those revelations actually matter.” - Estella Conwill-Majozo  

Faculty and Staff

Interim Chair: Eric Griffis
Professors: Valerie Aranda, Elissa Auerbach, William Fisher, Fadhili Mshana, Sandra Trujillo
Associate Professors: Abraham Abebe, Matthew Forrest
Assistant Professors: Sajad Amini,  Ruben Yepes
Lecturer: Megan McNaught

Assistant Collections Manager: Laura Wilson
Ceramics Technician: Curtis Stewardson

Department Contact Information

Georgia College
Department of Art
Campus Box 94
Milledgeville, GA 31061
478-445-4572

Interim Chair,  Eric Griffis, eric.griffis@gcsu.edu

Office Coordinator: Lori Watson, lori.watson@gcsu.edu

Mission

The Department of Art fosters a unique interdisciplinary program in art history, fine art studio, graphic design, and museum studies.  All four concentrations promote excellence in creative activity and research.  Together with our liberal arts curriculum and commitment to experiential learning, the department presents students with diverse opportunities to acquire the skills that will prepare them for a wide variety of career and graduate study.  Our goal is to provide a strong foundation necessary for our students to become visually literate artists, scholars, and global citizens with a deep appreciation and understanding of the visual arts as well as a lifelong passion for learning.

Analysis and critical thinking are central to the visual experience and production of fine art. Our goals for our students are to inculcate the visual language as a creative problem-solving tool, to bridge the gap between the history of visual cultures, the theories of contemporary art strategies and how they are applied to the production of art. Our students will become visually literate in order to decipher the relationships between art and society within the multiple-contexts of history, politics, literature, and issues of gender, identity, and multiculturalism. Our mission is to provide the skills and values that will produce active and responsible participants in society, prepared to engage in questions of self-expression, artisanship, identity, community, values, politics, and meaning.

Our changing world challenges artists to become flexible practitioners and participants who can think, research, organize, and produce work that transforms people, places and our times. The power of art lies in artists connecting themselves in reciprocal relationships with their publics, in order to create a more humane life relevant to their time and place. Housed within Ennis Hall and several other fully equipped studios, the Art program provides a balance of Studio, Art History, Museum Studies, Graphic Design and theory courses organized around a combination of core concept and skill courses, visiting artist experiences, exposure to contemporary art through the Leland Gallery at Ennis Hall Gallery, the Georgia College Permanent Collection housed at the Museum of Fine Arts at Underwood House, and independent and international learning opportunities, all culminating in a senior capstone experience. Our program offers small classes and a low faculty to student ratio, and students will be encouraged to explore media from the tradition of paints to the precision of pixels. The program integrates practice and theory through its interdisciplinary approach to critiques, with the goal of facilitating the acquisition of the following skill sets:

• COMPREHENSION SKILLS including ability to: investigate and understand visual arts from diverse formal, theoretical, historical, social, multicultural, and/or international perspectives.
• ANALYTICAL SKILLS including ability to: research, define, analyze, and critically formulate positions on relevant issues in visual art from diverse formal, theoretical, historical, social, multicultural, and/or international perspectives.
• PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS including ability to: achieve interdisciplinary and selected theoretical, social, multicultural, and/or international connections in art through art-related activities.
• SYNTHESIS/INTEGRATIVE SKILLS including ability to: comprehend, appreciate, analyze, and examine the ways in which ideas about knowledge, creativity, and art are constructed differently in diverse theoretical, multicultural, and/or international perspectives.
• CREATIVE/SCHOLARLY PRODUCTION & PRESENTATION SKILLS including ability to: to create, write about, and/or to otherwise manipulate artistic media in a formal presentation to provide a coherent and cogent visual, oral, and written summary of knowledge.

These skills will lead to a breadth of learning through achievement of the Departmental Major Learning Objectives (DMLO):

• DMLO 1 The student will demonstrate historical and contemporary analytical skills including the ability to research, define, analyze, and critically formulate positions on contemporary issues in visual and public art from historical, ethical, formal, sociopolitical and international perspectives.
• DMLO 2 The student will demonstrate an understanding of the diversity of audience including the ability to define, investigate, and analyze community-audience issues ~ the ability to practice effective problem-solving, communication, and community-sensitive work ~ the ability to evaluate accountability ~ the ability to achieve interdisciplinary collaboration and display community-organizing strategies within an arts project.
• DMLO 3 The student will demonstrate production skills including the ability to create, understand and manipulate media ~ the ability to complete and present artworks or projects. Within the arena of production the student will consider how to present and distribute artwork in multiple formats/contexts using technological, multilingual, and other means.
• DMLO 4 The student will demonstrate critical and evaluative skills including the ability to assess, critique, and analyze formal properties, audience relevancy, and impact from diverse points of view and within multiple contexts.

Student Success

Earning a college degree is a significant milestone requiring and perseverance. To enable in achieving this goal, our department has developed measures to ensure student success. This process begins with the First-Year Academic Seminar (ARTS 0001), in which you are introduced to the faculty and students who make up the departmental community. We are committed to offering the courses necessary to ensure that students who follow the program of study will graduate in four years. Students are advised to enroll in an average of 30 semester hours each year. Intensive interaction with the faculty, small studio and lecture classes, a program of study that is designed to provide a strong foundation in the arts, and the expectation that each student will work to their maximum potential, provide the opportunity for each student to succeed in the field of art.

Concentrations

There are four concentrations within the Art major, offering students diverse options of study. The Art History concentration is a focused exploration of Western and Non-Western art history and theory, preparing students for further study and a range of career applications in the arts. The Fine Art Studio concentration prepares students for graduate school, the professional art world, and a host of careers requiring visual literacy and creative problem solving skills. The Graphic Design concentration employs a curriculum carefully assembled to assist students in acquiring the applicable technical and design skills for proficiency within the graphic design profession or for further study at the graduate level. The Museum Studies concentration is a focused study on museums, galleries, and future employment opportunities within the curatorial field. All four concentrations culminate in a public presentation, at a professional level, of an original creative research project produced during the senior year.

Admission

There is no application process to the Art major or any of its concentrations.

Career Information

The Art major prepares students for further study in specialized fields. These fields include but are not limited to art history, museum studies, graphic design, web design, desktop publishing, cover art, advertising, interior design, textile design, as well as the fine art studio specialties of ceramics, digital art, installation, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture.  Careers in Art Therapy, K-12 Art Education and university-level instruction also begin with programs in the Art Department.

Scholarships

The Art Department presently offers three scholarships, the Katherine Comfort Art Award, the Dorothy Brown Art Award, and the Tina Yarborough Student Scholarship. For more information please contact the Financial Aid Office, 103 Parks Hall, 478-445-5149 or view scholarship information at http://www.gcsu.edu/financialaid.

Exhibition and Visiting Artist and Scholars Program

The Department brings contemporary art to the University community through its exhibitions, seminars, and lectures. The exhibition program provides works in ceramics, drawing, fiber arts, installation, painting, photography, printmaking, performance art, sculpture, and time based media by recognized artists. Exhibitions are held in the Leland Gallery at Ennis Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts at Underwood House, and in pop-up venues across town and campus. Georgia College proudly displays “Ocmulgee Signs” by internationally renowned artist Edgar Heap of Bird's, as well as fine art prints created during residencies by James Luna, Mark Dion, Basia Irland, Dan McCleary and Sue Coe. Other visiting artists include Chakaia Booker, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jonathan Brilliant, Sally Heller, Shiva Ahmadi, Juana Alicia Araiza, and Henry Horenstein. All students are encouraged to attend our exhibitions and guest lectures, and to work closely with our visitors as part of their scholarship. Our guest scholars have included Maria Elena Buszek, Erin Hogan, Stuart Horodner, Sue Taylor, Reinhold Heller and Temma Balducci. 

In addition to regular exhibition programming and the Visiting Artist and Scholars Program, the Department of Art maintains an increasingly important collection of original art work as a resource for our students and communities. The permanent collection includes the Mary Thomas Study Collection of 190 graphic works, the Mamie Padget Collection of 21 works , the Jerome Kaplan Collection of over 1000 prints, paintings and drawings, the Jim and Carol Dew Collection of contemporary Japanese woodcuts, the Fleece Collection of African Art, and is in the process of building the preeminent Southeastern archive of the Art of Resistance, Dissent and Rebellion. The collection is regularly enhanced through fine art print collaborations with our visiting scholars through editions pulled at our Gas Light Press, and by purchases of student work through the generosity of the annual President’s Purchase Award. The collections are archived and exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts. Our Murals Program, working collaboratively with other departments, academic units and regional organizations is leading the way with public art on campus and in neighboring communities.

All students pursuing the BA with a major in Art curate the work of professional artists, exhibit their own thesis art work, and/or publicly present their written scholarship as an aspect of their senior Capstone experience. These achievement highlight many public departmental and community events every semester.