Visual Arts, B.A.

The Visual Arts major is structured to take you from foundational skills to independent creative practice.

You’ll complete 12 courses in total, building technical range early and focusing your vision over time. The curriculum is designed to be genuinely flexible — allowing you to pursue the combination of studio practice, interactive media, and interdisciplinary work that fits your interests and goals.

Requirements

Requirements include one ARTS foundation course, six ARTS electives, one professional development course, and the Visual and Performing Arts capstone. ARTS electives may be selected from visual arts offerings, with the option to include up to three interactive media courses; one interdisciplinary course may also count toward the ARTS electives. The major culminates in a cohort-based Visual and Performing Arts capstone experience that brings together students from six majors, with projects completed individually or in collaboration.

Foundation

You’ll begin by choosing one foundation course in a core discipline: 2D design, drawing, photographic media, or sculpture. This is your entry point into the visual language of the program — the skills and habits of attention that everything else builds on.

Studio electives

Six elective courses allow you to develop breadth and depth across the program’s full range of media: drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and graphic design. Up to three of these electives can be drawn from Interactive Media — courses in game art, animation, motion graphics, UI/UX design, digital 3D modeling, and more — making it possible to build a genuinely hybrid practice without pursuing a separate major. One elective can come from an approved interdisciplinary course in screen studies, theater, creative writing, entrepreneurship, computing, or another field. A formal request process is available for courses not already on the approved list.

Professional Development

One course is dedicated to professional practice. Options include Portfolio Development, Gallery Culture and Practice, Contemporary Directions, Studio Topics, and Internship. These courses connect your studio work to the realities of a creative career — how work is presented, contextualized, and sustained.

Visual and Performing Arts Requirements

All Visual Arts majors take one 100-level course in another V&PA discipline — screen studies, theater, music, media culture and the arts, or art history — and two art history courses, one of which must be ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing. This breadth requirement connects your studio practice to the critical and historical frameworks that give it context.