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Department of Art and Art History

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Course of Study

"The pencil speaks the tongue of every land." — Alexander Pope

"Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for." — George Sand

Washington College has a long and inspired tradition in the visual arts. Elizabeth Callister Peale and her sister, Sarah, taught drawing and painting here in the 1780s—perhaps the first women to teach at any institution of higher learning in North America. In the middle part of the last century, one of our graduates, Anthony Kloman, was a prime mover at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, behind an extraordinary yet ultimately unsuccessful competition for a monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, the winning maquette for which, selected from some 2700 entries from 57 countries, survives in the Tate Modern. More recently, we had a special relationship with the South-African photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee, whose name adorns our studio facility, and whose work, a corpus of which she bequeathed to the College, hangs, among other places, in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

At a time when images shape our lives in ways hard to imagine even a decade ago, and neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists are plumbing the ways in which image-making is thought to make us uniquely "human," we in the Department of Art and Art History try continually to map the relations between thinking and making, to contemplate the role of the beautiful—yes, the beautiful, which, in the work of certain aestheticians has again been linked to ideals of social justice—and to live up to the ideal set forth in the Renaissance, that image-making at its best (at that time, painting) is, in fact, the eighth liberal art, in dialogue with, and building on, the other seven: logic, rhetoric, grammar, music, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic.

The student interested primarily in the study of visual cultures, past and present, is given the tools for historical analysis and a theoretical grounding in the discipline of art history, as well as some understanding of techniques and concepts of current studio practice. The student concentrating in studio art, in turn, benefits from the perspective of those artists who came before her/himself, by taking one introductory and three advanced courses in art history, and learning something of the traditions of which she/he is—or is not—a part, in addition to immersing herself/himself in contemporary visual culture.


News

Kohl Gallery "artNOW:Baltimore" Features Five Contemporary Artists Starting February 10

Major Grants Enhance Studio Art Experience at Washington College

Assistant Professor of Studio Art Monika Weiss Presents Multi-media Installation Sustenazo in Warsaw, March 12-April 25

Acclaimed 'Second Nature' Art Exhibition Continues At Washington College's New Kohl Gallery

First Annual Art History Symposium

'Chronotopes: Where Time and Space Meet': 2008 Student Art Exhibition

Washington College, Smithsonian Museums Join Forces for 'American Pictures' Lecture Series

Underwood Donates $1.5 Million to Renovation of Washington College's Performing Arts Center

Students Explore Museum Careers at The Walters

The New George: CSI Techniques Used to Put a New Face of Our First President November 30 and December 1

Drawing Lethe: Professor Monika Weiss Presents Multimedia Art Performance in New York City, September 9

WC Senior Astra Haldeman Receives $26,000 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship for Post-Graduate Studies

WC Art Professor Studies Early Christian Sculptures during Summer Research at Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks

Donald McColl Appointed First Underwood Professor in Art History at Washington College

$1 Million Gift Establishes New Endowed Chair in Art and Art History at Washington College