Visual and Public Art B.A. ~ Faculty & Student Quotes
Our VPA program helps you integrate your individual skills with collaborative models. Our projects are hands-on, and you have the opportunity to work on campus in interdisciplinary activities where you can solve problems, use technology, and apply your art. Come join us as we transform this campus and our neighboring communities.
~ Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Founding Director, Co-Chair
I teach my students that each form of creation and every level of participation in the field of public art is equivalent. Each project, every personal interaction between an artist/educator/administrator has the ability to serve, heal, and revitalize a community, a neighborhood, a city, a country, and our planet. In a time of increasing economic pressure and social alienation, public art has the ability to make visible members of society who have been rendered as "invisible"; to manifest the dreams and hopes of communities in magical, intangible ways; and to bridge long standing and often unexamined cultural, racial, and social divisions by providing meaningful collective experiences.
~ Gilbert Neri, Assistant Professor, Integrated Media Studies and Digital Public Art
Over the years as our VPA program has grown, I am continually inspired by the creativity and enthusiasm of our students. When I talk with some of our VPA graduates, now working as artists or in graduate programs, they reflect on the unique and supportive experience they had working with our faculty and how this still informs their creative process. It is a great task in our society to be aware of the media propaganda and be culturally strong in our diversity and individuality. Developing the visual and critical skills to interpret, communicate, and collaborate in the world with innovation and integrity is what I try as an artist to do and teach.
~ Stephanie A. Johnson, Co-Chair and Service Learning Liaison
VPA is unique as an undergraduate public art program, allowing students to experience the public process firsthand in class projects and finally in Senior Capstones. Experience in integrating theory and practice is the key to being better prepared to enter the field of public art.
~ Johanna Poethig, Assistant Professor, Painting, Murals, and Public Art
As a teacher, I feel a natural affinity for my students and enjoy helping them with creative learning experiences. I spend a great deal of time in and out of the classroom thinking about the students, their work, and how to better share with them the enthusiasm that I have for the subject matter and the creative process.
~ Siobhan Arnold, Lecturer, Photography and Drawing
Museums are critical to our communities not so that we can learn about art and culture, but so that we can learn about ourselves.
~ Lila Staples, Lecturer, Museum Studies and Arts Education
Collaborative art brings a range of people into conversations about their visions for their neighborhoods or their nations. Finding a place for those ideas in monuments that are constructed of the soil and spirit of the people is the most challenging task for public artists in this time.
~ Judith F. Baca, Founding Faculty