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

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, Associate Professor, painting, murals and public art

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, Assistant Professor, 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

A Student's Perspective

As a VPA student I believe I have been given the opportunity to think in a critical and reflective manner about art. I have learned to use my developing artistic skills to produce work that is personal to myself, with a reflective and critical view of life and my place within it. I also believe that I have developed skills involving critical interpretations to use when observing the art of other people. Honestly, I believe that if I had taken the traditional art school route, I would have learned the monotonous versions of art history rather than truly engaging and observing the history of art, not just memorizing artists and dates. (Can we say boring?)
~ Nicole Ricci, former VPA student assistant