A Tour of Our Facilities With one exception, our studio courses are capped at fifteen students each (Introductuion to Visual Fundamentas has twenty). We have dedicated studios for drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, digital, and printmaking. Students enrolled in classes have open access to these spaces till 1:00 AM. The sculpture area includes a separate area for welding as well as a discrete woodshop (for safety and sound reasons). The ceramics area contains fifteen wheels for throwing in a spacious work area; we have a pugmill along with three electric and two gas-fired kilns. In photography, we have a classroom that functions as studio, critique space, and film developing area. The adjacent darkroom has eight enlargers: most for 35mm film, but one is set up for medium format and one for large format negatives. We don't plan on getting rid of this darkroom in the foreseeable future, as some schools have done. Our digital lab in the fine arts building has fifteen Macintosh computers (four G5s and eleven I-Macs) with the latest Adobe software (Creative Suite 4). There is additional digital equipment (computers, scanners, and printers--including an Epson 44" wide printer) in our Center for New Media in the Upjohn Library across the street. For Senior Individualized Projects, we have use of an adjacent building where four or five students, usually painters, can work. Other seniors work on their SIPs in their area of study: photography area, ceramics lab, or sculpture studio. The gallery, where the seniors have their SIP exhibit during their last quarter here, is approximately 20 x 20 feet square. We can also exhibit work in the fine arts display case, in our spacious lobby, and have lots of wall space up on our 2nd floor balcony. Our department is small (three full time faculty for studio and one full time art historian) but we are active exhibitors and researchers. We have a few additional instructors who teach classes for our department, such as documentary video and art history classes that are cross-listed with classics and religion--to give us good coverage.
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