Why Purchase?
You are an artist of exceptional talent, vision, and promise.

You don't want to merely major in art - you want to immerse yourself in it.

You are excited by the notion that artists in the 21st century will go beyond established traditions and categories.

You want to use your whole brain in college. . . left side, right side, all of it!

You believe that your work can reach new heights in a community of committed, working artists.

The School of Art+Design at Purchase College offers the intensity, depth, and excellence you are looking for. This acclaimed undergraduate BFA program, with its faculty of exhibiting artists, addresses the complexities of the 21st-century art world and prepares you to join it.

Art+Design at Purchase stresses the acquisition of traditional artistic tools and skills, but also insists on cultivation of the mind. You will work intensively in your chosen concentration, with full encouragement to collaborate with artists in other media.

You will grow as an artist and as a human being. You will also be required to sample widely from the many excellent offerings in the liberal arts, including art history.

The BFA program offers a four-year curriculum of study with majors in:

• Graphic Design
• Painting/Drawing
• Photography
• Printmaking/Art of the Book
• Sculpture/3-D Media
• Visual Arts: Interdisciplinary

Minor in Visual Arts
Students now have the opportunity to minor in visual arts. The purpose of the minor is to provide students who are not degree candidates in the School of Art+Design with an understanding of processes, issues, and skills in the visual arts.

Art+Design Concentrations
Each student works closely with an assigned faculty advisor to establish his or her program. All students fulfill a core requirement and then specialize in one area or tailor a program of interdisciplinary study under faculty sponsorship. Each concentration has a specific sequence of courses leading to a required senior project in that area.

Graphic Design
The program educates students in the art and practice of visual communications, from industrially multiplied graphics to books, magazines, pamphlets, posters, packaging, and signage. The roles of the artist/designer are continually expanding as printed and electronic communications reshape our world. To prepare students for this range of options, the program provides a hands-on studio environment, emphasizing the marriage of practical and conceptual skills. The program encourages the role of the artist/designer as the generator of ideas - a person who can combine imagination, theory, and a command of visual language.

Painting and Drawing
Students in painting and drawing benefit from the variety of views of faculty members who are all practicing and exhibiting artists. Studio work is complemented by trips to New York City to visit galleries, museums, and artists' studios. In the junior and senior years, selected students may be assigned semiprivate studios. All students enjoy critique and review sessions by the resident faculty, as well as by visiting artists and critics.

Photography
The curriculum covers camera formats from 35mm to 8x10 and includes work with black and white, color, and nonsilver materials. Specific courses are given in studio, view camera, and collotype techniques. The program is devoted to fine art photography, though many graduates are working successfully in applied fields.

Students work with photographs as documents, objects, experiments, evidence, statements, prayers, confessions, jokes, notations, accidents, prophesies, indictments, products, concepts, and poems, while wrestling with the knot of reality and image.

Printmaking/Art of the Book
Purchase College offers one of the finest and most comprehensive printmaking facilities in the country. Students receive comprehensive, up-to-date training in lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, woodcut, papermaking, photomechanical techniques, and the art of the book, leading to the development of skills as artists or master printers. The extraordinary facilities in the Center for Editions provide students with a wide array of technologies for print and electronic media.

Sculpture/3-D Media
Exploring contemporary concerns, students can opt to work in a variety of traditional and new media. The curriculum encompasses: object making, studio furniture making, site-specific work, installation, inter/multimedia, and video. Facilities include more than 25,000 square feet of shop/studio space with professional-caliber equipment for working in wood, metals, bronze casting, ceramics, plaster, fabric, plastic, video, light, sound, and interactive multimedia computing.

Outstanding Facilities
The facilities of the 160,000 square-foot Art+Design building help make great work possible. It is one of the largest educational facilities of its kind in the Northeast. Most studios and shops are open until 2:00 am.

Painting/Drawing students have access to nine light-filled studios. Photographers enjoy group darkrooms and 24 individual darkrooms, developing and finishing rooms, color and nonsilver darkrooms, and suites for digital/computer photographic processes.

Sculpture/3-D Media students have more than 25,000 square feet of shop and studio space superbly equipped for working in wood, metals, ceramics, plaster, fabric, plastics, video, light, sound, and interactive multimedia computing.

Printmaking/Art of the Book students train on Brand presses, lithography stones, silkscreen vacuum printers, paper beaters, process cameras, platemakers, a Mailander press, a Solna offset cylinder press, digital software, letterpress, and hand bindery.

Also on campus is the Neuberger Museum of Art, the eighth largest university museum in the nation. The museum is an ongoing inspiration for students and an incomparable teaching resource. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, it houses a permanent collection of more than 6,000 works of art, with an emphasis on 20th-century American art. A full schedule of exhibitions, lectures, films, concerts, and intermedia events are presented throughout the year. Admission is free for Purchase students.

Academic Requirements
Art+Design at Purchase offers professional training with a general education component in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. The four-year BFA program requires:

• Visual Arts Studio Courses 80 credits (of which 24 credits must be in upper-level studio coursework)
• Art History 12 credits
• Additional liberal arts courses 28 credits
• Senior Project 8 credits

The Core Program
First-year students are required to complete an Art+Design core program that includes courses in the following areas:

• Seeing
• Composition
• History
• Imaging

For more information, please visit the Art+Design web site.