Fine Arts Overview

The Brandeis University Department of Fine Arts invites students to experience art as both scholarship and a process of creation. By uniting artistic excellence with intellectual inquiry, Brandeis affirms the importance of a broad education in preparing our students for creative participation in a changing society. Our students are encouraged to develop their artistry with the idealism of a global perspective.

Fine arts students are educated in visual thinking through experience. The department offers programs in studio art and history of art for undergraduates who wish to study the visual arts as a creative artist or as a humanist. The studio art program offers diverse approaches in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. The art history program is designed to give a breadth and depth of knowledge about international art movements from the past to the present.

Our post-baccalaureate in studio art is recognized as one of the finest in the country. It provides intensive training for ambitious young artists interested in enhancing their technique and developing their portfolio in preparation for graduate students.

Founded in 1951 by Social Realist painter Mitchell Siporin, the Department of Fine Arts features a distinguished faculty of acclaimed artists and noted art historians. Classes are taught in Goldman-Schwarz Studios, Pollack Lecture Hall, and off campus at a converted urban warehouse/studio. A new fine arts complex, offering new studios, digital library, and student gallery, is planned for opening in 2009. Department exhibits are currently held four times each year on campus in the Dreitzer Gallery.

The Rose Art Museum is home to one of New England's largest collection of modern and contemporary art. The Rose offers three annual exhibitions of innovative international, national, and regional artists such as Barry McGee, and Surasi Kusolwong, and addresses themes such as Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa. The Rose also lends artwork to students for their residence halls in partnership with the Student Committee at the Rose Art Museum (SCRAM). Fine arts students have the opportunity to interact with artists exhibited at the Rose, and comprehensive internships are available.

The permanent collection of Brandeis University features nearly 8,000 works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Raoul Dufy, David Hockney, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, among many others. Brandeis students have access to more than 100 museums and galleries in the Greater Boston area, from the Institute of Contemporary Art to the Peabody Essex Museum, and they receive free admission to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as well as the art museums at Harvard.