Visual Arts

The Visual Arts Department at SPCPA combines rigorous artistic study with dedicated technical training, creative exploration, and the development of each student’s individual artistic voice. Students work with teaching artists from varied professional backgrounds, gaining exposure to a range of media, techniques, perspectives, and professional practices.

Students build strong foundational skills while learning to think, create, critique, revise, and present work as artists. From traditional studio practice to interdisciplinary collaboration, courses are designed to provide a well-rounded visual arts education that balances craftsmanship, experimentation, artistic voice, and meaningful engagement with the world.

Principles of 2D Design
Students build foundational skills in two dimensional art through drawing, painting, composition, color, line, shape, value, texture, and visual organization. Technical exercises are balanced with original projects that challenge students to apply foundational principles to increasingly individual artistic work.

Principles of 3D Design
Students explore how artists work with form, volume, structure, space, texture, balance, and material. Through hands-on construction and sculptural processes, students strengthen technical skills while considering how three dimensional work changes as it is experienced from multiple viewpoints.

The Working Artist: Finding Your Artistic Voice
Students move beyond individual assignments and begin developing a personal artistic practice. Through experimentation with subject matter, materials, process, and style, students identify the ideas and visual choices that define their emerging artistic voice. Students also explore portfolio development, artist statements, documenting artwork, exhibition preparation, and the professional practices artists use to present and sustain their work.

Art for Social Change
Students examine the powerful relationship between visual art, history, culture, community, and social change. Through the study and discussion of artists from varied backgrounds, cultures, communities, and periods, students investigate how visual artists have responded to the world around them. Students develop original work that considers how art can question, document, communicate, challenge, and create dialogue while learning to approach complex ideas thoughtfully and responsibly.

The Living Canvas: Collaboration with Storytelling Through Movement
This interdisciplinary experience brings Visual Arts and Storytelling Through Movement together to explore how ideas can travel between artistic forms. Students investigate how line, shape, color, texture, composition, gesture, space, rhythm, energy, and narrative communicate across disciplines. Visual artists create work inspired by movement, while movement artists respond to original visual artwork.

Rather than using visual art simply as scenery or movement as illustration, students learn to interpret and respond to one another’s artistic work while maintaining the integrity of each discipline. The collaboration culminates in The Living Canvas, an integrated visual art and movement experience in which original artwork and performance exist in conversation with one another.

Visual Art Faculty