Becoming an Artist at Houghton | A Tour of Stevens Art Studio

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

We also have painting studio in a drawing studio, a printmaking studio and a photography studio and a three D studio where we have a wood shop and sculpture materials. The art department brought into this liberal arts program. I think that's really important because you get a variety of things to engage in and studio art is one of those components that gives that creative outlet but it also helps you to think creatively in problem solving and that's a life skill that everyone needs. These days, the studio classes are full of challenges and we let our students kind of wrestle with some of those challenges intentionally. They don't always enjoy it but they come out stronger because of it. So we're giving them that studio time and the studio classes take a little bit more time. So we kind of limit the number of studio classes they can take in any given semester within the arts program. We have the studio arts, the traditional arts and then we have applied design and communications area which is more of the digital arts. The opportunities for students in both of those are numerous on the apply design side. We have opportunities to work at Markham through internships are marketing communications area. There are also students that get work outside of Houghton. We have many students that are photographing weddings or doing graphic design projects. They're doing product shots for small small companies and there's students that are in the ceramics area that are working with ceramics business here in town that's actually run by one of the owned by one of the faculty, that ceramics professor and he does production where they're down working and producing a lot of the stuff that's going out to a real customers, so they're getting real live hands on experience that way as well. One of the things that Houghton art department offers is the christian aspect To our to study art and to be able to have conversations and tackle and wrestle with ideas that you may not be able to in other places. We've got five faculty and we're all Christians were all with our terminal degrees master's of fine arts, several of us have a lot of real world experience. I came from 20 years in New York City as a commercial advertising photographer. We have our ceramics professor that I mentioned has his production company of ceramics and he's been doing that for about 15 years. So we're bringing real life experience with hands on opportunities for students to involve their faculty, care deeply about all the students and we want to get to know them personally and you'll find us often having coffee with them down a coffee shop or meeting with them outside on a warm day and and just having life discussions. So for students coming into Houghton, their first year, we try to get them into our foundation classes right away. So the first semester you can expect to be taking two D. Class, a three D. Class, possibly a drawing one class, there's an intro to visual arts which is a primer on art histories and then you'll be moving right into 200 level studio classes by your second semester and third semester into digital photography. We also have a foundations and digital communications where you're learning the entire W suite. Then you can get into more advanced painting and printmaking, photography and ceramics.