About Visual Arts at Evergreen

Who We Are, What We Do

We seek to educate students to be more acutely aware of and record their visual environments by rigorously exploring their own personal visions through speaking and writing clearly and persuasively about their work, understanding the pervasiveness and potency of visual images and arguments in personal, political, cultural and environmental contexts, and giving effective voice to that understanding in their communities. Critical thinking and writing skills development are part of every full-time program offered. We strive to advance the visual literacy and visual learning and reasoning skills of our students.

Facilities

Evergreen has well-equipped shops and studios where students work across a range of mediums.

Fully equipped Wood and Metal shops, Ceramics studio and kiln room, Fine Metals studio, Fibers studio, Printmaking studio, Neon studio and Photography studios and darkrooms:  all are available to students enrolled in Visual Art programs, classes or individual contracts.

Teaching spaces include a Life Drawing studio, Drawing and Painting studios, a 3D studio and two critique rooms.

Photo studios, a Digital Imaging studio and the Evergreen Gallery are housed in the Library. We also have access to two large studios and a critique room in the recently completed Seminar II Building.

Faculty

The Visual and Environmental Arts department hosts a menagerie of full-time faculty, EWS (evening and weekend studies) faculty and instructional support staff who regularly instruct students involved with Visual Art programs, often incorporating several facilities and teaching spaces into the curriculum.

The VEA area fills about 200-225 seats each quarter in full-time studies. Most of our students explore the visual and environmental arts offerings as a part of their liberal arts education; 12-14% identify as arts emphasizers, moving toward future careers in the arts. We sponsor about 33 seats each quarter in individual and internship learning contracts. We fill about 25-40 seats each quarter in 8 credit EWS programs, and about 200 seats in 4 credit EWS courses. *Seat numbers are from 2003-04 Academic Year statistics.

Quantitative reasoning skills are almost always a part of programs taught by VEA faculty, for example:

• Centering, a ceramics and science program: glaze formula testing and calculations, surface to volume calculations, mathematics of ideal forms, physics of rotational systems.
• Sustainable Design, a design, ecology, and community studies program: structural analyses of columns and beams, land surveying basics, topographic mapping, plant and animal population analyses, cut and fill calculations.
• Picturing Plants, a botany and visual arts program: proportional analysis, spreadsheet analyses.
• Light, a chemistry and visual arts program: statistical analyses, graphic and spreadsheet analyses, chemical energy calculations.

Our programs do a sound job of fostering technical skills and conceptual understanding, while encouraging the independent visions of students. Students tend to find the mentors they need among us because of our direct roles in the classroom and studio. Our program structure and commitment to delivering the curriculum promote learning in a community with teachers and students challenging and supporting one another in their investigations. We regularly teach across disciplines, especially with the sciences and humanities.

We promote and seek opportunities to engage our students in the larger community, collaborating with schools, organizations, governing bodies, and other institutions to learn, to teach and to create. At the same time, we encourage students to develop strong personal ideas and the skills and language to express them. We provide diverse cultural perspectives in our programs, with regular engagement with Asian, Latin American, Native American, Black and Latino artists and communities. We design programs that encourage students to put art and art making in the context of environmental stewardship and sustainability.