School of Visual Arts
The College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts was established as a professional school at Boston University in 1954. With a faculty composed of practicing professional artists, the school offers an intensive program of studio training combined with liberal arts studies leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), and Master of Arts (MA) degrees. Graduate admission is highly selective and limited class size ensures that students receive individual attention from faculty mentors.
Required undergraduate foundation courses offer an intensive foundation in the studio disciplines of drawing, painting, and 3D sculptural work, with emphasis on composition, color, form, and line. This broad base of experience provides students with a solid introduction to the visual arts disciplines before they elect major areas of specialization and prepares students for future study or professional practice in art education, graphic design, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Studio classes are limited in enrollment to ensure a high degree of student-faculty contact in the courses. Students are given the opportunity, through elective courses, to continue in other studio areas—printmaking, traditional and digital photography, book arts, ceramics, multimedia design, motion graphics, animation, and illustration—as well as in liberal arts studies.
At the graduate level, a faculty composed of leading practitioners challenge students to catalyze new work and fully express new knowledge. Students take part in and help create important creative communities toward sustaining their own successful and impactful lives in the arts. Graduate students learn field-specific histories reframed through contemporary practice and thinking. They make individualized work in the context of a larger community and for speculative future audiences, modes, and needs.
Visits from distinguished artists and lecturers as well as a widely varied program of exhibitions in the Boston University Art Galleries broaden and enrich each student’s educational experience. Student-run galleries—the Commonwealth Gallery and Gallery 5—provide undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to propose and present exhibitions. Professional development workshops and resources augment students’ courses and help prepare them for a professional life in the arts.
Facilities available include the Visual Arts Research & Resource Library, welding shop, wood shop, art education resource repository, and painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, artist book, and photography studios.
The intellectual and cultural resources of BU and other leading universities in Boston, combined with internationally renowned art museums, galleries, theatres, and orchestras, make for a stimulating, challenging, and inspiring environment. Students do not merely observe the Boston art scene, but work in the midst of it, redefining it with their perspective, vision, and energy.
