Art & Art History
Department

Welcome to the Department of Art and Art History

Our Mission:

The Art and Art History Department provides a diverse, collaborative, and integrated curriculum in studio art, art history, and art theory. Our program forcefully models an interdisciplinary liberal arts mission, and department members share a common philosophy that studying the making, analysis, and history of art are inseparable endeavors.
In an increasingly visually complex world, we need to understand how the visual aspects of our world affect our actions, our interactions, and our understanding. The department’s central goal is to expose students to creative and intellectual activities that will help them become thoughtful producers and consumers of visual media.  In our department, students and faculty work through visual problems, study past and present visual cultures, and join in art production in order to connect concepts and ideas to analysis and practice.  Our offerings appeal equally to the intellect and the senses, and our curriculum is designed to be accessible to students of all interest levels.
One goal of the art major is to produce professionals in both studio practice and art scholarship. In a broader context, we also prepare students for other careers in the arts, as well as a wide range of professional and personal activities for which visual literacy is a central component of both production and interpretation.  Finally, we instill appreciation in those for whom art is simply a pleasurable and meaningful component of a full life.  By exploring the visual world at St. Mary's College of Maryland, students can shape that world throughout their lives.

Painting Workship with Artists-in-Residence Lois Dodd and Elizabeth O'Reilly

Students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and artists in the community will spend a day painting along side Lois Dodd and Elizabeth O’Reilly. The workshop will be conducted outside in the landscape of the college and Historic St. Mary’s City. Through observation and one on one interaction with the guest artists, students will learn their unique processes and techniques of painting from life. The workshop will continue into a screening of the film Lois Dodd: Maine Master (May 29), and then a second day of in studio critiques followed by the film Elizabeth O’Reilly: An Artist Abroad (translated from the Gaelic: Ealaiontoir Thar Saile) (May 30). All students are expected to bring their own materials and are invited to bring older work for review. More information here (pdf)

Painting
 Workshop:
 May
 29
 and
 May
 30


To
 Register
 email Carrie 
Patterson 
at
 ccpatterson@smcm.edu 
(limited
 to
 25 attendees)


Be sure to check out our Current Opportunities page for information on internships, exhibition opportunities, workshops, grad school programs, and more!