Skills You’ll Learn

The academic course work required to earn your undergraduate degree includes program requirements set by the Department of Art and by University Common Requirements (known as UCORE) set by the College of Arts and Sciences, the WSU provost, and WSU registrar.

The UCORE program helps you learn transferable skills and develop intellectual and civic competencies beyond the focus of your degree. With dozens courses available across six categories, you are sure to find interesting options that complement your major programs of study and add value to your career potential.

Student Learning Outcomes

For the BA in Art (studio) and the BFA degree programs

Creative Process

Develop a range of innovative, challenging and creative approaches to art making through rigor, skill, and exploration:

• Demonstrate a disciplined approach to their working process in order to bring projects to resolution and meet deadlines.
• Display technical skills appropriate for resolving particular projects or areas of concentration/interest.
• Challenge themself through trying new and undeveloped ideas and processes.

Depth of Thinking

Push beyond obvious content and concepts to embrace complexity and depth through historical context, contemporary understanding, critical evaluation, and curiosity:

• Demonstration of a general knowledge of art history, artists/art movements on his/her work.
• Able to convey they are informed artists by understanding global contemporary art process and concerns and how these processes inform and influence their own work.
• Able to critique and/or analyze their own works and the works of others using appropriate art vocabulary and concepts.
• Demonstrate a willingness to explore multiple, diverse, divergent or even contradictory ideas as well as the ambiguous gray areas between.

Professionalism

Display professionalism in the presentation of the art and themselves through communication, presentation, and receptivity:

• Exhibit an ability to articulate their own artistic production in written, spoken and visual form.
• Demonstrates intentionality, thoughtfulness, and awareness of conventional best practices with presentation of works.
• Demonstrate an openness to applying suggestions from diverse viewpoints.

For the BA in Art, art history specialization

• Develop a working knowledge of major artistic traditions.
• Demonstrate critical reasoning skills and analysis of visual objects through use of art historical tools.
• Able to conduct disciplined and systematic art historical research and evaluate critically information and sources.
• Develop the ability to move between visual and verbal (oral and written) forms of communication when analyzing and discussing works of art.
• Develop ways of thinking about themselves and the world.
• Recognize, explore, and challenge cultural attitudes and stereotypes, thereby enabling greater appreciation and respect for the variety and range of art and cultural differences.
• Develop a historical understanding of art works and artists’ practices within social, cultural, political and economic contexts, and with an appreciation for the ways that artists mediate issues within these contexts.