Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Department of Art is committed to educating its students as contemporary artists with a solid foundation in both traditional and current practice.  With in-depth core disciplines, we advocate interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to making art.  

We reach out to the campus, the community, and the professional art world.  Collaborating with other programs and organizations, we enhance our students’ education and seek to enrich the lives of those beyond our department by investigating new thinking and modes of expression for ourselves and others.  Centered within a major research university, we seek to interact creatively with the performing arts, humanities, and sciences.  We prepare our students to become active professionals in the creative economy of for-profit and non-profit arenas of the art world.

As a public university, we are dedicated to being a cultural resource for the citizens of the Commonwealth and recognize the inherent value of the visual arts as central to a dynamic nation. Diversity in all respects is vital to us as a creative community as we strive to build an inclusive faculty and student body.  We seek to develop in our students critical thinking, and skills as image makers and object makers that will equip them to realize their creative ambitions over a lifetime.