The Studio Art Program engages students in art making within the context of an undergraduate liberal arts education. Students will learn to use art materials and processes for creative expression. They will learn that their creative products have cultural, historical, and formal attributes, leading to an understanding of the relationship of visual arts to various disciplines and human practices. Throughout their coursework, their production will employ problem-solving skills and improve their perceptual, technical, aesthetic and conceptual abilities. The studio art major and minor will provide a foundation for students interested in pursuing careers in the visual arts.
Learning Goals
- Development of the ability to make visual art works of high quality. Success will be characterized by demonstrating creativity and innovation, gaining new art making skills, working through conceptual problems, and making formal decisions relevant to each media. Student creative development takes into consideration two different categories: (1) the progress of each student during an individual course, and (2) the progress over four years of the studio art majors.
- Development of the ability to evaluate one’s own artwork and the artwork of others. Success will be characterized by gaining an understanding of the vocabulary of art appreciation, using vocabulary to speak and write about art, and demonstrating a heightened sense of individual, social, and cultural awareness while participating in artistic evaluations.
Measures
- The first measurement tool is the scoring of Senior Capstone exhibits during the weeks immediately following Spring Break. Each member of the faculty evaluates the artworks, assessing their progress and growth over their four years at Kenyon. The assessment tool requires faculty to score the artworks in the Senior Capstone numerically from 1-6, with 6 representing the highest performance on the various traits identified in our learning goals. Conceptual development, art making skills, formal decisions, and incorporation of innovation are all factors that individual faculty members weigh as they assess each student’s growth.
In the oral portion of the Senior Capstone, the faculty assess the senior majors’ abilities to understand and to explain their art, placing their work in the context of their liberal arts education and in the context of the larger art world. The assessment tool requires faculty to score this portion of the Senior Capstone numerically from 1-4. When individual tallies are calculated and averaged, the respective scores determine awards of distinction, pass, or failing.
- The second measurement tool is “The Studio Art Program Student Opinion Survey.” Four groups of students are polled using this evaluative exit survey. These four groups are: current senior studio majors; current senior art minors, current senior non-majors who have taken more than two courses with us; and studio majors who graduated five years ago. This questionnaire asks for their reactions to the studio art program, their individual development as artists, and about the senior capstone. Students check responses from “excellent” to “very poor.” By tallying responses and then comparing year-to-year, the Department obtains a picture of how students react to the education they have received with us. There is also a final section of the form that asks for narrative responses. The core group — studio art majors — are asked to respond twice with a five year interval, providing an opportunity for immediate reactions as well as a more reflective response.
Feedback
The studio art faculty meet to analyze the data at the end of the academic year, discussing the results and making changes within the department if necessary, and making requests and addressing issues in our end-of-year report to the Office of the Provost as well.