The art program provides a wide array of courses for the major and for the non-major alike. Courses in many mediums are taught using both traditional and new media and technologies to provide both the breadth and depth necessary to ensure that the art experience at Presbyterian College is a rich and rewarding one.

The Art Department at Presbyterian College offers a wide array of courses for the major and non-major alike. For the liberal arts student, courses in visual art such as Art Appreciation, Basic Drawing, the Art History surveys, and beginning studio art courses such as Photography and Ceramics allow students to explore the relationships of art to their own experiences of the world.  An educated person will understand how overarching themes of the human experience, like love, death, and spirituality, find expression in the visual arts, and these courses provide a beginning context through which to understand this.  As with disciplines such as history, literature, and political science, the visual arts form a key component to the liberal arts and to an understanding of the human experience.

For the serious art student, a fundamentally balanced menu of studio courses and art history is provided to allow them to gain knowledge and experience the studio arts and history.  This menu will allow them to focus their energies in developing their talents in a chosen area.  Within the area of two-dimensional art, students gain insight and skills in the areas of drawing, painting, photography and graphic/computer design.  In the three-dimensional art area, 3-D design, sculpture and ceramics challenge student’s spatial manipulation and skill building with a variety of classical and contemporary mediums.  Art history courses develop both a historical and social contextual understanding of art production across time and cultures.

The art major currently has two significant tracks or areas of emphasis:  studio art and art history.  In the junior and senior years, students in each of these concentrations undertake a course sequence that includes junior project, junior seminar, senior seminar and senior show.  This sequence trains studio majors to develop professional habits, conceptual focus, and a strong portfolio prior to the capstone exhibition in the campus art gallery.  Students with the art history emphasis utilize the same sequence to learn critical research and writing skills, art historical methodologies, and research techniques toward the development of a final research project, which is presented publicly and then submitted as a documented research thesis.  Altogether, this series of upper-level, team-taught seminars serves to encourage personal, artistic and intellectual growth while fostering a close and supportive network among the members of the department.

In addition to courses offered in residence at Presbyterian College, the art department coordinates with the international study programs to grant credit toward the degree for classes taken during semesters abroad, in order that students can benefit from the wealth of artistic experience available in other cultures.  In addition, the Art Department conducts an annual field trip to a major city in the United States to visit important collections of art in museums and galleries.  Recent field trips have gone to New York City, Washington, DC, and Chicago.  The Art Department also plans several Maymester experiences in coming years, with one to England in May 2007.

Students who have majored in art at PC have gone on to do graduate work at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, Tulane University, the Chicago Art Institute, Savannah College of Art and Design, the University of Georgia in Athens, and the University of South Carolina.  These and others have gone on to pursue careers in teaching, graphic design, art auctioning, and historic preservation, among others.

The number of art majors continues to grow.  The Art Department looks forward to the construction of new facilities and expanded programs to meet the ever-changing and growing needs of talented students in the visual arts areas.

The art department is led by three full time faculty and several capable adjunct professors:

Mark Anderson (MFA UT Knoxville) has taught all levels of painting, drawing, Media and Society, art appreciation, art history, and advance junior and senior seminars for over 20 years and has exhibited his works at the Las Vegas Museum of Art as well as in galleries and museum throughout the region. His work received favorable mention in the New Art Examiner where he was described as a painter of international importance.

Ralph Paquin (MFA Cranbrook) has taught ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and advanced junior and senior seminars for seven years full time and six years prior to that as an adjunct. He has shown widely and earned favorable critical acclaim from the critic Donald Kuspit in a lecture several years ago on contemporary ceramic sculpture.

Dr. Laura Crary (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh), the most recent addition to our department, has taught art history survey, Renaissance art, Baroque and Romantic art, Modern art, women in art, contemporary art theory and criticism, and Latin American art history for three years. She has presented papers and chaired symposia at the CAA annual conference.

The professors are surrounded by capable adjunct teachers in design, graphic design, art education, and photography. These adjuncts are professionals in their respective fields, doing the very thing they teach students to do. The combination of many years of experience, ongoing commitment to professional careers, and a proven sense of calling to undergraduate education makes these professors stand out as truly gifted and capable faculty, able to guide young students toward a bright future in the arts.

The number of art majors continues to grow. We look forward to the construction of new facilities and the approval of new programs to meet the ever-changing, ever-growing needs of a talented group of junior and senior art majors.