Our BFA program provides lots of space to experiment and explore. You choose the coursework, faculty, and facilities that interest you and support your artistic development. Build a personally and intellectually rewarding course of study that fosters technical skills and critical thinking, and immerses you in a supportive, collaborative creative community. Visual and Material Studies (VMS, formerly Visual and Critical Studies) is a cross-disciplinary department bringing together faculty from the related fields of Art and Architectural History, Film, and the Language Arts. Since its creation in the 1980s, VMS faculty have developed curricular offerings to complement artists practices by focusing on the social contextualization of material culture. Course offerings expose students to varied histories, aesthetic theories, and methodological approaches, thereby encouraging in-depth analysis of a broad range of visual works. In these classes students explore the relationships between makers of art, spatial constructs, audience, and the contexts in which visual culture circulates. VMS course offerings span introductory as well as more focused, seminar style, in-depth approaches to evaluating visual practices across the humanities and social sciences. VMS faculty's expertise underscores a pluralistic approach to placing images, objects, and sites within global perspectives that explore alternative literacies, post-colonial visual practices as well as issues of race, identity, and gender materialized in the visual arts.