Art asks us to focus on technical, aesthetic, and critical themes. It invokes response, recalls emotions, draws on memory, and encourages us to act. When we exhibit ourselves through creativity, we incite motion in the mind and soul.

Why study Art at Sewanee?

At Sewanee, you’ll have the opportunity to choose from six different disciplines in the art program: digital arts, drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and video. Study documentary, motion, color, material, landscape, and much more.

As an art student at Sewanee, you’ll finish the major with a comprehensive examination that includes the preparation and presentation of a portfolio, participation in a senior exhibition, writing a thesis paper, and undergoing a defense of the portfolio and thesis.

First Destinations: Art Majors

Sewanee graduates secure positions in a variety of fields. Some you would expect, others are a bit of a surprise. Sewanee prepares you for your profession and your passion. Below is a sampling of recent graduates' first jobs.

  • Therapeutic childhood specialist, Helping Hands Home for Children, Austin, Texas.
  • Editorial assistant, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
  • Director of advanced media, South Kent School, South Kent, Connecticut.
GRADUATE SCHOOL & PRE-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMS: ART MAJORS

Sewanee graduates enjoy extraordinary acceptance rates to top graduate and pre-professional programs–about 95 percent to law school and over 85 percent to medical school. Below is a sampling of where Sewanee grads continue their education.

  • M.A. in clinical mental health counseling, Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas.
  • J.D. Samford University Cumberland School of Law, Birmingham, Alabama.
FELLOWSHIP IN THE ARTS

Students with exceptional promise in performing or studio arts can apply for a Fellowship in the Arts. These fellowships range in value and are renewable for four years.

Chronicler of Loss

Nearly a half-century after leaving his native Tanzania, Sewanee Art Professor Pradip Malde returned—with a big camera and a Guggenheim fellowship—to document lives affected by a widely condemned but culturally entrenched surgical practice.

In March 1970, Pradip Malde, now a member of the art faculty at Sewanee and an internationally acclaimed photographer, left his family home in Arusha, Tanzania, to return to the elite Anglican boarding school in India where he and his younger brother were students. The Malde family enjoyed a comfortable life in Arusha, a place he describes as a cosmopolitan town with a rich cultural and social life among the Anglo-Indian elite of the place. Malde attended an Anglican school in Arusha before being enrolled in 1969 at St. Paul’s School in Darjeeling, India, an international school in the Himalayan foothills that traces its origins back to the British East India Company—the predecessor of the British Raj. Only when he and his brother traveled to Bombay (now Mumbai) in November 1972—the first leg of a planned trip back to Arusha—did he get the first inkling that something had changed.

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A Sampling of Courses

Art

Programs of Study & Related Programs

Requirements for the Major & Minor in Art

Requirements for the Major & Minor in Art HistoryWebsite

Requirements for the Minor in Film Studies | Website

Meet some professors

Contact

Jessica Wohl
Associate Professor of Art; chair of Art, Art history, and visual studies

jewohl@sewanee.edu

Studio Art Building 109, Ext. 1256

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