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No sooner had Joyce Szabo taken over as chair of the Art and Art History Department last summer than she set to work on what became a two-inch-thick self study of the graduate program. A four-member outside review team that visited the department in October used the study and deemed it not only fit, but also an impressive example of making the most of meager resources. "The committee was astounded to find that the facilities which support a program which continues as an unquestioned leader in art and art history education are substandard when compared to almost any other art program, at any level in the United States," the review team wrote in its report.
Team members considered the Native American Art History and Modem Latin American Art programs to be the most comprehensive in the country. They noted that the History of Photography program is matched only by New York and Princeton universities. Such high
praise fits with U.S. News and World Report's third ranking of the studio photography program and seventh ranking of the printmaking program. Also this past year, in an effort to provide studio space for all graduate students, the department embarked upon renovation of the Mattox Building, a former automobile body shop near campus. Studios for sculpture students already take up the first floor and with a $250,000 appropriation, the department began upgrading electricity and heating and cooling vents on the third floor. “Depending on how much money we get next year, hopefully we can complete the third floor so that students can move in by mid-November,” says Szabo. The complete renovation will include studio space for photography, printmaking, painting and drawing students.
The department also is working to fill five faculty positions, including someone to teach electronic imaging, an increasingly important facet of the creative process. “We need to grow with the field and be able to keep up,” says Szabo.
The department’s Seventh Annual Graduate Student Exhibition, a juried show, ran through May 11 at the Jonson Gallery. This annual show not only showcases studio students, but also illustrates how effectively the department brings together the diverse nature of artists and scholars. Each interested art history graduate student writes about the work of a studio graduate student accepted into the show. “Combining art history and studio into one department is rare anymore, but we believe both disciplines benefit from the other,” says Szabo. “We work hard to make it work.”
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