Colors, shapes, textures. Art. This is your vocabulary. This is how you communicate.

Or maybe you're fascinated by the history of art and its profound, lasting, and complicated impact through time and across cultures. And your love of art may translate not into creating it, but rather into teaching and enabling others to appreciate and gain access to art's riches.

At Southern, artists have abundant choices. All students receive extensive training in the fine arts. And with studio facilities that include gas, electric, and raku kilns, a full-scale print shop, up-to-date jewelry-making and darkroom facilities, students hone their skills in a supportive environment.

Art students can expand their studies by drawing from the rich array of courses in other University departments. Want to delve into computer technology? Explore video production? Learn the journalism part of photojournalism? Courses from the computer science, communication, or journalism departments are perfectly suited to your own individual career plans.

And with the only art history major in the Connecticut State University System, Southern students can immerse themselves in the theory and traditions of art, preparing for careers with museums, art galleries, and as art appraisers.

And you'll be in New Haven, home to numerous galleries, international arts festivals, and world-class museums where you can consider the works of masters like Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas, Warhol, and Sargent.

Art History

Studio Art

students explore sculptural principles of design and form, developing hand-building techniques and gaining experience in throwing on the potter's wheel, kiln firing, and raku.

students examine all the materials and techniques of the form, including figure and still life.

students expand on their fine arts training by mastering principles and techniques of advanced visual communication, working with contemporary and emerging technology in computer graphics.

students gain expertise in working with handwrought metals (including casting techniques) and in the design and creation of jewelry, from casting and forging to stone setting.

students work in water-based media and oils, examining an array of artistic directions.

students gain the technical skills and creative confidence to capture the world on film. Courses cover advanced darkroom techniques and such emerging technologies as digital photography and electronic darkroom software.

students explore the formal and expressive potential of woodcut, collograph, etching, silkscreen, and lithography in a progressive program that builds basic skills while giving artists a chance to push the creative limits of the medium.

graduates help others discover their creative potential. The program draws on the department's offerings in art history and studio art, giving the student depth, perspective, and technical expertise in various art forms. Students also take a rigorous professional sequence of courses in education and psychology.