May someone offer insight into the Visual Arts program at University of Chicago?
I would love to hear about quality of the courses, whether they have an experimental or traditional focus, & what kinds of opportunities there are to tap into Chicago’s art scene etc.
Thank you so much!
The art major at UChicago isn’t the same as a studio-intense BFA program (2/3 studio 1/3 gen eds) elsewhere. You graduate with a BA in art so only about 1/3 of your courses will count towards your major, although you can probably take more studio for your electives if you want and/or take advantage of the art history, theater arts, music, and architectural studies programs. While there are definitely studio courses (and, IMO, the stuff I’ve seen exhibited at Logan looked really cool), the major is going to be more intellectual and writing-intensive than it would be at a “typical” school of art/design. On the flip side, you will be exposed to some top scholar-artists.
UChicago does have an MFA program so there will be grad students on campus who are doing very specialized, studio-intensive work. The number of visual arts majors is quite small - not even 50 first or second majors - so you are likely to be interacting and even collaborating with MFA candidates and most definitely with the MFA Visual Arts teaching fellows. That can be a major advantage of the program.
Check out this link for more info; you can scroll down for specific course descriptions. The courses requiring ARTV 101-103 are likely to be more studio-based than the rest.
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/visualarts/
Also, check out the department’s website for faculty profiles, events, examples of artwork, etc.:
Chicago has an incredible visual arts scene, in large part due to the influence of the Art Institute - which, btw, has its own school of art known for a “thinky” and experimental curriculum and which, undoubtedly, has influenced the curricular focus throughout the Chicagoland area. Everyone is welcome to take advantage of the arts culture on campus and throughout the city. Some of the residential houses will also have a strong interest in the arts (though you don’t indicate a house preference on the residential form, they do try to place you where you have some things in common with others at the College). As a practical matter, there will be three dorms fairly close to Logan Center: BJ and South are the closest and Woodlawn, when it opens next fall, will only be a few blocks further east. All are on South Campus.
Finally, check out Logan Center itself:
https://arts.uchicago.edu/explore/reva-and-david-logan-center-arts
^ OP, here is another website concerning arts and artisitic opportunities at the University of Chicago:
Oh yes, and this: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/
My limited, vicarious experience is about a decade old.
A close friend – still a close friend – of one of my kids was a visual art major. He liked it a lot. That year, I think there were a total of 5 visual art majors, and he may have been the only one for whom it wasn’t a second major. I went to the end-of-year show for everyone’s BA portfolios. It was all avant-garde stuff, no one in that group was doing anything conventional (except that it was all pretty conventionally avant-garde for that moment).
The student in question found a niche for himself in the New York art world after graduation, by the way. He is a working artist; he got an MFA at Hunter College subsequently.
There is a ton of art stuff going on in Chicago, including lots on the south side where it’s much cheaper to live and work. Columbia College is a large, successful art school for all sorts of kids who want to be artists of various sorts, and of course the School or the Art Institute of Chicago is a great high-end BFA/MFA program, so there are tons of art students running around the city, and former art students living there. There are also lots of really rich people who buy art, which ensures that there will be a vibrant art community. The parts of the art community that are formally connected to the University of Chicago are minuscule, but that doesn’t matter much. If you are interested, it’s very easy to meet people and network, but by and large you would have to leave the UChicago campus to do that.
By the way, I think one of the perks you get as a student is free admission to the Art Institute – a really great thing. It’s a 20-minute bus ride from campus – when it’s free, you can go for a couple hours any time you want. If you are not familiar with it, it’s a true world-class institution, the best art museum in this hemisphere that’s not the Met or MOMA.
@JBStillFlying Thank you so much for all this information! It’s encouraging to see that there is a strong focus on writing and the concepts behind art – that’s exactly what I’d like to explore. Hearing about the collaboration with MFA students as well as more about the residential houses is very helpful. Thank you for the links too - I’ll be checking them out!
@JHS Thank you for all your information! It’s exciting to hear about the art scene in Chicago, and also very helpful to see that I would very likely be apart of a small group on campus as a visual arts major. Most surely, I look forward to visiting the museum if I get the chance to go to Chicago. 
@thestarfish , you might be interested in a bit of history of [sic] the history of art at UChicago:
Those studies were essentially inaugurated by two German emigres (Ulrich Middeldorf and Ludwig Bachhofer), who joined the Department in 1935 as refugees from Nazi Germany. They came to the University on the strength of a gift from a wealthy Chicago businessman and art collector, Max Epstein (McNeill, “Hutchins’ University”, p. 75). The Department has, I believe, always been a strong one since that time and always focussed on, in your words, “writing and the concepts behind the art.” That sort of focus on theory runs deep at the University and can be seen in many of its Departments (for example, Music). Nevertheless, something about art as a field of study makes you want to also experience it firsthand. That was true even for me, a no-talent wordsmith and visual ignoramus. Looking at and pondering or merely marveling at all the inspired or merely eccentric representations of human life made by artists is a good counterpart to hours spent pouring over words and pure concepts in the library. I always looked forward to trips to the Art Institute of a Saturday morning. There was a quasi-communal experience in those pilgrimages, given all the U of C kids to be found there. Not a bad venue for courtship, incidentally. (The same could be said for trips to Symphony Hall just across the street for matinee performances of the Chicago symphony on a Friday afternoon, at a price of $1.25 per ticket.)
There was at that time a free art rental program under which assorted works from the personal collection of an alumnus by the name of Shapiro were made available to us college students to hang in our rooms for a year. The value of some of those pieces must make this prohibitive nowadays (I had a print by Max Ernst one year, which, whatever its value, didn’t contribute much to the sweetness of my dreams during that year).
Perhaps the most beloved prof in the College of those years, Joshua C. Taylor, was a distinguished art historian who not only taught sections of HUM 1 and a class in the Philosophy of Art (kids were packed to the rafters in that class) but regularly conducted off-duty trips of anyone interested to the Art Institute and architectural walking tours of Hyde Park, the Loop and Oak Park (home of several F.L. Wright buildings). Taylor was also the author of “Learning to Look”, used in HUM 1, which went on to sell 300,000 copies. He himself left Chicago to become the Curator of the American Collection at the Smithsonian. He was as much a talismanic figure as a teacher - the embodiment of the intellectual life lived with passion.
This is all somewhat ancient history, but what is the study of art if not the study of ancient history? There are many shiny new facilities and programs at the University, but there is also a long tradition worth knowing something about.
@marlowe1
Wow! Thank you for the detailed description. It’s intriguing to hear about the origins of the department as well as the important role that the Art Institute plays within art education at UChi. It also sounds like Prof. Taylor would have been a wonderful teacher to learn from, if only he still taught there. Thank you so much, again!