BFA - Painting in Ithaca United States | Cornell University

The Department of Art has unveiled a revamped B.F.A. program tailored for students who envision themselves as both creative practitioners and academic thinkers. This updated structure merges the art department's immersive studio environment with broader opportunities to explore electives across the university. Emphasizing cross-disciplinary connections, the department seeks to cultivate a generation of artists poised to become influential creative and intellectual voices. Students can design a personalized academic path to accelerate the development of a sophisticated artistic practice. The B.F.A. comprises two academic pillars: department-specific art courses (64 credits) and university-wide electives (56 credits). Studio foundations and seminars cover: Digital Media, Drawing, Painting, Photography, Print Media, Sculpture, Plus diverse specialized subjects. The initial three semesters feature six foundational studio courses (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, print media, and digital media) paired with an in-depth art seminar.

The curriculum exposes students to multiple technical approaches through thematic studies that foster conceptual, formal, and aesthetic exploration across conventional and innovative formats. Current focus areas examine modern challenges in spatial representation, cinematic storytelling techniques involving narrative construction, borrowed imagery, time-based elements, compositional framing, and dimensional relationships, as well as investigations into painting's material heritage, visual vocabulary development, and determining optimal production scales—from traditional canvases to immersive installations.