Congratulations to the Class of 2022!

5/19/22

We are so very proud of you in all that you have accomplished so far. We look forward to watching you go out and impact the world! Enjoy your future!

11/8/21

Visiting Artist Speaker Series

11/5/20

The Fall Visiting Artist Speaker Series brings important artists, designers, and thinkers to the University at Buffalo. (Hard Light by Stephanie Syjuco)

Welcome to Buffalo

11/5/20

Buffalo is New York’s second-largest city and has been home to many prominent artists, including Michael Zwack, Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Cory Archangel, Nancy Dwyer, Tony Conrad and Cindy Sherman. It was also home to Mary Burnett Talbert who helped to launch organized civil rights activism in America and to Serbian inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla.

Undergraduate Studies

4/28/20

The University at Buffalo’s Department of Art is housed within New York State’s premier public university. Our programs offer a unique convergence of contemporary art, technology, and critical discourse.

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The Department of Art at the University at Buffalo is dedicated to developing creative and academic skills in studio art, post-studio art, graphic design, aesthetics, critical theory, and art history. Since its founding, our department has been committed to shepherding innovative approaches and new practices. We empower our students to represent their unique visions within a contemporary cultural environment.

In Solidarity We Stand Against Racism and Offer Words of Support

We are all still reeling from the shock and anger of Saturday’s racially motivated hate crime against members of our Black community. Our thoughts are with the victims, their families and loved ones, and everyone in our community who is experiencing grief in this moment. It is difficult to put these feelings into words.

We strongly stand in solidarity with our friends and neighbors working on the front-lines of racial justice. As members of a university community -- educators, scholars, artists -- we are committed to building cross-cultural understanding and empathy across our communities. We value research and critical inquiry alongside listening, engaging and respect for all people as part of our learning process.

In this difficult time, we encourage you to reach out to your professors and staff for support if you are feeling stress, anxiety or just need to talk. In addition, UB’s Counseling Services are available for help and guidance and UB’s Intercultural and Diversity Center offers a safe space for all students.

Furthermore Theresa McCarthy and Luis Colón, Associate Deans for Inclusive Excellence in the College of Arts and Sciences, will host a student centered community discussion from 12-1:30pm today (05/17/22) via Zoom, see links below. This session will hold space for College of Arts and Sciences community members grappling with the impact of last weekend’s harrowing tragedy in our community. It is open to all students, faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences and facilitated by UB Counseling Services experts, Frankie Kraft and Alison Smith. The Zoom information is below.

This senseless tragedy impacts us all, and in order to move forward and stay strong please take care of yourselves and each other.

In solidarity,

Stephanie Rothenberg

Chair

Department of Art

Reinhard Reitzenstein

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Department of Art

Matt Kenyon,

Director of Graduate Studies

Department of Art

Mary Gordon

Art Department Administrator

College of Arts and Sciences Community Discussion:

Zoom Link: https://buffalo.zoom.us/j/93294041433?pwd=M3hnRDdnWjUzZ0RybTJ6U2Z4dy9TUT09

Meeting ID: 932 9404 1433

Passcode: 985189

MFA Student Highlight

2022 MFA Graduate Edreys Wajed describes working on his bronze casting that is a major component in his graduating thesis exhibition. The work is currently on display at the Burchfield Penney Arts Center in Buffalo, NY.

The Department of Art Statement of Acknowledgment, Inclusion and Equity

Areas of Study

Emerging Practices, Art and Technology

Explore and shape the future of art. Emerging Practices, Art and Technology
is a multidisciplinary studio practice that builds on knowledge of emerging technologies such as interactive multi-media, electronic installation, networked telematic communication, robotic art, three-dimensional simulation, biotechnology, and algorithmic image synthesis.

Graphic Design

Today’s digitally networked culture and industry demand increasing levels of visual literacy. Communication in the 21st century is an ecology of information, knowledge production, and visual rhetoric that shapes the way people understand our world.

Students with petri dishes of yellow liquid.

Biological Art

Coalesce: Center for Biological Arts is a hybrid studio laboratory facility dedicated to enabling hands-on creative engagement with tools and technologies from the life sciences.

Sculpture and Installation

The sculpture and installation program encourages students to investigate a multitude of methods, materials, and conceptual approaches. Students in this area employ a range of fabrication techniques and technologies to engage with the material, technical, aesthetic, and theoretical dimensions of contemporary sculpture practice.

Eight Caryatid Figures at the Albright Knox art gallery.

Art History

In today’s broad and immersive visual world, the Art History program is committed to studying the visual arts as tools for exploring and decoding culture.

snapshot of the recording screen of a video camera with a woman's head in the frame.

Performance

The currency of performance-based art lies in its capacity to be utilized in the most extreme, urgent, and quotidian of situations, incorporating live and mediated means.

Photography

Photography is concerned with producing creative artists and professional photographers who are fluent in a wide variety of photographic productions, techniques, and critical concerns.

Painting

Painting is continually evolving, producing an enormous variety of responses to philosophies and technological developments. These changes have always been part of the discipline, whether it meant moving from the frescoed surface to wood panels or from hand-mixed paints to digital techniques.

Drawing

Explore line, shape and form in a variety of mediums on a diversity of scale. Work in large rooms with skylights and spotlights at dimensions that are only limited by your imagination. Here, we explore everything from still-life and life drawing to anatomical and architectural drawing. Our award-winning instructors are here to help you refine and expand your skills.

Students participating in a critique of work in the print lab.

Print Media

Print Media students work in an atmosphere of intellectual exploration and investigation, with comprehensive print facilities for developing and refining their personal vision.

Future Students

Our student body represents a diverse cross-section of the nation and the world. As a small art and design school situated within one of the nation's largest and most comprehensive research universities, students get the best of both worlds.

Meet Our Faculty

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Millie Chen
4/8/20
Professor, Intermedia. Chen utilizes the subversive capacity of image making and non-visual elements like sound, scent, and participatory, collaborative modes of working to interrupt habits of viewing.
Livingston V. Watrous
4/8/20
Professor, Visual Studies; Art History. Professor Watrous’ interests include Aegean and Greek art and archaeology. He is particularly interested in iconography (mainly as it relates to Greek poetry) and the relationship between society, social institutions and art.
John Opera
1/12/21
Assistant Professor, Photography Program Head. In his photo-based work, John Opera combines a deep interest in the visual characteristics of natural and scientific phenomena with a rigorous experimental approach to the techniques and apparatuses by which photographs have been defined and produced.
Paul Vanouse
4/8/20
Professor, Program Head Emerging Practices, Director Coalesce, Emerging Practices. Paul Vanouse has been working in emerging media forms since 1990. Interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his art practice. His electronic cinema, biological experiments, and interactive installations have been exhibited in over 20 countries and widely across the US.
Becky Brown
7/9/20
Visiting Assistant Professor, Painting. Brown works between painting, drawing, sculpture and installation using found images, objects and texts. Diverse materials inform her practice, including pre-modern poetic forms, current headlines, photo-journalism and discarded appliances.
T. Triandos
4/8/20
Visiting Lecturer, Art History; Visual Studies. His work explores the politics of representation in art criticism during the late 20th century. In particular, he is interested in how struggles over the meaning of postmodernism during the late 1970s and early 1980s anticipate the culture wars of the coming decade.
Matt Kenyon
4/14/21
Director, Graduate Program, Associate Professor, Graphic Design; Emerging Practices. Kenyon’s work has been exhibited internationally and collected by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has received a number of awards including the distinguished FILE Prix Lux Art prize.
Victoria Udondian (Visiting Associate Professor)
8/30/21
Reinhard Reitzenstein
4/8/20
Associate Professor, Director Undergraduate Program, Sculpture Program Head. He works in several parallel areas: indoor installation and sculpture using cast, spun and welded metals, wood, glass, photography, digitally processed images; large scale drawings; outdoor tree-based installations and sound art.
Stephanie Rothenberg
4/15/21
Professor, Graphic Design Program Head, Graphic Design; Emerging Practices. Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems.
Shasti O’Leary Soudant
8/24/20
Visiting Assistant Professor, Graphic Design. Shasti is transdisciplinary artist, designer and writer. In her art practice, she uses a wide range of media and material to create immersive experiences
Adele Henderson
4/8/20
Professor, Program Head, Print Media, Henderson’s artwork has been exhibited in over 170 solo and group exhibitions across the US and internationally including Australia, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, and Slovenia. Her prints and works on paper are in the collections of a great many museums and institutions across the country.
Maximilian Goldfarb
4/16/20
Clinical Assistant Professor, Sculpture. Goldfarb is a maker of unsettled objects and soundscapes presented through methods of installation and transmission: Forms of production include books, object installations, site-based artworks, experimental architectures, and mobile radio programming.
Marc Böhlen
12/3/20
Professor, Emerging Practices in Computational Media. Artist-engineer Marc Böhlen / RealTechSupport delivers the kind of support technology really needs. His research focuses on two areas: public computational media and speculative robotics.
George Afedzi Hughes
4/8/20
Associate Professor, Program Head, Painting. George’s work involves painting and performance art, utilizing the turbulence of colonialism as a premise to highlight parallels between that violent history and contemporary global conflicts.
Berin Golonu
4/8/20
Clinical Assistant Professor, Visual Studies. Golonu’s research interests include Middle Eastern modern and contemporary art, Ottoman and Orientalist art and visual culture, art and environmentalism in developing Asian countries, and photographic histories of the Middle East.
Joan Linder
10/14/20
Professor of Drawing. Her large-scale images of quotidian subjects find inspiration from my immediate surroundings. Her resent project, Operation Sunshine, explores the toxic chemical and radioactive waste sites of the Buffalo -Niagara region.

SEE ALL FACULTY & STAFF

Department News

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Stacey Robinson and John Jennings bring back Black Superhero Ebon
5/2/22
Stacey Robinson and John Jennings, the duo behind the art collective Black Kirby, expand Larry Fuller's "Ebon" story this year.
Crystal Z Campbell earns 2022 Creative Capital Award
4/25/22
Crystal Z Campbell, UB's Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar, earns 2022 Creative Capital Award!
Matt Kenyon at Undercurrent Gallery in NYC
4/22/22
MATT KENYON /Wolf at the Door April 22 to May 22, 2022 Undercurrent 70 John Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11201
Berin Golonu published in Artforum
4/5/22
Berin Golonu published in April 2022 issue of Artforum magazine. In it she writes about photographer Serkan Taycan’s exhibition “Towards the City”.
Crystal Campbell, “Viewfinder,” April 22—May 14, 2022
4/5/22
Crystal Campbell, “Viewfinder,” April 22—May 14, 2022 at Buffalo Arts Studio
Mountains 2 Premieres at Torn Space Theater
1/31/22
Mountains 2 is a co-production of Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Torn Space Theater, UB Arts Collaboratory and MFA Alumnus Kyla Kegler, made possible through generous sponsorship from NYSCA and UB Arts Collaboratory.
Crystal Z Campbell wins Creative Capital Award
1/12/22
UB's CDI Distinguished Visiting Scholar was award a 2022 Creative Capital Award for her experimental film, performance, painting, and publication project entitled "Post Masters"
Amid/In WNY 2022 at Hallwalls
1/11/22
Amid/In WNY 2022 at Hallwalls includes a number of UB graduates along with our own faculty Becky Brown.

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Department Events Calendar

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