9/12/22

The Fall Visiting Speaker Series brings important artists, designers, and thinkers to the University at Buffalo. (Artist Shantell Martin giving an artist's talk at the Center for the Arts on North Campus in 2017)

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.

11/8/21

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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.

Job Opportunities:

Hiring: Photographer/Instructional Support Technician

Applications are due by Fri. 5/19/23. For the full job description and to apply, visit: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/42155

The Department of Art in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo is seeking an Instructional Support Technician in Photography. This position is housed in the Department of Art with emphasis on serving the photo area. Duties and responsibilities are to supervise daily operations of the Analog Photography and Digital Imaging Laboratories, manage and maintain equipment and digital resources, purchase supplies, financial records keeping, and provide direct support for the education, instruction, and creative missions of the Photography Area and the Department of Art.

Behind the Scenes: Inside the Sculpture Studio

Students in Reinhard Reitzenstein’s Sculpture class turn simple pieces of plywood into works of art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Department of Art Statement of Acknowledgment, Inclusion and Equity

The Faculty and Staff of the Department of Art stand in solidarity with our LGBTQ+ community.

In March 2023 the UB student group “Young Americans for Freedom” invited Michael Knowles to speak on campus. While we support the right to free speech, and the respectful exchange of ideas from diverse perspectives, we are committed to the principles of social justice and ensuring a safe and welcoming community for all.

Discrimination and hate have no place in our society or on our campus.

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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Maximilian Goldfarb
8/11/22
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
2/13/23
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.
Shasti O’Leary Soudant
8/5/22
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
T. Triandos
8/11/22
Visiting Lecturer, Art History; Visual Studies
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.
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.
Millie Chen
8/11/22
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.
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.
Stephanie Rothenberg
8/11/22
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.
Kelly Myers Chunco
8/11/22
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.
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.
Ilona Gaynor
8/11/22
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.
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.
Crystal Z Campbell (Visiting)
8/8/22
Noah Breuer
8/9/22
John Opera
8/11/22
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.
Victoria Udondian (Visiting Associate Professor)
8/8/22
Victoria Udondian creates work that questions notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions in relation to her experiences growing up in Nigeria, a country flooded with cast off from the West. Her work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials.
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.

See all Faculty & Staff

Department News

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Professor Kenyon mentioned in UB NOW and Buffalo News
7/5/22
Professor Matt Kenyon mentioned in UB NOW and Buffalo News. In 2020, UB faculty member Matt Kenyon created “Alternative Rule,” a memorial to the school children who have been affected by gun violence.
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"

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