Department of Art

"Pitstop" tour announced for MFA Thesis Exhibitions

Every Spring the Department of Art's second year MFA Candidates mount solo exhibitions of their work, as part of their thesis project, in fulfillment of their program requirements. The 2025 Cohort's tour of these exhibition echoes the title of their group theses catalogue, "Pitstop". Below are the details of these exhibitions, hosted off-campus, at galleries around the Buffalo region.

Community Sewing Workshop, with artist Amanda Browder

12/5/24

On December 3, 2024, the Department of Art welcomed artist Amanda Browder to the Atrium of the Center for the Arts, for a Community Sewing Workshop. More info here.

MFA Applications are Open

11/19/24

Come study at the top-ranked, flagship research university in the state of New York. The fully-funded MFA program in Studio Art is open for applications through Jan. 15, 2025, for Fall 2025 start.

Image: Edreys Wajed (MFA ’22) in his studio space in the Center for the Arts, preparing for his thesis exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. (photo by Meredith Forrest Kulwicki)

Misael Hernandez gestures towards handmade "Adobe bricks" in his artist studio, with his photographs mounted on the wall behind.

MFA Open Studios during Art in the Open

11/6/24

Art in the Open with MFA Open Studios took place Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. A big thank you to everyone who partook! Gallery of images here. Pictured: Studio of Misael Hernandez, with handmade "Adobe bricks" in foreground.

Students in Professor Joan Linder’s ART308 Drawing II: Material & Mark class did a body-scale mark making exercise. They laid out brown paper stretching from one side of the classroom to the other, and down the halls, and were encouraged to experiment with charcoal and full body movements in order to create marks. These images show students in the process of drawing on the large paper, and posing by their oversized finished works.

Classroom Showcase: ART308 Drawing II, 2/24/24

4/22/24

Students in Professor Joan Linder’s ART308 Drawing II: Material & Mark class did a body-scale mark making exercise, experimenting with charcoal and full body movements across paper on the classroom floor.

Visiting Artist Speaker Series

9/29/23

The Fall Visiting Artist 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)

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 Statement of Acknowledgment, Inclusion and Equity

MFA Artist Interviews in Studios

Film by Sudi Wang. More info here.

Areas of Study

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.

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. Coalesce offers multiple short term BioArt Residencies to visiting artists each year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Events

Department of Art Events

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Center for the Arts Events

UB Overarching Calendar

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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Julia Lillie
8/1/24
Julia Lillie is a Buffalo-based Art Historian. She specializes in sixteenth-century prints, illustrated books and maps made in Northern Europe, and on the ways these highly mobile objects created and disseminated knowledge in an increasingly connected world.
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.
Theo Triandos
12/18/23
Assistant Professor, Art History; Visual Studies Director, Undergraduate Studies, Art History
Crystal Z Campbell (Visiting)
9/22/23
Crystal Z Campbell (they/them/theirs) is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets — fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken.
Noah Breuer
9/22/23
Professor Breuer's creative work examines themes of family, identity, labor, and diaspora. Exploring the fusion of traditional printmaking techniques and 21st-century tools and technology is fundamental to his art practice. His current research investigates early 20th century domestic textile design in Europe and the legacy of Jewish-owned textile printing companies in Czech Bohemia and their role within that economic and cultural landscape.
John Opera
10/31/24
Associate 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.
Berin Golonu
10/31/24
Assistant Professor, and Area Head for Art History 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.
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.
Kelly Myers-Chunco
9/26/23
Kelly is a Buffalo, NY-based graphic designer with over 20 years of experience in art direction, branding, and print media. Her graphic design work has been published internationally, receiving several American Advertising Federation (AAF) Awards for art direction and design.
Abdi Osman
7/28/23
Professor, Art Professor Osman’s interests include questions of black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim and queer identities. Osman’s video and photography work has been shown in Canada and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions.
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.
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.
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.
George Afedzi Hughes
12/10/24
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.
Reinhard Reitzenstein
11/6/24
Associate Professor, Sculpture Program Head. Reitzenstein 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.
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.
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.
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.
Matt Kenyon
9/22/23
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.