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 Artist FUTURA2000 (right) in conversation with artist Carlos Mare (left) for an artist's talk at the Center for the Arts on North Campus in 2013).

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)

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.

"art involves everything" - eyes, ears, nose, mouth banner #UBuffaloArt.
11/8/21
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Fall Scholarship Opportunities Open through 12/8 for Art Students

Frances R. and Louis B. Morrison Scholarship

Evelyn Rumsey Lord Travel Award, Part I

 

Applicants will need to login to the UB Scholarship Portal, fill out the “General Application”, then apply for individual scholarships. Faculty references required for both of these opportunities.

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

Student work from Experimental Photography Art365.

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.
Sculpture installation with syringes.

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.
Arduino.

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 work from Nekita Thomas, MFA 2015.

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 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.
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.
Drawing by Foran.

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.
Graduate student in painting studio.

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.

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.

The Department of Art Statement of Acknowledgment, Inclusion and Equity

Events

Department of Art Events

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Center for the Arts Events
Buffalo Community Arts Calendar
UB Overarching Calendar

Future Students

Printmaking student in the studio.

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

  • 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
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Joel Brenden
    9/22/23
    Professor, Art Professor Brenden is a photographer, installation- and book-artist based in Buffalo. His photographs and other works explore themes of ecology and built environments, memory, and identity. He has exhibited extensively in the WNY region, and works as a book and publication designer.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Ilona Gaynor
    9/22/23
    Professor Gaynor's work spans photography, narrative texts, schemata, objects and film. Her work is drawn from the methods and histories of a wide range of research and disciplines: from design, architecture, literature, theatre and cinema, to the histories of labour, forensic science, risk management and insurance
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • T. Triandos
    8/11/22
    Visiting Lecturer, Art History; Visual Studies
  • 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.
  • 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.
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