Sculpture Program Overview - BFA
What is the future you wish to sculpt?
The Sculpture Program equips students with an expansive toolkit of technical, conceptual, and professional skills to craft sustainable lives and careers. We encourage students to explore the wide breadth of materials and approaches in contemporary sculpture.
The Sculpture faculty—Associate Professor Michael Asbill and Associate Professor Emily Puthoff—encourage an interdisciplinary approach and the Sculpture curriculum reflects the expansive breadth of media, techniques, content and contexts inherent within contemporary sculpture practice. They are active mentors and makers, fostering students’ diverse approaches and creative growth by engaging students in inquisitive research, technical skill development, regenerative dialogue, experiential and hands-on processes, and collaboration. Together, we cultivate a nourishing studio culture and community where students can explore ways of making and belonging while learning how to sculpt their sustainable lives and careers. We invite you to join our creative community of curious thinkers and bold makers to sculpt the future with us.
Students have ample opportunity to further their professional skills and research with internships and fieldwork projects within the abundant local art resources both in the Hudson Valley and nearby New York City. Similarly, students are uniquely situated within the context of a liberal arts university to inform their sculptural practice through other areas of study and art studio electives. The Sculpture faculty at SUNY New Paltz invite students that are willing to challenge the conventions and parameters of the field while articulating an individual vision through experimentation, inquiry, rigorous making, and risk taking.
The well-appointed Sculpture facilities encompass 10,000 square feet of studio space. Individual studio space and ample access to tools is provided for both MFA and BFA sculpture majors. The SUNY New Paltz campus is located 90 miles north of New York City and is proximate to other major sculpture sites including Storm King, Socrates Sculpture Park, Art Omi, DIA:Beacon, and Mass MOCA. The abundant local resources as well as an extensive Visiting Artist Lecture Series provide students with comprehensive access to contemporary art.
Sculpture students have gone on to successful careers as professional artists, fine art and furniture designers and fabricators, scenic designers for movies and theater, studio managers, business owners, curators, art preparators, professors/educators, illustrators, filmmakers, authors, and non-profit directors.
Undergraduate Curriculum
Courses are offered in installation, site-specific and situational sculpture, time-based media, kinetics and electronics, and sound, as well as traditional sculpture processes such as casting, welding/metal fabrication, and material investigations.
In Basic Sculpture, students build their foundational sculpture knowledge in woodworking, welding/metal fabrication, and casting/mold making to create conceptually evocative, formally resonant sculptures.
Following Basic Sculpture, students expand their technical, conceptual, and professional growth in our advanced sculpture courses. In these courses, students explore unconventional materials, installations, site-specific and socially engaged art, ecological art, casting and moldmaking, metal fabrication, collaboration, electronics, kinetics, and sonic art.
In the Contemporary Ideas in Sculpture seminar, students investigate the expansive field of sculpture by learning from contemporary practitioners and actively situating their work in relation to historical and contemporary theory and contexts. We hold the broad perspective that "everything is art materials, but not everything is art." Students are encouraged to expand their practice by exploring the myriad of ways of making that sculpture offers and by taking elective courses in the other studios: Ceramics, Metal, Painting/Drawing, Photography, Printmaking, Wood Design, Digital Design and Fabrication, and Theater: Scenic and Costume Design.
Artist Survival Skills offers students the practical, professional skills needed to successfully navigate their transition from their student to professional lives. Students are encouraged to deepen their professional skills and creative community by learning from internship and fieldwork opportunities locally and nearby New York City.
BFA students synthesize their research and creative work in Senior Studio 1 and 2, culminating in a thesis paper and exhibition of thesis work in the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art.
Check out the Sculpture BFA plan of study in the Undergraduate Catalog for more information.
