University Wisconsin Madison Campus University of Wisconsin River Falls Art Department

Opened in 1877 on the same spot where the current Science Hall now stands, the Quondam Science Hall included laboratories, lecture halls, section offices, and museum space. The building caught fire in 1884 and was completely gutted.

A combination of spirit and social dynamics has given the state of Wisconsin and the Academy their distinctive identity and grapheme. Some of this is readily traceable to life on the frontier during the country'south determinative years. Life was backbreaking and understandably elementary. The circumstances did not encourage any immediate flowering of the visual arts. The early on settlers regarded art every bit education—art as something to learn how to do or as a desirable enterprise for improving cocky-expression and evidencing qualities of gentility, peculiarly among women. In spite of the more pragmatic concerns of frontier life, the University showed a comparatively early interest in art. When Science Hall, the university's first major building synthetic since the Civil War, opened in 1877, it independent an art museum. Unfortunately, the gallery and the collection were lost when the building defenseless burn down and its contents were destroyed in 1884.

Portrait of William Varnum, Professor of Art from 1912 to 1946.

Although some courses in Latin touched on classical fine art and UW Extension offered art survey and art appreciation courses, the progenitor of today's Art Department began in 1910 when the technology section in the College of Letters and Science offered a "manual arts" program. The program was designed for students hoping to secure positions every bit directors and supervisors of transmission arts and vocational work in public school systems. The University's transmission arts curriculum included subjects with an industrial orientation such as mechanical cartoon, woodworking, and metallic craft. Additional courses embraced the more traditional freehand drawing and perspective, watercolor rendering, and pottery. By the mid-1920s, the plan had expanded into a department of industrial pedagogy and applied arts. The vocational aspects of fine art training were the primary emphasis, but courses as well were offered in drawing, painting, design, arts-crafts, and primary arts for teachers. After 1930, when the newly-established School of Education separated from its original home in the Higher of Letters and Science, it included a section of art educational activity. William Varnum, a design educator and member of the art kinesthesia for more than twenty years, served equally chair of the department.

Professor James Schwalbach looks at drawings from the WHA Radio programme "Allow'due south Draw."

As the section continued to evolve, its prior emphasis on vocational topics gave manner to a programme designed to familiarize the educatee with basic and avant-garde art practise, leading to the evolution of teachers and supervisors of art (drawing, painting, blueprint, commercial and professional fine art, and the fine art crafts) in public and private schools, teachers colleges and universities. However, the curriculum did include an additional accommodation for students not majoring in fine art education only who were interested in beholden or professional noesis of art theory and exercise through studio participation. By the end of the 1930s, the section began to offer a baccalaureate degree in applied art. The major emphasis of the art department through the 1930s and into the early 1940s connected to be in art education—grooming teachers to staff the high school programs around the state. A generation of Wisconsin schoolchildren took their art lessons past listening to the radio, specifically Professor James Schwalbach'south "Let's Draw" plan.

Professor Fred Logan

Change does not commonly happen quickly in an academic setting, but for Fred Logan, a relatively new member of the art education faculty, the earth turned topsy-turvy as far as pedagogy was concerned in 1946. Veterans returning from service in Globe War II, were eager to pursue their teaching through grants provided past the Grand.I. Nib. University enrollment swelled in all areas of the campus. The surge placed unprecedented demands on the University'southward physical and human being resources. Art was no exception. Those students who came to written report were more mature and enervating than those of previous generations. They were in a hurry to cease their teaching and get on with their lives.

Professor Alfred Sessler (heart) and Professor Robert Grilley of the Art Pedagogy Department with works for the 2nd Annual Summer Session Art Exhibition at the Memorial Matrimony.

Really, a sense of change had been building in the section. New faculty appointments indicated a trend which grew and eventually matured in the postwar years. Alfred Sessler, a graduate pupil who had worked on federally sponsored Public Piece of work for Arts Programs during the depression, received an engagement equally an instructor in the department on completion of his degree. Similarly, Arthur Vierthaler, who had considerable experience working with art metal but had no formal training in art education took over the courses of William Varnum, following his passing in the summertime of 1946. Shortly thereafter, Dean Meeker, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, arrived to teach courses in cartoon and painting. These appointments were followed past a wave of new faces, including Santos Zingale, John Wilde, Warrington Colescott, Donald Anderson, and Gibson Byrd. The presence of women on the art teaching faculty, begun earlier with the appointments of Della Wilson and Helen Annen, continued with Marjorie Kreilick.

Robert Grilley, Helen Annen, and Dean Meeker in 1952

The balance within the department began to shift from art instruction to applied art. The new faculty came with established records as emerging artists simply offered marginal credentials in traditional academic subjects. The new faculty selected to staff the postwar program were predominantly de facto artists-in-residence, people who brought with them a restless energy, creativity, and innovation. (Dean Meeker, for example, offered the first college course in serigraphy.)

Dean John Guy Fowlkes

Greater student need for studio-oriented courses meant increased enrollments for the school. Building a highly visible, quality program translated into increased prestige. School of Education Dean John Guy Fowlkes made sure the administrative environment was right to capitalize on the momentum. Fred Logan helped found the basis for a relatively smooth transition of accent from teaching teachers to cultivating the talents of potential studio artists. Although primarily an art educator, Logan recognized that the future of art at Wisconsin—and in the profession—would be in studio programs. The 1950s brought a broad and substantial expansion of the program. At the middle of the decade, the section conducted a self-assessment showing that from 1945 to 1955, the Department more than tripled its capacity to bargain with the enormously increased demands both from regular art majors and others requiring special art courses in their curriculum.

Students sit down on the steps of the Education building.

A substantial remodeling of infinite in the Educational activity Building to accommodate the growing programme proved to be a major boost for the department during the 1950s. The remodeling produced an exhibition gallery on the main floor, a new ceramics workshop, a model art classroom for teacher training, more spacious cartoon and design rooms, space for sculpture activities, enlarged art metal quarters, and expanded space and equipment for photography, lithography, serigraphy, and general crafts. A further enhancement of the bookish program came in 1957 with the approval of a Master of Fine Arts caste. Just over ii decades subsequently, in 1978, a like programme, the Bachelor of Fine Arts, was introduced to provide undergraduates better professional grooming in the studio areas of the visual arts than is possible in the existing B.S. programme.

A Wisconsin Alumnus Magazine article about Harvey Littleton, a "trail-blazing drinking glass-blower."

By the beginning of the 1960s, the present-day configuration of the art department program had been firmly established. The initial generation of kinesthesia who had established the studio art program was augmented past the appointments of Raymond Gloeckler in fine art pedagogy and relief printing, Jack Damer in lithography, and Walter Hamady, Phil Hamilton, William Weege, and Cavalierre Ketchum in graphic arts and photography. Harvey Littleton, who served equally department chair on ii separate occasions in the 1960s and early on 1970s, had come to teach ceramics only presently established the kickoff studio plan in art glass in the U.s.a.. This evolution had a meaning impact every bit the graduates of the Wisconsin program fanned out across the land to teach and to create their ain works. Similarly, Don Reitz gave new impetus to the ceramics program, while Hamady stimulated developments in the volume arts and papermaking.

An aerial view of the completed George Fifty. Mosse Humanities Building in 1970.

These developments were tempered by more applied concerns, however. By the finish of the 1950s, the increased growth of the programme was obvious and plans were laid to seek larger quarters and better equipment. In 1962, building committees were established in the department of art and fine art education, the history section, and the School of Music to ready plans for what is now the Humanities Building. Humanities, designed by Chicago architect Harry Weese in the Brutalist manner, opened in 1969. It provided the section with administrative offices, studios, classrooms, and a small gallery. For the outset time, at that place was enough space to offer each of the major components of the program—art instruction, two-dimensional studio art, three-dimensional studio art, and the graphic arts—their own separate areas. New equipment made it possible to offer instruction in land-of-the-art developments in the various media.

A structure of red steel beams and cables course a decorative entry to the outside of the Art Lofts edifice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The land-of-the-art facility houses teaching spaces for several fine fine art disciplines likewise as individual studio spaces for faculty and graduate students.

The programme grew and adjusted to changing times. The current curriculum, for example, embraces such relatively recent expansions of the concept of making art to include computer art, video, and cross-listed courses dealing with lighting, set up design, and sound design too as courses which deal with such topics as the social functions of art. A major addition to the Art Department came in 1987 with the establishment of Tandem Press, founded by faculty member Bill Weege. Built on a long tradition of excellence in printmaking at the university, Tandem Printing produces prints by nationally recognized visiting artists and offers students opportunities to learn well-nigh the artistic and economical factors that get into the operation of a major print studio.

In 2003 during Arts Dark Out, visitors to the 7th Floor Gallery in the Mosse Humanities Edifice adore a sculpture by art graduate educatee Chris Walla. The untitled eight-foot tall sculpture, fabricated of steel, forest and linoleum, was function of an showroom of Walla's work entitled Domestica.

In the early 21st century, the section acquired a foothold in a warehouse next to the Kohl Center for new ceramics, glass, neon, and papermaking facilities, a bronze foundry, darkroom and digital labs, a woodshop, graduate and faculty studios, a large performance space, as well equally a 2nd gallery infinite. Renovations were completed in 2009 and the Art Lofts opened for utilize, increasing the department'southward options for programming, art production, exhibitions, and education in the arts across a total of 160,000 square feet of dedicated space.

From a standpoint of public perception, mayhap the nigh tangible testament of the department's ongoing creative activities can be institute in the multitude of weekly educatee exhibitions which announced in the seventh floor gallery of the Humanities Building and the Art Lofts gallery each yr, and in the Art Department Quadrennial Faculty Exhibition, an event which has become a cotillion sampling recent work by current and emeritus faculty. The starting time comprehensive faculty exhibition was organized and presented in 1974 equally articulation venture of the Art Section and the Elvehjem Museum of Art (so known as the Elvehjem Art Center, now the Chazen Museum of Art) to assist celebrate the academy's 125th anniversary.

In many ways, the shows represent a periodic revisiting of the frontier. It is not so much a consideration of the borderland as a mural boundary, merely more an exploration of artistic potential. That standing exploration has become the primary mission of the Art Department.

-Adjusted from "Exploring Artistic Potential: An Informal History of the UW-Madison Art Section" by Arthur Hove, special assistant emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Source: https://art.wisc.edu/about/overview/

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