Art, Creative Writing, Music/Arts, Theatre/Arts, Arts Administration: Art/Art History, Arts Administration: Music, Arts Administration: Theater

The Arts
At UMF we challenge students to look beyond the traditional categories of art, music, theater, and creative writing as they engage the changing role of arts in the 21st century. Our students make guerrilla art to exercise political ideas; compose music for electric guitar, laptop, and string quartet; write and direct their own plays; and give public readings of their own poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Our students make work that cuts across disciplinary and cultural boundaries such as opening a gallery in Second Life; improvising a work for instrumentalists, dancers, and actors; creating animations about the economy; springing a theatrical “happening” on campus; or collaborating with other musicians, artists, and actors to create a short film.

The department of Sound Performance and Visual Inquiry encompasses the Studio Arts (digital sound, video, print and animation, painting, drawing, sculpture and combined media); Art History, Theory and Criticism; Theater (acting, directing, playwriting and technical theater) and Music (composition, philosophy of music, performance). In our Arts Administration programs, students become arts entrepreneurs and community organizers as they combine the arts with a keen business focus. This leads to internships and jobs such as managing an art gallery, promoting regional semi-professional non-profit theatres and their work, or working in music management. Our classes are based on a concept-driven education and include explorations in areas such as Digital Animation, Fundamentals of Acting, Electro-Acoustic Music, Improvising Music, and Contemporary Japanese Film.

The Arts also include our renowned Bachelor of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Creative Writing majors at Farmington study poetry, novel writing, short fiction, writing for the stage and screen, journalism, magazine writing, literature for children and young adults, and nonfiction, which includes such forms as memoir and the personal essay. Our writing apprenticeship program means that every student who graduates with a BFA in creative writing gets hands-on experience in a field related to writing or publishing, and our lively student Writer’s Guild, campus literary magazine, and Visiting Writers series means we have a lively campus writing community.

Lastly, some students create an individualized major (Theater and English, Music and Writing, Art and Sociology), or a multidisciplinary program around a concept (Technology and the Arts or Performance Across the Arts). Rather than limiting graduate study, employment or options, distinctive majors help students stand out among their many peers with traditional degrees.

All of these programs are based on our belief that learning in the arts is not about the accumulation of a series of courses, but challenging each student to develop his or her own individual voice in dialogue with a community of supportive peers and faculty.