From Word to image: Christian colleges expand visual art programs
At Boston College this spring, senior Pierce Keegan found something he’d been missing: a visible connection to his older sister, Marina, who died in a car accident five years ago.
But the economics major didn’t discover it in this Jesuit school’s chapel, theology classes or faith groups.
He found it in “Digital Diaries,” a photography and graphic design course that’s part of a wave of expanding visual arts programs on Christian college campuses nationwide.
Inside a new classroom custom-tailored for digital arts, Keegan created “Echoes of My Mind,” a book made from online images and Photoshop. A two-page spread shows a broadcast tower shouting a wavy line of text in Marina’s voice.
She used to say, “‘Radio waves go on forever, so I’m going to go to a radio tower and scream my name into space, and that will be my lasting work,’” said Keegan, who describes himself as nonreligious. “I wanted to capture the permanence.”
Over the past decade, more than 85 Christian colleges and universities have added new degree programs in the arts, according to data from college associations. At least 10 have introduced new degrees specifically in visual arts since 2012. Some have also hired new visual arts faculty, expanded studios, added galleries or opened museums. A few examples:
Last year, Southeastern University in Lakeland, Fla., a Pentecostal school, launched painting and drawing classes, a 1,600-foot studio and a student art gallery ahead of a new bachelor of arts in visual arts program that debuts in August.
The University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, created 10 new faculty positions in visual arts since 2007, and enrollment in art courses has climbed from 250 to 1,000 per year over that period.
At Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, Calif., another Pentecostal school, a new Master of Arts Education degree will begin this fall with support from a new, dedicated $4.5 million endowment, and four more visual arts degree programs are in the works.
Though offered at Christian colleges, many of the new classes aren’t necessarily producing art that’s explicitly Christian – or even religious. The idea is to give students, who might or might not be people of faith, a medium where they can explore whatever is meaningful to them. Only one of 12 students in “Digital Diaries” said she had made something remotely religious. Her image of water approaching a horizon was meant to be spiritual, she said.
With new investments, Christian schools aim to equip graduates for an image-saturated world in which jobs, ministries and social networking require visual literacy and competence. Students, meanwhile, are using the arts to explore who they are, what they believe and where they fit on America’s diverse religious landscape.
“People are realizing that we are visually inundated in a visually mediated society through advertising and film – that’s how we’re communicating all the time,” said Kimberly Kersey-Asbury, the first tenured art professor at St. Anselm College, a Catholic school in Manchester, N.H. “Students are now learning to think critically about the visual messages that we’re consuming.”
