From Studio Art and Art History to Visual Practices

In 2023, Agnes Scott College, an independent, liberal arts, historically-women’s college in Atlanta with a diverse student body of around 900 undergraduates, dissolved individual departments in visual (studio/history) and performing (music, theatre/dance) art. Our former degrees in Studio Art and Art History became a concentration in our new Creative Arts department/major, which requires a common core, from introductory to capstone levels, and a series of discipline-specific courses.

We have remade ourselves as “Visual Practices,” a concentration that combines and infuses making and analysis in all classes and nominally signals its difference from traditional disciplinary separations and its iterative process, with necessary risk-taking, research, collaboration, and communication in the development of ideas, images, and objects. We have distilled the most significant techniques and content from our fields and the critical thinking and communication skills characteristic of liberal arts while also integrating career competencies and using our college art collection of global contemporary art. We believe this new format has fostered, in some ways, even greater success than our previous majors, as students more confidently position their work in historical and current discourses and demands; we are preparing to graduate our first Creative Arts majors in May 2026.