DIRECTOR'S WELCOME


Visual culture encompasses far more than pleasing aesthetic experiences. The stakes are much higher than that. Embedded in the objects we make, and the messages that we construct, are entire constellations of belief and bias. Artists, designers, art historians, and art educators manifest through their work explicit understandings of our world and hypotheses for our place within it. The enduring qualities in art and design are never found on the surface, or in the materials. Its always about the intangible — the ideas. Art and design, stripped to its bare essentials, is a system for exploring the world, gathering information, and making meaning.

Our students will engage an ongoing cultural conversation that is both timeless and utterly new. While much is (and will remain) the same, new technologies and cultural/economic globalization are changing the world in profound and irreversible ways. They will find many challenges and difficulties, but also incredible potential and limitless possibility. There is mounting evidence that the 20th century's focus on the development of linear, sequential, literal skills is waning. In its place we see a growing recognition that the next generation of leaders will be distinct, and prized, for their ability to think in ways that are metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic. These are exactly the skills that our students in our School work at developing.

The School of Art + Design also enjoys the distinct advantage of being situated within one of the leading public research universities in the world. The University of Illinois campus was the birthplace of some of the most far-reaching cultural developments of the 20th Century. In the early 20th century this is where sound was first combined with film. And in the early 1990s the World Wide Web was born on this campus, with the development of the first web browser, called Mosaic.

This larger intellectual and creative campus community informs and energizes the work of both our faculty and our students. As we move further into the 21st century I expect the School of Art + Design to continue to attract and produce new generations of leaders in art practice, history, and education.

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Nan Goggin