Department of
Art and Art History

Art is an Essential Part of the Human Experience

Art-making is one of the many means of expression that humans engage with to understand and interpret the world around them. Community based art education is a collaboration between students and their teacher, tailored to the students’ needs. CSU art education students and teachers craft meaningful visual art experiences for students throughout Fort Collins. 

Winter 2019/Spring 2020

The visual arts evolution at CSU

The evolution of Colorado State University’s Art and Art History department is tied to the space it is housed in. At first, art classes were held in Old Main and all across campus. But since 1974, the Visual Arts building has housed all disciplines from art history to printmaking to electronic art. The painted cinderblock functions as a blank canvas for students, faculty, and staff to create art and is a place to work, learn, create, collaborate, and grow.

Spring 2019

Technique and Technology In Art

Technology has always been fundamental to the crafts which are rooted in the use of some tool. The Greek root tekhne— an art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing — is about systematizing, standardizing, and organizing. For Del Harrow, associate professor of pottery, throwing on the wheel is about practice and a development of skill, repetition of movements, and involvement in a kind of ritual practice.

Winter 2018

Connected by Water: Semester at Sea illuminates our cross-cultural connections

Eleanor Moseman, associate professor of art history, studies the role women artists play as cultural producers. Her experience teaching on Semester at Sea brought a global comparative element to her courses Intro to Visual Art and Women in Art History, encouraging students to compare art in Spain, Japan, and Ghana.

Spring 2018

Curiosity, Generosity, and New Knowledge

From electronic art to silver mining in Bolivia, the German Enlightenment to Congressional productivity, our faculty are able to extend their research based on donor support from Great Conversations.

Collaboration, Contemporary Discourse, and A Golf Course

Art galleries are not usually the place people go to play mini-golf. That is, unless the gallery in question is the Hatton Gallery in the Visual Arts building. The interactive show, called “Mulligan,” was put together by CSU art department students and the experimental design studio Zero-Craft Corp.

Winter 2017

CSU alumnus’ sculpture chosen for U.S. embassy in Netherlands

The colorful new 30-foot-high sculpture emerging from a water feature at the new U.S. Embassy building in The Hague was created by alumnus Pard Morrison.