Randall Lavender reflects on the value of a strong Foundation Program in the study of Art and Design

Many students today look to the United States for higher education in the fields of art and design.  If you are among them, you face several challenges in choosing the school or program that best suits your goals.  But there is one way to assure a truly empowering education: seek solid ground.  By that I mean that you should look for institutions that offer a strong Foundation Program. 

Colleges granting B.F.A. degrees in art and design often organize curricula around one of three models: expression-based, trade-based, or foundation-based.  Schools whose approach emphasizes students' expressive inclinations focus on the notably experimental and, sometimes, personal nature of student work produced within their programs.  Students in this kind of setting are often encouraged to explore widely, even within specific courses and/or project activities. 

Institutions adhering to a more trade-based approach tend to teach from the top down - that is, they train students in the professional standards of a discipline.  Students enrolled in programs based primarily on standards of professional practice often learn specialized technical and field-specific skills in preparation for entry into various art and design 'trades.'  A foundation-based approach, by contrast, empowers students from the ground up by establishing a solid base on which further, more specialized, study can successfully build. 

While it may be tempting to 'go with the flow' in an expression-based setting, or learn 'tricks of the trade' in a top-down training program, it is most advantageous for first year college art and design students to develop a strong foundation of fundamental skills before moving toward more advanced or professionally oriented challenges.  Colleges that provide Foundation Programs in art and design are built to provide just that kind of learning groundwork. 

A well-conceived Foundation curriculum will foster the perceptual, thinking, and making skills that you will need to advance smoothly in the more specialized major degree tracks.  Perceptual skills you will develop include recognition and understanding of such visual phenomena as the interaction of color, spatial perspective, and measurement of proportion by observation.  Your thinking skills can be expanded in several ways, including by developing skills of rational, intuitive, and critical analysis.  Finally, making skills help you manipulate various media, tools, and image/form/meaning construction systems so you can create well-resolved responses to visual problems. 

Foundation courses such as Drawing & Composition, Color & Design, Life Drawing, and Form & Space can guide you through diverse creative challenges intended to build basic skills used by all artists and designers.  Foundation instructors often link these challenges in sequential order within courses so that each new learning task advances previous lessons learned.  A strong Drawing & Composition sequence, for example, might include learning 'steps' such as how to use perspective to organize pictorial space, or transparency to reveal interior structure in drawn images, or cross-contour marking to articulate planar transitions in pictorial illusions.  In a Color & Design course, you might progress from the study of line as a design element to the use of negative and positive shapes, grid systems, or serial relationships as organizing principles for composition and expression.  Life Drawing presents the human figure, arguably one of the most complex organic forms, as a basis for sustained visual analysis and indication of gesture and anatomical structure.  And a Form & Space class teaches three-dimensional design involving interactions of physical and implied forms with the spaces that they occupy and activate around them. 

But why shouldn't a student jump ahead - skip the fundamentals - and move straight to more specialized training?  After all, if you're hoping to someday become a fashion designer or a fine artist, why not start right out working on problems of contemporary fashion design or painting, as soon as you enter art/design college?  Some artists and designers who teach in college programs would argue that you should do just that, hoping that by exposing you as quickly as possible to the particulars of their fields, they can better enable you to participate in those fields yourself.  At first glance, this might seem to make sense.  But you would be wise to remember that across all the special fields they work in, the things that artists and designers do are actually quite similar.  All artists and designers rely on a set of commonly recognized principles, phenomena, and technical means that are often best learned through focused Foundation study.  In other words, there is a set of fundamentals, or underlying aspects, of art and design that remains constant regardless of potential professional application.  These can and should be studied as a subject in themselves.

To understand why, consider the following question:  If two complementary colors are used in a garment design, a painting, or a digital graphic, are they any less complementary?  You're right - they're not!  Yellow and violet always interact in the same ways as color complements regardless of the medium, field, or the market in which they are used.  But how can you best learn color theory?  Where will you best learn one-, two-, and three-point perspective?  A good Foundation Program will focus your first year of art/design study on the rich set of visually- and culturally-constructed systems, principles, and methods that underlie all art/design activity.

Does this mean that taking field-specific courses and projects is in some way bad for first year college art and design students?  It does not - if they are offered as additional Elective opportunities that parallel core Foundation instruction.  In the best of all worlds, then, Foundation students would choose a specialized introductory course as part of a strong first-year program.  Such a Foundation Elective adds value to your first-year studies by providing an important bridge to the area of special interest that may later become your major concentration for the B.F.A. degree. 

Another way a Foundation Program can serve your long-term development as an artist or designer is to integrate art and design studio activity with Art History, English, or Critical Theory courses in ways that more specialized, purely professional, or expression-driven training often cannot. 

That is because a Foundation Program is just that - a program - organized especially with first-year art and design students in mind.  A programmatic approach to foundational learning allows faculty from the liberal studies to coordinate and share curricular material with your studio instructors, and vice versa.  Coordination of this kind between diverse first-year courses supports your process of integrating the multitude of ideas, points of view, and working methodologies that you will encounter throughout your art school experience.

So, in choosing a college for art and design study in the United States, look for an institution that offers a strong Foundation Program.  Such institutions can be identified by searching catalogues and view-books for first year art/design curricula that include the following features:

• Required core introductory courses in Two- and Three-Dimensional Design, Drawing, and Life Drawing
• Evidence of sequential learning in descriptions of required first year courses
• Elective courses for first-year students in areas of specialization such as Painting, Sculpture, Digital Media, or Graphic Design
• An integrated platform of studio, Art History, and Liberal Studies courses for first-year art and design students
• Supplemental course offerings in the first year that focus on general concepts and issues such as creative practice, integrated learning, or materials and methods

Finally, your search for the right art/design college or program will not be complete until you find an educational setting that includes compelling student work.  Be sure to note your responses to this aspect of each school as you evaluate it.  The ones you consider should all proudly display student work produced within the areas of instruction offered.
 
If you keep these points in mind, you will find that your path through college art and design can grow from a base of core studies for life-long learning.  And you can launch your future career from solid ground.

Randall Lavender is Associate Chair of the Foundation Program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Randall has exhibited his paintings internationally, and has published several recent articles on art and design in higher education