Whitman College is committed to providing an excellent, well–rounded liberal arts and sciences education. Study of the arts is designed as a liberating and freeing experience–freeing us from conventional thinking, sloppy reasoning, narrow–mindedness, prejudice, and mediocrity. This liberation encourages skepticism, questioning, searching for new ideas, new ways of problem–solving, and new ways of seeing things.
Art–making is an essential part of the liberal arts, for art is a wakening agent—a way of wrestling with and recording the great paradoxes of life and the inevitable struggles of the soul. It is one of the ways we examine and reexamine our values of truth, beauty, freedom, and justice. Art is not only one of the chief pleasures of human beings, it is indeed one of the things making us human.
The Whitman College art department, which two generations ago consisted of one faculty member who taught art appreciation courses as well as some drawing, now offers dozens of courses in visual art––drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography, book arts, and printmaking––as well as a variety of art history courses. Currently, professor and painter Keiko Hara and professor and ceramicist Charles Timm–Ballard, head a team of six art faculty who offer instruction in visual art, and an additional three tenure–track faculty comprise Whitman's separate art history department.
Each year over 500 students enroll in visual art courses. Many freshman and sophomore non–majors still must be turned away from full classes. Growing interest in the curriculum has been limited by the space available in the current facility, much of which is undivided and open, making it difficult for multiple classes to operate concurrently. More room is needed for instructional purposes, faculty offices and studios, student studios, displaying art in progress, safe welding and sculpture spaces, and soon-to-come digital art technologies.
A new stand-alone Center for Visual Arts is a bold acknowledgement of the critical role art can play in liberating the imagination. With the new Center, Whitman celebrates art-making as a way to find new perspectives, pursue happiness, and nourish the imagination and the soul.
A writer needs pen and paper.
A visual artist requires a studio.
When art students begin to find their own visual language, they must have the opportunity to ponder what they produce. Every artist must step back, or step away, from their work to have an insightful response to the image. An art studio space is essential for this type of reflection and imagination to take place.
–Mark Anderson '78, Walla Walla Foundry Owner
The prospect of Whitman having a new Center for Visual Arts spawns ideas of a seductive and dynamic space with flexibility to accommodate everything from the artist who paints in a Jasper Johns fashion to a large scale bronze casting. A new visual arts building would enable students and faculty to explore and create in an energizing environment that embodies the Whitman experience.
–Drew Pasek '97, Architect
Thomas Hacker and Associates (architects of Penrose Library and the Reid Campus Center) have developed designs for this important new facility that will meet our unique space and equipment needs, for general contractor Leone & Keeble, Inc. of Spokane, Washington.
You can help make the Whitman Center for Visual Arts a reality...
More than $15.5 million is needed for a facility that will accommodate our growth and nurture our students' interest in the visual arts. As always, the help of alumni and friends will be vital to the success of the project. Gifts of any amount are a meaningful gesture of support for this top College priority. We hope that you will consider an investment in this valuable resource. Major gifts to the facility can be made in honor of family members, artists, faculty, or friends who have inspired the artistic spirit.
Fouts Center for Visual Arts Pledge Form
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