Hello! Hei! Goddag! Ahalan! Nei Ho! Guten Tag! Shalom! Ciao! Kon-nichiwa! Hola!

It is our pleasure to welcome you to an exciting future in the visual arts: an exploration of personal and professional growth within a beautiful setting of a new studio arts facility with advanced technology, an exciting faculty, and an inspirational community of national and international undergraduate and graduate students.

The Department of Art and Visual Technology’s primary purpose is to foster the conceptual and technical education of the artist in a highly professional and studio-oriented environment. Believing that the artist's success is dependent on both creative vision and technical expertise, the department encourages excellence, critical inquiry, and experimentation.

Through our broad range of courses in studio and digital art and our complementary program in Interdisciplinary Arts, we offer you the resources to stimulate your creative and critical growth. Add to that our visiting artists, internship opportunities, campus art galleries and exhibition programs, lecture series, and free tickets to world-class performances at Mason’s renowned Center for the Arts. Beyond our on-campus resources, you can travel to New York via the well-known ArtsBus program and take advantage of international libraries, and the collections and exhibitions of many of the world's finest museums in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding metropolitan area. All of these opportunities contribute to the variety, the challenge, and the resonance of the educational experience in AVT at Mason.

Graduate and undergraduate students and a superb faculty of artists and scholars work in close proximity, sharing resources and establishing a forum for critiquing and refining technical abilities and conceptual concerns.

As we look forward to opening our new studios, exhibition facilities, and classrooms in fall 2009, we know you can look forward with enthusiasm toward a lively and stimulating environment that facilitates the exchange of ideas among students at all levels.

Sincerely yours,
Harold Linton, Chair
Department of Art and Visual Technology