BFASculpture

Sculpture at CCA includes many disciplines and viewpoints. You’ll work with a range of complex materials as you study the medium’s role throughout history and contemporary culture. Compared to traditional fine arts programs, we’re much more experimental. From performance and installation to video and social practice, you’ll have the chance to try everything.

Cast in bronze and prototype with CAD software

Our unique curriculum emphasizes craft, critical thinking, visual and cultural literacy, collaboration, and social responsibility. You’ll learn that research and conceptualization are just as important as choosing the right materials and fabrication tools. Our facilities include ceramics studios, metal shop, woodworking shop, and model-making studio, help you work with every material imaginable.

Showcase your art in the Bay Area

You’ll have many opportunities to exhibit at CCA. We encourage everyone to organize solo and group shows, using our flexible installation spaces and dedicated student gallery. You’ll also make important connections with visiting artists and meet practitioners at nearby arts institutions, such as the Headlands Center for the Arts and Minnesota Street Project. These relationships can help you land assistantships and research roles right after graduation.

Chair Taro Hattori creates socially engaged installations that bridge “we” and “they,” the inside and the outside, through creative and generative actions such as singing and conversing. Hattori often focuses on personal and social challenges such as refugee experiences in the United States. Hattori’s work often incorporates music and conversations to balance social conflicts and harmonies, transform and explore human desire, and vulnerability and connections. Hattori has been a recent recipient of a grant from Creative Work Fund, Phyllis C Wattis Foundation, California Arts Council, Art Matters Foundation, and others. He has been awarded a residency fellowship from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the de Young Art Museum, Kuandu Art Museum in Taiwan, and others.

Our students graduate with a solid conceptual and historical foundation in sculpture. What truly sets them apart, however, is their broad material vocabulary. Not only do they have basic skills in many crafts, but also interdisciplinary skills that pull from furniture, glass, interaction design, jewelry and metal arts, textiles, and many other disciplines.