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- I think that Silas Rhodes always had a view of the art
in a larger context of society.
- It's through the history of a discipline that you can
begin to have a conversation with the past.
You find that out through academic programs.
You find out about creativity in different fields.
- You need inspiration as an artist.
- The liberal arts classes that we have here
are super important for the kids to take that information
and bring it back to their work that they do in class.
- Word and images belong together.
They've had a very, very long history together.
The Humanities and Sciences Department is
a very large department.
We offer 200 courses in 15 separate disciplines.
The writing program offers art students
the chance to compliment their art studies.
We have a Writing Resource Center,
in which we offer tutoring for students,
as well as computers and internet resources.
(Students chatting indistinctly)
Many of our faculty happen to be visual artists.
- I've been working on photography,
just got some photographs published.
And I do a lot of different things.
Our students are very talented,
but they really need humanities.
They really need a subject matter that challenges them.
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- I'd like to thank the staff for this opportunity,
and the judges for picking me,
and Professor Rivera for inspiring me
to get back into hobby writing.
- It's important to have more than one perspective,
and that's what I try to introduce in the classroom.
If they can, you know, reference Hamlet for instance,
in their own work,
and they won't sound pretentious,
they would actually be ennobled by that,
and maybe even, their work would have more energy.
- One of the students who's in my Capture and Release class,
also took a modernist lit class with me.
I kind of wanted more humanities classes,
and I was getting more into symbology
and I'm usually big on stuff like that, so,
I wanted to explore that more.
There are definitely times when I've seen students
take stuff from my class and put it into their art,
which is very flattering, or it's fun to see.
I think the idea that you have these sealed off
compartmentalized subjects which shouldn't touch each other,
is nonsense.
I mean, they feed on each other.
- We're here on a field trip at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
with four of my classes, biology students,
ornithology students, and urban zoology students
that'll be joining us today.
- Being that I'm from New York City,
I find my inspiration from the urban environment around me.
But it's definitely another element to my work
to be around nature.
So I guess it's widening or broadening my horizons in a way.
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- Our students really need images.
They're voracious consumers of images.
So part of that great imagery is in books,
and is a fine art publications.
The library accommodates that by physically having books,
but also by providing spaces
where people can use these materials.
- Part of what you expect in the library
is to stumble across things, where you discover things
in physical form that you didn't realize existed before.
And I think that puts you in a different frame of mind.
- If you have the opportunity to, you know, sort of see,
you know, where other artists sort of went along,
maybe they stumbled and then they found a new solution,
and you can start to imagine where your work might go.
- Art history is this wonderful opportunity
to actually teach students the history of the things
that they're making.
- The way information works, whatever the newest piece is,
it piles up on top of the older ones.
And eventually you forget
that maybe somebody did what you were doing before,
and that can help you not repeat it, but grow in a new way.
- Often it looks like some work of art
or design or photograph, is brand new.
In fact, everything that human beings create
happens in a continuum.
- Smart artists are the ones that win.
I think it's really important that all of our students
do their research to make work that has a richness
and a foundation that you couldn't have otherwise.
- We designed the honors program as a kind of challenge
to a number of students who really wanted
alongside their studio work,
to feel like they were really reading more, engaged more.
- And the idea is that hopefully it will further
their studio art.
- The humanities are wonderful
because they are so like, broad and diverse.
Outside of school, it's difficult to engage with material
that you're completely unfamiliar with.
- You really need to be great thinker
and critical thinker in order to make
any kind of great art form.
- You need to be aware of who came before you.
And I think it helps to inform your own work.
- Especially if we're working with issues like,
environmental or social areas,
these are really relevant areas for artists to be exploring,
or it has the power to really change people's perceptions.
- Artists are not just hands.
The art that they make comes from the total culture.
For many of our students who don't go onto graduate school,
this is the final piece of formal education.
And the most important thing we impart
is give you the ability and the curiosity
to continue to educate yourselves once you've graduated.
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