Students & the Arts
Art is alive and well at Gutenberg College. Gutenberg acknowledges the God-given, creative capacity of humans to make art, and the college has cultivated a lively “arts conversation” among its students, including an ongoing dialogue about contemporary and popular art, music, and cinema. The faculty also recognize that the arts have played a major role in expressing the unfolding ideas of Western civilization and are therefore a powerful way the mind of man has made itself known over thousands of years and continues to today, especially as our culture has shifted from a language-based to image-based culture. Gutenberg College is therefore committed to helping its students understand how the power of art works in today’s society.
Gutenberg College is located near the University of Oregon’s art museum and art facilities, which gives Gutenberg students access to a wide variety of art activities, such as dance classes and classes at the university’s Craft Center. The Craft Center, located in the student union, offers short courses in subjects such as photography, fibers, screen-printing, and woodworking. In addition, the city of Eugene and the surrounding area offer scores of local and internationally acclaimed musical and theater venues.
The first two years of Gutenberg’s Western Civilization course includes a survey of art history, and over the course of four years, students will take three art seminars and an art practicum. The art-history survey, the seminars, and the practicum not only help students learn what art is, but they help students learn to discern the differences between art motivated by indifference and hostility to God and art motivated by a true desire to know and please God.
Gutenberg also encourages its students to participate in the Annual Student Art Show and Performance. At the end of winter term each year, students fill Gutenberg’s Puccinelli Gallery with their artwork and offer to the public an evening of visual and performance art, which may include video, music, theater, poetry readings, and dance.
Art Project, an institute of Gutenberg College, is dedicated to exploring the relationship between Christianity and the arts and to encouraging artists to pursue their art-making in a manner that embodies the biblical vision of life. During the academic year, Art Project hosts house concerts, gallery shows, and other arts events that Gutenberg students may attend. Student’s are also invited to attend Art Project’s spring conference, where vocational and advocational Christian artists and others interested in the arts explore topics on both the theory and practice of art-making.
