Welcome New Students!

2007 New Student Guide

The Foundation Program offers comprehensive interdisciplinary training in the fundamentals of art and design for first-year students. The program, built on the premise that innovation grows out of tradition, provides incoming students with the art-making and critical-thinking skills they need to become inventive, informed makers. The first-year experience allows aspects of personal vision to emerge from the confluence of visual, intuitive, and rational thinking. Underlying this synthesis is the belief that meaningful artistic investigation combines creativity with problem solving and defining. Traditional and contemporary perspectives on art and design are brought together with strong critical underpinnings. Students also develop effective work habits, skills of organization, responsibility, and discipline. By the end of the Foundation experience, students demonstrate core skills for lifelong learning and professional practice in the visual arts.

The core curriculum includes courses in Life Drawing, Drawing and Composition, Principles of Design, and Form and Space.  Each student takes these four studio courses as a part of a section. These sections provide an added measure of peer collaboration that promotes creative investigation, construction of meaning, and appropriate risk-taking. Complementary courses in the liberal arts and sciences focus on art history, literature and composition, critical analysis, and cultural studies. In the second semester, students continue Drawing and Composition and Form and Space, and add Connections Through  Color and Design, an Integrated Learning course.  They also have the option of taking Creative Practices and Responses, a unique studio course in place of second semester Life Drawing that focuses on the study and practice of creative thinking that bridges art and design disciplines.  Second semester students also select an Elective that introduces the majors in Architecture/Landscape/Interiors, Communication Arts (graphic design, illustration, and advertising), Digital Media, Fashion Design, Fine Arts (painting, photography, and sculpture/new genres), Interactive Product Design, and Toy Design.

The spring Foundation Forward seminar helps students select the major they will join for their remaining three years at Otis. Upon completion of Foundation, students may pursue an Interdisciplinary Concentration by entering one of the majors and taking a number of elective courses outside the major.

Each year Foundation students travel to Paris for ten days during spring break to view art–from prehistoric to contemporary–in an extraordinary urban environment. Students encounter European design, culture, and sensibilities while visiting great museums and seeing outstanding architecture.

Here are some useful links:

Supply Kit

First Day Studio Supplies

Foundation Forward

About Foundation Faculty

Otis Public Foundation Site

Educational Advising

Learning Goals

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