Request information at admissions@sva.edu to learn more about humanities and sciences college classes at SVA.

Like nature, art abhors a vacuum. Art is noisy and busy, a roiling ferment of ideas, impressions, attitudes, values and relationships. Art, in other words, doesn't just appear from your fingertips: It's made from culture.

An arts education at SVA connects your hand to your eye and your mind to the world. Out of a matrix of learning in history, politics, literature, psychology, anatomy, biology and technology, you evolve as an artist. From Chaucer to William S. Burroughs, Stravinsky to the Ramones, Karl Marx to bell hooks, you get a cultural grounding that is at once classical and contemporary, canonical and cutting-edge. You'll discover that the more you have to say, the bigger statement your art will make.

With over 200 courses and more than 100 instructors, SVA has one of the richest, deepest, most imaginative humanities and sciences curriculums of any arts college. Our teachers are anything but dry, hidebound academics. You'll study with poets, filmmakers, curators, performance artists, illustrators and veterans of federal and city government—busy doers who are also heavy thinkers. You'll see ideas in action, like the decorated Vietnam veteran/philosophy professor who takes his War and Morality students to a VA hospital to speak with posttraumatic stress syndrome patients.

Writing and a fluent command of English is the core of the humanities and sciences. The Writing Resource Center, with computers, Internet access and instructors on hand for consultation and tutoring, reflects our commitment to producing artists who embrace the written word as a form of expression not alien to, but supporting, the visual arts.

Good language skills will help you better understand your work as an artist, clarifying your intentions, articulating your vision.

Humanities and sciences introduces you to a multitude of great thinkers' ideas, giving you an opportunity to project your perspective through the prism of many different minds. Your point of view will open up, your eye will widen—and your art will reflect the world.