Blog 6: Changes to my Study Program

I study Plastic Arts in Universidad de Chile. The Faculty of Arts is one of the poorest in the university, since the university has a central financing system and another that is income from faculties and obviously, as art in Chile is not highly valued, it does not generate much income either.

This is why some of the faculty workshops are in very bad condition, becoming even dangerous because they have old machinery, not being well protected from the rain, etc. However, I am aware that compared to other universities, at least in my workshop I had a privileged study space, with large and small presses, an industrial oven, dryers for the prints, etc.

What I liked about my study program is that in second year I was able to chose one main workshop (and I had 8 options: painting, sculpting, photography, textile art, ceramics, goldsmith, experimental arts, and mine: engraving). Since then I specialized myself in the engraving workshop, learning lots of techniques like gauffering, imprint, woodcut (my favorite), drypoint, etching, aquatint, lithography, silkscreen and offset plate.

I liked it a lot because it was like learning a skill more than "being an artist".

The were also some things I didn't like about the program: I felt like all the first year I learnt almost nothing. We had introductory classes like volume, color and visual thinking, among history of art and drawing and some media workshops that I felt were the most important to me that year. I had silkscreen and photography.

Another thing I didn't like is that most of the theoretical classes were not good enough or weren't that important. For example: if I could change that I would like to learn about colonial art, the history of Latin American art, art and feminism, prehispanic art etc, things that are more related to my own history than having 6 classes about European art history, art and psychoanalysis, hermeneutics etc.

Well, in addition to that and the fact that at the end of 5 years I am a little tired of university, I appreciate having had the workspace that is created in the workshop, and that the teachers I had in that space have built a much more human space than in other workshops, in which we can talk about what we like and what we don't like, and that they have given us a little more freedom when it comes to doing what interests us beyond one assignment after another after another.