Visual Art

In the Visual Art department, students are develop a personal style and voice while enhancing technical skills. This program focuses on mastering a variety of mediums, techniques and content in order to become a well-rounded and versatile artist. Students engage in a variety of tasks to allow for creative, innovative thinking and risk-taking. Each unit culminates in a formal critique session in order to allow for peer to peer feedback which provides students the opportunities to justify artistic decisions as well as receive and implement feedback in order to improve the quality of work. The Visual Arts program relies on feedback to allow us to grow as artists, developing our vocabulary and gaining the skills of self-reflection, receiving and implementing feedback, while having the knowledge to provide appropriate feedback to peers. Students graduating from Fordham High School for the Arts with a major in Visual Art are prepared for college readiness in a Specialized Arts’ school. At the end of 4 years, Visual Art Majors sit for the NYC Visual Art Exit Exam to garner a Chancellor’s Arts Endorsed Diploma with a specialization in Visual Art.

The Visual Arts department offers multiple opportunities for artwork to be displayed throughout the school, as well as off-site facilities and entered in competitions. Fordham High School for the Arts has been the recipient of many P.S.Art competition winners. In 2017, one of our students won the competition, received a scholarship, had the artwork displayed in the education center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, displayed on a large screen in Times Square and printed in the P.S. Art catalog. In 2021, 2 of our senior artists were recipients of the P.S. Art scholarship. Our students present artwork at the Bronx Borough Festival, participate in workshops and Saturday classes offered by Studio in A School along with in class residencies with teaching artists and garner internships through Studio in a School including the Bloomberg Foundation and TAP.