ARTS DEPARTMENT

In its structure and principles of training the Department is close to analogous departments of European and American universities. It trains experts in four fields of concentration:

1. Art History and Theory.
2. Design (particularly Environmental Design).
3. Tourism and Cultural Heritage (joint French-Belarusian program).
4. Painting (studio).

The 4th and 5th-year students work according to the specialization curricula, at the end of which they prepare diploma papers. The Department offers both B.A. and M.A. programs. A Ph. D. program in the fields of theory and history of arts and cultural tourism is coordinated jointly with Russian and European institutes of arts. Teaching is conducted by an international team of professors amongst whom one can find famed historians of arts, art critics, designers and artists, such as Dr. Ziva Amishai-Maisels (Jerusalem University), Dr. Irina Danilova (Vice-Director of the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow), Dr. Richard Lewy (Conseil National du Tourisme, France), and other professors from France, Russia, Belarus, USA, Poland, and Israel.

Specialized internships on architecture and design, international tourism and other fields are available. Senior students are offered training in France, Poland, and other countries.

International cooperation and dialog in the sphere of culture and art is an important factor of the Department's development. The joint Department of History and Theory of Art created by the Department together with the Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum unites the leading art historians of Belarus and Russia. The Department's students take training courses in the exposition and holdings of the Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum (Moscow) which possesses one of the best collections of Antique and West-European art. The students do their architectural research in Russian and European towns of exceptionally valuable architectural and cultural heritage. The Department coordinates and administers the joint program 'International Tourism and Cultural Heritage' organized jointly with the French Ministry for Tourism, French Embassy in Belarus, the Belarusian Ministry for Tourism and other organizations. This program is aimed at training a new generation of specialists capable of embracing cultural values and tourist management as a unified whole, in order to expose the Belarusian cultural space to international tourism. Joint projects with the Arts Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Center of Arts at Jerusalem University, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Bourges, the Russian Academy of Architecture and other centers and institutes of arts are being realized.

Research programs of the Arts Department are concentrated in the following areas: concepts and history of modern and contemporary art, art and mass media, as well as studies of the Vitebsk avant-garde, Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich, and other painters and theoreticians of avant-garde. The Arts Department participates in a number of programs run by the Belarusian Ministry of Culture, such as the International Marc Chagall Festival of Arts, a reunion of artists and art critics of numerous American and European countries. The faculty members and students take part in various international and local expositions of painting and graphics.