Education | Boston and Suzhou: A Cultural Concept Book Study

  • Authors
  • Joan Schwartz and Richard B. Doubleday
  • University
  • Boston and Suzhou

We describe here a collaborative project between the School of Fine Arts of Boston University and Suzhou Design and Technology Institute. Richard B. Doubleday responded to an invitation from a former Master of Fine Arts student at Boston to spend a week working with second-year diploma students. Doubleday set a book concept project, which many of the students evidently responded to with vigour and enthusiasm. While they may not handle western typographic conventions with confidence, they demonstrate a ready competence with current graphic arts technology, an inventive use of photomontage and the customary colour palette characteristic of students from a Chinese culture. While the results may not yet be suitable for publication as books, the imagery which they have produced within a brief period of time does credit to both Doubleday’s instruction and the students’ energy.

Top to bottom: Deconstructed experimental type design.

‘The School of Visual Arts at Boston’

Founded in 1954, the School of Visual Arts is located in the heart of the city, one of the nation’s most vibrant arts communities, and offers undergraduate and graduate programmes in painting, sculpture, graphic design and art education. The intellectual and cultural resources of Boston University and other leading universities in the area – combined with internationally renowned art museums, galleries, theatres and orchestras – offer an environment that stimulates, challenges and inspires. Undergraduate programmes offer students a classically structured educational experience based on intensive studio training. The programme stresses the disciplines of drawing, painting, sculpture, and two and three dimensional design. Course requirements include art history and liberal arts electives. Students learn the cornerstones of art: visual education, technical skill and aesthetic understanding, which together make persuasive self-expression possible. Graduate students at the School of Visual Arts study with a first-rate faculty in an intimate and stimulating learning environment. Students refine their artistic skills while developing their personal vision. New graduate students are invited not merely to observe the Boston art scene, but to work in the midst of it and to help redefine it with their perspective, vision and energy…

by Joan Schwartz & Richard B. Doubleday