School Of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts is a private art and design college in Manhattan, founded in 1947 by Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and renamed in 1956. It occupies buildings around East 23rd Street, Gramercy, and Chelsea rather than a single enclosed campus. Its defining fact is a specialist studio school focused on art, design, and related media.

Undergraduate and graduate departments cover cartooning, illustration, graphic design, photography, film, fine arts, advertising, computer art, and interaction design. MFA studios and college galleries are the main spaces for graduate work. Strengths include illustration, photography, computer art, and fine arts.

Enrollment is about 3,500 to 4,000 students, mostly undergraduates, with several hundred in master's programs. International students form a substantial share of the studio population. Faculty are working artists, designers, and filmmakers. Alumni include artist Keith Haring and artist Brian Donnelly (KAWS).

Graduate study is built around the MFA and related master's degrees, with critique, studio practice, and a thesis exhibition or project as the supervision model. The academic year is two semesters. Students work in midtown and downtown Manhattan, using the city's galleries, agencies, and freelance economy as an extension of the classroom.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, School Of Visual Arts lists 5 graduate programs in environmental design, all of them master's programs.