Fine Arts
Master of Arts
Master of Fine Arts
Master of Music
Doctor of Musical Arts
Doctor of Philosophy
Facilities for Graduate Work
In addition to the academic departments, the College of Fine Arts includes the Performing Arts Center and the Blanton Museum of Art. These components provide University students and the Austin community with opportunities to attend art exhibitions, plays, operas, ballets, recitals, and concerts by internationally renowned artists and companies. Austin's proximity to Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth places the major art collections and dramatic and musical events of those cities within a few hours’ drive.
Performing Arts Center. Created in 1981, the Performing Arts Center complex includes six venues to accommodate diverse performances: Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Concert Hall (three thousand seats); the Ralph and Ruth McCullough Theatre (four hundred seats); Hogg Memorial Auditorium (twelve hundred seats); the B. Iden Payne Theatre (five hundred seats); the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre (two hundred seats); and Bates Recital Hall (seven hundred seats) which features a three-story Visser-Rowland tracker pipe organ. Support facilities include rehearsal rooms, paint shops, scene shops, costume shops, metal shop, prop shop, and administrative offices.
The Performing Arts Center’s season program includes artists from around the world, reflecting a multitude of cultures and art forms. In addition, the Performing Arts Center maintains the Lifelong Learning program, which helps the Austin community to become more involved with the performing arts through lectures, master classes, residencies, youth performances, and workshops. The Performing Arts Center also serves as a learning laboratory for University students, providing them the opportunity to work alongside professionals in a variety of fields.
Fine Arts Library. Located in the E. William Doty Fine Arts Building, the Fine Arts Library contains materials on art, theatre, dance, and music.
The art collection supports instruction and research for the four divisions of the Department of Art and Art History: art history, design, studio art, and visual arts studies/art education. The collection includes materials on most art and design movements and schools, photography, and art education. Artists of most periods and nationalities and studies of their works are represented, as are most media and techniques.
The theatre and dance collection supports the Department of Theatre and Dance, which concentrates on performance, especially play production, theatrical design, playwriting, theatre education, and dance. Materials on other types of theatrical presentations, such as magic, circuses, and pantomime, are included. The Fine Arts Library holds texts of major plays written in English or translated into English, with contemporary plays collected most heavily. The Perry-Castañeda Library also holds texts of plays in English and other languages, with emphasis on plays as a literary form and on literary criticism.
The music collection supports instruction and research in the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music, which includes music performance, composition, ethnomusicology, music and human learning, music theory, and musicology. Most historical periods and geographical areas are covered in both classical and popular idioms, though the emphasis is on the Western classical tradition. Music is represented in a wide variety of printed and recorded formats.
The special collections of the Fine Arts Library include the Historical Music Recordings Collection, the papers of the Paramount and State Theatres, and papers of Sam Shepard. The Historical Music Recordings Collection is an archive of audio recordings in all formats. Holding more than two hundred thousand items, it is one of the largest collections of audio recordings in the United States. The Paramount and State Theatre archive is an archival collection of about three thousand items, including posters, fliers, documents, and ephemera from Austin’s historic Paramount and State Theatres. The Sam Shepard Collection is an archival collection of materials by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, actor, and author Sam Shepard. The archive contains materials from the latter part of Shepard’s career, roughly from the late 1970s to the present, and includes manuscripts, film scripts, correspondence, volumes from his personal library, and awards.
Fine Arts Library services include reference and research assistance, instruction, circulation and reserves, and media and technology support. The Fine Arts Library is wireless and offers a wide variety of media equipment including laptops, digital cameras, and portable compact disc players available for check-out. In addition, the Fine Arts Library has computing hardware and a wide variety of software to support the study of fine arts.
Areas of Study
Graduate study is available in the following areas: in the Department of Art and Art History: art history, studio art, design, and art education; in the Butler School of Music: performance (including conducting and opera), music and human learning, musicology (including ethnomusicology), composition, conducting, and theory (a jazz emphasis is available in approved areas); and in the Department of Theatre and Dance: dance, directing, drama and theatre for youth, performance as public practice, playwriting, stage technology, teacher training, and theatrical design. See Art Education , Art History , Design , Music , Studio Art , and Theatre and Dance for more information. Further information is available from the graduate adviser of each program.