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VOL. 9, NO. 2 
FALL 2020 

 

 SPECIAL ISSUE: ARTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION  

Reframing the Arts within the Liberal Arts Community 
Teaching an Arts Entrepreneurial Mindset to Achieve 
Transdisciplinary Outcomes 

Sarah Archino 
Furman University 

Marta Lanier 
Furman University 

Ross McClain 
Furman University 

ABSTRACT: The dominance of New Venture Creation and Skills for Transitioning 
models has produced scholarship focusing on the impact of entrepreneurial 
pedagogy on graduates who pursue careers within the arts. This paper shares a 
liberal arts approach, positioning arts as a central component in the creation of an 
entrepreneurial mindset with benefits for students throughout campus. Shifting our 
department to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset through arts-based experiential 
education, we have created an alternate approach that can serve those who wish to 
become professional artists, but also provides value for the majority of our students 
who will not remain in the arts. KEYWORDS: arts entrepreneurship, liberal arts 
colleges, arts education, student learning outcomes, entrepreneurial mindset. 
DOI: 10.34053/artivate.9.2.138 

Introduction 
Arts entrepreneurship is an established and rapidly growing field, however the dominance of 
New Venture Creation (NVC) and Skills for Transitioning (SFT) models has led to a scholarly 
focus on the impact of entrepreneurial pedagogy on graduates who pursue careers within the 
arts (Beckman, ). This paper shares a different approach taken by a liberal arts college, to 
position arts education as a central component in the creation of an entrepreneurial mindset 
with benefits for students throughout campus. By shifting our department to cultivate an entre-
preneurial mindset (rather than more traditional integration of business curriculum or arts-
focused entrepreneurial training), we have created an alternative approach that can serve those 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

6 

who wish to become professional artists, but also provides value for the majority of our students 
who will not remain in the arts (Neck & Corbett, ). This shift to emphasize entrepreneurial 
competencies “broadens the applicability of entrepreneurship education from the exclusive do-
main of students who want to be entrepreneurs to students who want to be more entrepreneur-
ial” (Toscher, ). In other terms, we encourage students to think of entrepreneurial skills as 
more than professional development, but as a mindset of “being enterprising” (Bridgstock, 
). 

As part of a vibrant and interconnected liberal arts community at Furman University, our 
art department has the opportunity to work across disciplines and fields, contributing to the 
formulation of the next generation of well-rounded, ambitious, entrepreneurial leaders, and 
problem solvers. Home to both art history and studio majors, our department has embraced a 
role in nurturing skills, such as flexibility and creativity, that are required in the twenty-first-
century economy. 

By connecting with components of entrepreneurial education, we have reframed both the 
studio and art history majors to affirm the importance of the arts within a liberal arts education 
and to emphasize both the intrinsic richness of these fields and their pragmatic applications 
outside of academia without requiring a radical reconfiguration. This allows us to integrate en-
trepreneurial competencies without simply adding them as another curricular requirement 
(Dempster, ). This essay is a progress report and it will address our rationale, the steps we 
have taken to expand our footprint beyond the art building, our approach to assessment, and 
our next steps in reframing the arts within the liberal arts community. 

Institutional Background 
Furman University is a small liberal arts and science college, home to , undergraduate stu-
dents and five graduate programs, located in Greenville, South Carolina. Our signature initia-
tive, The Furman Advantage, which guarantees each student the opportunity for engaged learn-
ing experiences and vocational support, was announced in . Through internships, 
mentoring, curricular and extracurricular programming, research, and travel opportunities, the 
program “prepares students for lives of purpose and accelerated career and community impact” 
(“The Furman Advantage,” ). In particular, our four-year pathway provides a measured 
track of exploration, introspection, and preparation designed to help students grow during their 
undergraduate experience and develop an individualized course of study. This institutional fo-
cus has supported the evolution of our art department and allows us to integrate our curriculum 
across disciplinary boundaries. 

As a university, Furman adopted the National Association of Colleges and Employers 
(NACE) competencies in order for students, parents, and administrators to easily connect with 
the skills the liberal arts education provides. Working with employers, NACE defines career 
readiness as “the attainment and demonstration of requisite competencies that broadly prepare 
college graduates for a successful transition into the workplace” (). They have also named 
a core set of seven competencies that employers seek in college graduates. These competencies 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

7 

are not specific to any particular industry, rather they are broader soft skills that create excep-
tional employees: global/intercultural fluency, career management, critical thinking/problem 
solving, oral/written communications, teamwork/collaboration, digital technology, leadership. 

Employable Outcomes 
We must accept that employable outcomes are important. This is how students and their fami-
lies determine the cost–benefit analysis of their college education. According to a Northeastern 
University study, “[eighty-one] percent of students believe that college is crucial to starting a 
career” (Loveland, ). When students are making these decisions, they are often making 
them with limited knowledge of how they will actually need to navigate professional pathways 
and networks. They are comfortable in departments with a direct career path such as business 
or health sciences, which were the two top majors in  (National Center for Education Sta-
tistics). They don’t think about art. And part of this is our fault, if we remain wedded to the 
notion of art being an out-of-the-ordinary, autonomous sphere of creative genius and innate 
talent. We have to change the conversation. 

And we must face the inevitable question: Does it really pay off to go to a small liberal arts 
college—and study art? We would answer yes. Counter to the clichés and stereotypes of under-
employed art students, an arts education precisely targets skills for a changing career field 
(White, ). Furthermore, contrary to student (and parent) perceptions of professional edu-
cation, employers increasingly emphasize the need for flexibility, creativity, and communication 
skills over discipline-specific training (Petrone, ). 

We don’t need to limit ourselves to training that will produce a new generation of arts 
workers. Few graduates pursue a career as an artist. While only . percent of college graduates 
work as artists, even within graduates with an arts degree, only  percent will work as artists 
(Wassall & Alper, ). Thinking more broadly about the value the arts contribute to an un-
dergraduate education, the authors focused on in-demand skills (including problem solving, 
critical thinking, creativity, communication skills, or cognitive flexibility), which we realized 
were already integral to arts practice (Colon, ). These are the skills one learns in making 
art—whether through a single class, a series of courses, or finishing a degree. Even apart from 
arts-specific entrepreneurial training, art courses offer targeted training for an entrepreneurial 
mindset. Our department learning objectives map directly on to the entrepreneurial skills artic-
ulated by Pollard and Wilson (): “) the capacity to think creatively, strategically, analyti-
cally and reflectively, ) confidence in one’s abilities, ) the ability to collaborate, ) well devel-
oped communication skills and ) an understanding of the current artistic context.” 

At Furman, our students do not typically pursue careers as fine artists, even if they major 
in studio art. This follows larger trends: most arts graduates do not work in the field (White, 
; Wassall & Alper, ). This does not mean we cannot contribute meaningfully to their 
career trajectory, nor that we can’t have meaningful impact on non-arts majors. To build on 
Gary Beckman’s () argument that “we lose this nation’s arts and intellectual arts capital 
when talented and competent students relinquish their dreams of arts employment” (p. )—



ARTIVATE 9.2 

8 

we need to consider the large population of students who never dream of working in the arts, 
but who take our classes. This requires us to move beyond thinking that the primary purpose of 
arts-related entrepreneurial education is “teaching students to create a sustainable arts career” 
(Gangi, , p. ) and to reconsider what we want to teach through art. 

Arts Education as Entrepreneurial Education 
Mindful of the challenges facing liberal arts institutions and the pressures our students feel to 
choose majors that have direct career tracks, our art department emphasizes dual strains: the 
developmental benefits of studying the arts and the employable skills developed through arts 
education. In confronting the career-mindedness of our students, we can assure them of the 
valuable skills and competencies that are developed through the arts without radically altering 
our practice. As Toscher () argues, an “arts entrepreneurial mindset . . . alludes to a more 
understated, yet important aspect of entrepreneurship and arts entrepreneurship education: 
that it is more than venture creation and can be aimed towards the development of entrepre-
neurial competencies” (p. ). 

As a department, we saw crossover and value in both NACE and entrepreneurial compe-
tencies that students learn through interacting in the art department whether as majors or as 
non-majors. Creating an entrepreneurial mindset involves three categories of entrepreneurial 
competencies: knowledge, skills, and attitude (Lackeus, ). Within these broad categories, 
we can address all of the NACE competencies that the university already emphasizes while add-
ing skills that are more specific to the entrepreneurial mindset—a mindset that allows students 
to be innovative in any field they choose to enter after graduation. The dominant models have 
been New Venture Creation (NVC) and Skills for Transitioning (SFT), both of which incorpo-
rate entrepreneurial training into an arts curriculum to support students’ post-graduate career 
goals. While NVC and SFT approaches target valuable knowledge and skills, we have focused 
on how art can cultivate an entrepreneurial attitude more generally (Barrie & Prosser, ). In 
other words, we are asking how we can export art learning, rather than importing lessons from 
business, to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset expected of graduates across disciplines 
(Blenker et al., ). The synergy between arts education and entrepreneurial training does not 
force a choice, but strengthens each practice (Gangi, ; Hart, ). 

Reframing Arts Entrepreneurship Outcomes: Beyond Arts Careers 
What does an entrepreneurial mindset, cultivated through art, look like? As Laura Zabel () 
argued, “Most actual definitions of entrepreneur don’t start with the business-minded, tech-
start-up-in-a-hoodie, capital-driven picture that is commonly imagined; most definitions start 
with opportunity, and risk, and initiative. That more elemental definition suits most artists per-
fectly” (p. ). Other scholars have similarly argued that arts entrepreneurship education sup-
ports more general/generic learning outcomes (Pollard & Wilson, ). Indeed, for competen-
cies centered in creativity and problem solving, the arts have an unfair advantage in the fact that 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

9 

the practice of these skills is self-reinforcing. As students witness the range of meaningful ways 
to deploy their creative skills, they build their confidence and begin to push for bolder ideas and 
more ambitious innovation. As they see the benefits of these competencies enhance their non-
art studies, they can imagine new career paths. These skills have no disciplinary boundaries, but 
they give our students an innovative edge (Frenette, ). 

We have found that cultivating creative problem solvers and skilled communicators pre-
pares our students in ways that escape traditional degree models. A turning point in this discov-
ery process came during the  American Society for Engineering Education Northeast Sec-
tion conference at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. A group of Furman design 
students were facilitating a workshop on design thinking that was largely attended by engineers. 
These were thinkers engaged in fascinating research, but they had difficulty talking about their 
work and making it comprehensible and relevant to a larger, more general audience. The miss-
ing piece was someone trained to craft an inspirational, empathetic, effective visual and verbal 
narrative that would connect the lab to the rest of the world. Indeed, economist Felipe Buitrago 
Restrepo predicts that, in years to come “Developing a creative ecology in which the myriad of 
possibilities presented by these new technologies—from advanced materials to energy storage 
and the Internet of things—make sense to the average person will be a major challenge. That 
work will be based on increased ‘coopetition’ between artists and creatives” (Restrepo, , pp. 
–). 

We see this role as one we can prepare our students to fill, branching out from art as a place 
of making and looking into innovation and entrepreneurship; our art department, as part of a 
liberal arts campus, is becoming a place where students learn how to make connections—be-
tween ideas and between people—as well as a bastion for creativity and imagination. 

Program Changes 
Many Furman students reported an interest in the arts upon arriving at the university, but were 
only enrolling in art courses as electives, often in their junior or senior year. Exploring this trend 
led us to understand how these talented, smart, curious, resilient, and driven students had been 
talked out of pursuing their interest in art. They had accepted the common but false narrative 
that art is frivolous, a waste of time, and certain to lead to underemployment. Having been ac-
cepted to an expensive private school, they majored in what they perceived as practical subjects 
like business, political science, communication studies, and the sciences. They were deeply in-
terested in art, but wary. 

Design thinking has served as our primary model for curriculum design and has trickled 
down into the structure and execution of our courses. By following the steps of empathy (un-
derstanding our students), definition (isolating the main problem to solve), ideation (brain-
storming a wide net of solutions), prototyping (through small course adjustments and extracur-
ricular activities and workshops), testing (in partnership with the university’s Office of 
Institutional Assessment and Research), and implementation (department-wide adjustments, 
reflection, future planning) we are tackling some of the pressing issues facing arts education—



ARTIVATE 9.2 

10 

and liberal arts institutions—in a manageable fashion that preserved our primary identity as an 
art department and respected the integral value of our field. To this end, we have eliminated 
barriers to study, clarified learning objectives within our curricular, cocurricular, and extracur-
ricular offerings, and clarified our message. 

Eliminating Barriers to Study 
Our –level classes have no prerequisites and do not need to be taken in a particular order. 
While a simple step, reworking the way a student could take these introductory surveys allowed 
this portion of our student body to experience the deep relevance of the arts first-hand. Simi-
larly, we offer several –level classes without prerequisites. Since , approximately two-
thirds of students enrolled in art courses were not art majors; non-majors outnumber arts ma-
jors in both – and –level courses. 

By eliminating a rigid curricular path and reducing prerequisites, we have made it easier 
for students to incorporate arts courses into their studies. Now, whether students take an art 
class and declare a major, or simply benefit from that singular experience, we are part of a larger 
conversation on celebrating creativity and cultivating a humanistic self. Ironically, by reducing 
the pressure to increase the size of our department and simply focusing on the joys of making 
and generating knowledge, we have extended our influence and connected with a broader range 
of students. Opening up our major has encouraged students with divergent interests to make 
art; we encourage them to integrate their other areas of growing expertise and reflect on how 
their unique position impacts their thinking. Then we explore how to leverage that point of view 
and connect to others. These skills have no disciplinary boundaries and they give our students 
an innovative edge (Frenette, ). 

Addressing Our Learning Objectives 
While most of our changes have been small-scale and incremental, they are predicated on the 
decision to embrace our identity as a BA program. Traditionally, our studio BA was based on a 
BFA model, a material-based curriculum that strained faculty and students as they attempted 
to complete comprehensive foundational training and specialization. This approach failed to 
address the needs of our students, most of whom do not become professional fine artists. By 
condensing our foundation courses and designing a more flexible progression of upper-level 
courses, not only were we better positioned to integrate with programs and departments across 
campus, but professors now had room in their courses to highlight the development of imagi-
nation and creativity. As a result, our studio classes allow students to focus on generating ideas 
rather than simply improving technique. Art history courses emphasize methodologies and crit-
ical thinking over the simple mastery and reinforcement of canonical knowledge. We ensure 
that students learn the necessary material as they progress throughout their time at Furman, but 
we stress critical thinking and problem solving as the primary learning outcomes. This deem-
phasizes product to focus on process—ideating, creating, and making over technical perfection. 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

11 

(As a side note, we believe this flexibility and introspection, coupled with an experimental atti-
tude that embraces risk and potential failure, provide the further benefit of modeling behaviors 
we hope to instill in our graduates.) 

Curricular Changes 
We have embraced both traditional arts entrepreneurship educational experiences and embed-
ded entrepreneurial mindset training throughout our curriculum, so that courses offer both 
hard technical skills and soft skills, such as management (Ghazali & Bennett, ). In –
, we debuted a business-based “Success in the Arts” course that roadmaps practical paths 
within creative fields. This is perhaps our most traditional approach to arts entrepreneurship, 
as it teaches skills related to professional arts careers and business development (Beckman, 
). 

This approach is not limited to studio arts: our art history faculty have similarly reconsid-
ered their disciplinary work to emphasize not only the material learned, but the potential for 
entrepreneurial learning experiences and the creative generation of new information. In , 
we began a collaboration with the estate of a local visual artist, Matthew Baumgardner. In addi-
tion to his studio/living space, the estate included a considerable body of artwork, as well as 
personal and business papers. Students enrolled in a new course on curatorial practices had the 
opportunity to conduct primary source research and curate an exhibition of Baumgardner’s 
work. That exhibition, which was accompanied by a published catalog of student essays, opened 
in a campus gallery space and served as a center for ongoing cultural programs and events. 

While these students exercised the same primary skills that could be found in a typical art 
history course, the projects were framed to emphasize their agency and the creative process of 
archival research, visual interpretation, and curation. With little previously-published research 
on their subject, students were generating new knowledge. The typical project management of 
a research project took on new dimensions with the unpredictability of archival work, adding a 
new level of challenge within the semester timeline that required flexibility from the students. 
To further underscore the skills developed, students worked with the university’s internship 
program director, who facilitated two class sessions that worked to translate learning experi-
ences into marketable skills on a resume and cover letter. 

Both of these courses drew students from a range of majors; this suggests that we are effec-
tively shifting campus-wide perceptions of arts education and the importance of creative train-
ing for career success. Working with our institution, we are collecting data that will help us 
better understand the changing perception of art courses, as well as their outcomes and benefits, 
for a range of Furman students. 

We have also worked to integrate skills into preexisting arts courses. For example, visual 
literacy is a practice rooted in traditional art history that has broader, but not often advertised, 
implications for entrepreneurial learning. Visual literacy builds interpretative and communica-
tive skills, in addition to increasing basic observational abilities. While liberal arts institutions 
are well grounded in textual literacy, there is a common assumption that visual literacy is an 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

12 

intuitive skill; we have worked to counter this narrative and to demonstrate how art historical 
training provides competencies that transcend disciplinarity (Archino, ). The visual liter-
acy skills of observation and communication have been highlighted through classroom exer-
cises, writing assignments, and reflection prompts throughout certain courses within the art 
history curriculum. These simple additions do not require an extensive in-class investment of 
time or resources, but they have been crucial in providing a larger context for the study of art 
history and demonstrated the relevancy of the discipline, even to students who will not continue 
in the field. This represents a subtle pedagogical shift, as the practices of close looking, analysis 
and synthesis, and communication were always central to the discipline. 

Additional visual literacy programs have been adopted, led by art history faculty, in grad-
uate studies for Community Engaged Medicine at Furman University, along with Clemson’s 
School of Nursing and Prisma Health’s Family Medicine residency, providing further evidence 
to students, parents, and administration that these are powerful educational opportunities with 
relevance to highly specialized, non-art fields. We have also been invited to share this arts-based 
approach within programming led by Furman’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

Once more, this was more of a shift in practice than a revolution. After analyzing our cur-
riculum and programming, we realized that we were already offering entrepreneurial develop-
ment through co- and extracurricular activities, but we could better emphasize how students 
were developing entrepreneurial skills in addition to the course material. This goes beyond the 
usual ways we help connect our students to career opportunities, such as our speaker series with 
fine artists, professional creatives, and entrepreneurs or workshops on marketing, internships, 
and career readiness. Today, when we talk to a student about course offerings, we do not neces-
sarily highlight the knowledge or technical skills they are learning about the subject area, instead 
we start by highlighting the competencies gained through the class structure, material, and re-
search. So when a student asks, “why should I take art history?,” our departmental response 
includes examples that demonstrate communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and global 
fluency; these were always present in an art history course but naming them helps to make the 
class more compelling and valuable to a Gen Z mindset. 

Interdisciplinary Initiatives 
We have also dismantled some programmatic barriers that kept our extracurricular events lim-
ited to the art department. The “Sleep When You're Dead” –hour Brand Marathon and Pitch 
was created four years ago to build a platform for students in different majors to intersect and 
solve creative problems. Typically, students from majors in communication studies, business, 
and art apply, although other departments are often represented. The event always begins with 
a prestigious keynote speaker, who gives a talk centered around the advantages of a liberal arts 
education for optimal creative success. This gives students a chance to hear how their broader 
education can translate into a creative and fruitful career. Then the students break up into teams 
of three—most recently these teams were paired with a student from our Master of Art in Stra-
tegic Design—and given a creative brief. Students then stay up all night to create a deliverable 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

13 

in the form of a professional presentation deck and built prototypes. They present the following 
day to a panel of judges, who award prizes based on their team's ability to solve the challenge as 
outlined in the creative brief. 

The highest honor is the Innovation Award, given to the team that not only answers the 
creative brief but creates a product that solves additional problems or addresses other needs 
within the product's marketplace. The Innovation Award moves the team on to the Furman 
University Paladin Pitch competition, where they develop a business plan to scale the product, 
which is eligible for up to , in seed money to develop their concept. In , this compe-
tition drew additional funding from community investors and was the largest such event in the 
state, providing an exciting and highly visible stage for the interdisciplinary and creative-based 
entrepreneurial spirit we have embraced. 

In , we extended this interdisciplinary, team-based approach with the inauguration of 
a graduate program in strategic design. This Master of Arts program differs from traditional 
MFA degrees in that the professional development components and artistic training are inte-
grated with theory and the liberal arts ethos. The course of study was collaboratively designed 
with faculty from communication studies, English, and business, as well as the art department. 
We routinely partner with the university’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, partici-
pating in their programs and integrating their expertise into student projects and events. Stu-
dents move between our campus at Furman and the Miami Ad School @ Portfolio Center in 
Atlanta, where the portfolio-centered curriculum allows them to build a professional practice 
while promoting our core principles of curiosity, experimentation, and innovation. The pro-
gram is truly interdisciplinary and adaptable, providing a space for creative thinking while 
demonstrating the clear market value of an arts education. 

Micro-Interventions 
While the types of curricular and cocurricular initiatives listed here are important, we’d like to 
call attention to micro-interventions, changes in language, and the use of focus and reflection 
that help center arts education as a meaningful component in the development of an entrepre-
neurial mindset. These are also sustainable for smaller departments in liberal arts schools. 

For example, the studio arts offer experiential opportunities to fail and recover as intrinsic 
to the process of creating work. Embracing failure, or even celebrating it, is necessary to estab-
lish proper studio practice and has been emphasized across our curriculum. Faculty have 
worked to change the perception of failure to make it a necessary part of the creative process 
and an opportunity to exercise new thinking and skills. In turn, this fosters a greater creative 
ethos, as students feel empowered to experiment, innovate, recognize failure, and continue to 
work. Particularly for Generation Z students, who are grade-conscious and mindful of the costs 
of their education, shifting their understanding of failure and teaching resilience provides a wide 
range of benefits. Our students begin with a fear of failure that can be paralyzing. Underclass-
men, in particular, are highly concerned with the finished product and meeting the expectations 
of the professor. In the arts, this is counterproductive to our true learning objectives. 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

14 

Beyond improving student output, this attitude has important ramifications for students 
as they graduate. Traditional preprofessional training “is no longer enough to prepare students 
to thrive in a rapidly changing world,” writes Supiano (), adding: “Students may be inclined 
to play it safe, but what they probably need is to be stretched. Graduates in all fields will need to 
bring fresh insights to open-ended challenges and to know how to navigate uncertainty. They 
will need to be creative” (p. ). 

A Hybrid Model 
Thus, while we have shifted certain aspects of our Studio and Art History curriculum, reducing 
pre-requisites, creating flexible major requirements, and focusing on the processes of art rather 
than notions of complete mastery, much of the work has been more subtle. Our program has 
developed new programming to reflect entrepreneurial development alongside traditional pro-
fessional development (Beckman, ). While components are embedded into individual 
courses, extracurricular activities also create a synthesis between short-term projects and long-
term learning objectives. We have developed programming that reaches outside of the depart-
ment to attract students, and once they are in the department, reminds them how these compe-
tencies connect back outward, making the boundaries between majors more fluid. Across the 
board, we engage in a continuous conversation about not only what students will learn to do 
during these experiences, but what students can do with that new knowledge. 

We have needed to adjust how we measure our success. Rather than counting majors, we 
are looking at broader enrollment figures and celebrating the impact of arts training on students 
who benefit from its creative exercise but do not pursue arts-related employment. Rather than 
see that as a failure of arts education, we see it as the expansion of our campus footprint and a 
valuable contribution that we make to the larger goals of the liberal arts institution. 

Major Maps 
To support better transparency about our learning objectives and help undergraduates connect 
their art studies to larger academic and professional goals, we developed experiential major 
maps for studio and art history that make visible the expectations and outcomes from their 
curricular paths (Figures , ). 

Students readily understand the ideas and techniques taught in each major, but they rarely 
understand the value they can gain that goes beyond the mastery of coursework. The visual, big-
picture overviews of the major use language from the four-year individualized pathways that 
form the core of the Furman Advantage, so students receive specific departmental information 
but can connect it with larger institutional messaging. This project has since been expanded 
across the university. 

Each major map outlines the courses needed for the major along with the extracurriculars, 
research, and internships that foster holistic growth over four years. The maps also include in-
formation about jobs, salary, and alumni testimonials to demonstrate some of the opportunities 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

15 

students might pursue in the future. Since the university stresses the development of NACE 
competencies, rather than concentrating only on hard technical knowledge, the major maps 
amplify the role of the arts within the larger liberal arts mission. These major maps make it 
easier to understand the value our department can bring to areas outside the specific area of 
study and can help art and art history majors to articulate how their studies connect to their 
future plans. They showcase the experiences and soft skills that enable art students to maximize 
their educational investment and cultivate in-demand competencies that will make them flexi-
ble, creative innovators and leaders. 

 

Assessment 
To assess the impact of these changes, the art department is partnering with Furman’s Office of 
Institutional Assessment and Research to develop tools that will capture information on indi-
vidual course changes, student perception, and data on majors and non-majors taking courses 
in the department. We are also compiling First Destination Survey data, collecting information 
on post-graduate employment or study, with assistance from the Malone Center for Career En-
gagement. 

STUDIO ART
MAJOR MAP

STUDIO ARTS BUILDS

THE FURMAN ADVANTAGE 
DEVELOPS:

Credits of Visual 
Language  

WE PREPARE GRADUATES TO: 

Photography Related
Independent Artist
Education 

Graphic Design Related

WHERE WILL I GO? CONCENTRATIONS

Graphic Design

Think di!erently, solve problems, 
and strengthen their creative 
muscle. 

WHO WE ARE
The Art Department is a vibrant 
collaborative environment that 
encourages creative innovation and 
entrepreneurship analysis making 
and reflection. We are focused on 
developing interdisciplinary 
creative thinkers and 
problem-solvers who are 
adaptable and successful in their 
lives outside of Furman.

Our primary goal is to support, 
encourage and mentor students 
through their educational pathways 
while championing the Arts.

1

2

3

Learn visual literacy – how to 
observe, analyze, and communicate 
information either in words or 
images. 

Understanding how images operate 
changes one’s perception of the 
world around us.

12:1
Student Faculty 

Ratio

70%
of Art Majors 

are double 
majors

90%
have had an 

internship by 
graduation

The world needed more designers. Design 
blended everything I had loved with math, 
technology and art. Design was everything that I 
had been interested in and loved all wrapped up 
into one field.  
             - Rowan Griscom ‘17

WH
ER

E C
AN

 I 
GO

?

OU
R 

AL
IU

MN
I

• Artist (exhibiting, maintaining studio, artist residencies)
•  Arts managment
• Art/Creative Entrepreneurship 
• Art direction, creative director, graphic designer,   
 brand manager
• Art therapy
• Brand Strategist
• Cartoonist or political cartoonist
• Commercial photographer
• UX designer 
•  Content manager
• Copywriter
• Craft design and production (jewelry design, ceramics,   
 furniture design)
•  Illustration (technical, editorial, scientific, children’s   
 book)
• Interior design
• Museum or gallery curator
• Photojournalism
• Public relations, marketing, account managment
• Retail display and concept promotion
• Stage or set design
• Surface designer (fabric, wallpaper, carpets)
• Teaching at public/private, K-12 (BA with teacher   
 certification)
• Teaching at college level (MFA/PhD for tenure track)

*Percentage of 
alumni 
in the field*  

Other

12 
4
4
8
4

12
4

Credits of Drawing 

Credits of Photography

Credits of History of 
Western Art 

Credits of Senior 
Seminar

Photography

Printmaking

Painting

Sculpture

Ceramics

2%

12%

6%

*14% undecided*

Credits of Studio Art 
and Art History 

Credits of Art Criticism

MA
JO

R 
BY

 TH
E N

UM
ER

S

Career Outcomes:

33%30%

16%4%
3%

Graduate Degrees:

Employment Hours:

50% of our 
alumni chose 
to further their 
education 

66% of our 
alumni work full 
time in the arts

Drawing

36%

12%
4%

10%

IDENTITY & PURPOSE   
AGENCY & INTEGRITY
INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY & CREATIVITY    
CIVIC & GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: making art, 
24 Hour design competition, art historical research 
and writing

Communication Skills: making art and visual 
messaging, visual literacy coursework, art history 
research, curatorial projects, client presentations, 
artist talks, Furman Engaged

Teamwork/Collaboration: collaborative class projects, 24 Hour 
design competition, curatorial projects, work study, undergraduate 
research projects, community-engaged projects, local exhibitions

Leadership/Initiative: student groups and clubs, curatorial 
projects, internships, study away, undergraduate research

Figure 2 Figure 2 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

16 

Within the body of art majors, survey data supports the impact of our emphasis on culti-
vating an entrepreneurial mindset. In the most recent senior exit survey (Spring ), one 
hundred percent of respondents said they felt “very well-prepared” “to think differently and 
solve problems creatively” and “to engage with the world in productive ways with curiosity, 
initiative, and persistence.” Seventy-one percent directly credited their coursework in the art 
department for developing creativity and working with critical feedback. 

To measure larger impact outside of the department, we are developing a metric based on 
the Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) (Rees et al., ). The CSAS was developed 
in  to track the impact of communication skills teaching within medical school, through a 
series of questions that assess the student opinion of these skills and their relevance to their 
professional practice. This assessment tool was selected for our model because of its interdisci-
plinary, competency-based approach; in measuring the importance of communication skills 
within clinical training, its developers have recognized a trajectory similar to what we anticipate: 
students are initially skeptical of the relevancy of this training to their larger career goals; 
through the training protocol, they recognize the unanticipated complications intrinsic to com-
munication and the impact this bears on their own area of specialization; and ultimately they 
gain a recognition of the importance of this training as a transferable skills with deep implica-
tions for their professional practice. Our department tool is in development and will be em-
ployed in courses during the – academic year; results will be compared with data cur-
rently collected through university assessment. 

Conclusion 
Our approach capitalizes on the intrinsic similarities between arts education and entrepreneur-
ial education as experiential programs that cultivate attitudes of the mind and decenter the au-
thority of the professor-as-expert to place more of the learning experience on the shoulders of 
the student. If they are to succeed in an entrepreneurial world, we need to train them in that 
practice (Dempster, ). Furthermore, in a changing field of employment where disciplinary 
skills are secondary to transferrable, transdisciplinary skills, the arts have new relevancy: “Our 
modes of expression and inquiry are very closely aligned with the real world, a world that the 
academy is struggling to remain engaged with” (Squier, , p. ). 

By foregrounding the essential skills that are intrinsic to the making and discussion of art 
(among them creativity, an embrace of failure, cultivation of empathy and curiosity, the build-
ing of confidence and mindfulness, acceptance of vulnerability, and a true joy of making) we 
have established the fine arts as an answer to the needs of our students, providing them with 
entrepreneurial skills that enrich any future career path. In thinking about entrepreneurship as 
not defined by business practice, but as a way of creating value, we can amplify the lessons 
learned in arts education and make them relevant to a wide spectrum of post-graduate plans 
(Timmons, ; Gangi, ; Kuratko,	*+*+). 

Arts programs risk being siloed when they focus on technical skills that have limited appli-
cation across campus. Yet, much as the ability to pull together disparate threads to unite broadly 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

17 

ranging ideas and narratives is central to the identity of a liberal arts college, it is also the heart 
of a studio art practice. It is the way an art historian understands how and why artists have 
worked across millennia. This simple act of reframing our practices and our teaching embodies 
what we want our students to do. The future does not lie in producing graduates who will think 
just like us, but rather innovators who will be flexible in the changing decades ahead. These 
changes have rippled across campus, making the arts a more valuable player in empowering 
student innovation and preparing our graduates to be leaders in a future we cannot predict. 

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Cover image: Marta Lanier 

 


