June 23, 2020
Education City, Al Luqta St
Doha Qatar
Connect with Qatar’s new generation of artists and designers.
Escaping chaos, cultural production in Qatar, edible packaging, bridal dresses, third culture kids, designer babies, Palestine, mental health, fake news, social hierarchies, and handbags!
These are some of the subjects by the graduating students from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), a Qatar Foundation partner university, that are on display at the BFA + MFA 2020 online show here.
The BFA + MFA 2020 online show features nearly 70 art and design projects from the university’s Fashion Design, Graphic Design, Interior Design, MFA in Design, and Painting and Printmaking programs.
The projects on display at BFA + MFA 2020 also highlight the tremendous range of skills and talents of VCUarts Qatar’s Class of 2020 that include animation, textile design, fabrication technology, visual languages, product, print and website design, typography, light and color in interior environments, home fashion merchandising, building code requirements, interior graphics, printmaking, digital painting, screenprinting, lithography, computer programming, and photographic stencil techniques, to name but a few.
VCUarts Qatar offers students the opportunity to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in fashion design, graphic design, interior design, and painting and printmaking, a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in design.
VCUarts Qatar is the Qatar campus of the prestigious Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. It was established in 1998 through a partnership with Qatar Foundation (QF), and now has more than 320 students representing 35 nationalities.
VCUarts Qatar has, since 1998, been joined on QF’s Education City campus by Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M University, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Carnegie-Mellon University, Northwestern University, HEC Paris, and University College London, where their fellow students are studying for degrees in engineering, medicine, business, international relations, and communications, for example.
Collaborations between the universities, such as the Art and Medicine exhibition, or the Battle of the Bands competition, for example, bring students from different countries and cultures together to share ideas, have fun, and explore new ways of studying and learning in a multiversity environment. Besides the aforementioned universities, VCUarts Qatar is located within easy reach of collaboration-friendly facilities including Education City’s Oxygen Park recreational complex and nearby Multaqa Student Center, the Qatar Science & Technology Park technology hub; the state-of-the-art Sidra Medicine women’s and children’s hospital, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; the Al Shaqab equestrian center, the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, and Doha Fire Station Artist in Residence.
Works by students and alumni from VCUarts Qatar have featured in exhibitions everywhere from Doha and Dubai, and from Paris to Moscow to Hong Kong, and at its home campus in Richmond, Virginia.
The students’ creativity and inspiration is fueled by participation in world class fashion shows, and field trips to the desert to study, work and network, as well visits by internationally acclaimed designers and artists such as Valentino, Hassan Hajjaj, Richard Serra, Shirin Neshat, Jeff Koons, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Diane von Furstenberg, Reza Abedini, Marina Abramović, Wissam Shawkat, Rami Al Ali, Naeem Khan, and Hector Ayuso.
VCUarts Qatar’s Materials Library is the only one of its kind in the Arab Gulf region and houses a circulating collection of thousands of diverse material samples from around the world. The University also hosts biennial international events such as the Tasmeem Doha art and design conference, and the Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, both of which attract visitors and speakers from around the world.
