If you’re an art major, get ready for the sophomore review
Emily Artus, Vision Magazine Artistic Director
If you drive faster than 10 miles an hour down North Tigerville Road, you’ll miss it.
If you slow down and give it a passing glance, you might think it’s an employee entrance to Einstein Brother’s Bagel shop.
But if you descend the steep, beige sidewalk from your dorm every day while lugging a cumbersome, 18-by-24 inch Strathmore sketch pad, you’ll know that white-washed door by heart.
Inside that door and up those ancient, creaking steps lies the North Greenville University art department. Art students spend their college careers hidden away in this upper level of the Eddie Runion Creative Arts center. They spend hours manipulating clay for sculptures, washing and rewashing paint-caked brushes, carving prints in linoleum and refining the lighting for a perfect photo. Late at night, when the English majors type away at papers from the comfort of their own beds, many art majors dutifully hole up in the Runion studios. Speeding cars along North Tigerville Road might notice the fluorescent-yellow light flooding from the upper windows.
These art students will spend their entire college careers creating in this artistic niche.
Unless, of course, they don’t pass their sophomore review.
According to the North Greenville University catalog (2017-18), a student passes the sophomore review based on his or her portfolio’s originality and strength of expression, visual intelligence, maturity and craftsmanship. Their portfolio contains all work produced in the lower level art core: Drawing 1 and 2, Design Theory 1 and 2 and Digital Imagery. A panel of art professors evaluate each rising junior’s portfolio based on those four qualities and then determine whether each stu-dent will proceed to the upper core. Also, once a student passes, he or she declares a concentration (ceramics, graphic art, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking or sculpture).
The sophomore review is a common practice in many colleges’ art departments—for justifiable reasons. Art is a subjective and highly competitive field.
The Department of Labor’s 2016 employment statistics for Greenville county indicate art and design jobs comprise one percent of total employment—which is just 0.4 percent less than the United States’ average. Furthermore, these percentages refer to a broad category of art and design jobs. Presumably, studio artists comprise an even smaller percent of employment. Art and design jobs are scarce, and an influx of mediocre art graduates could saturate an already saturated field.
So the rigorous art curriculum and mandatory check are in the students’ best interests.
But that doesn’t make the process any easier.
If you just look at Tori Cantrell’s hands, you might guess she’s an art major. She gestures her henna-stained hands in brush-like movements as she recalls her own sophomore check.
Now a senior studio art major, Cantrell recounts her sophomore check with little hindsight bias.
“This is what God has got for me,” Cantrell says, remembering her mantra for her sophomore year. “I know that God has me in the art department, and if that’s true, I’m going to pass as long as I do my best.”
But she still remembers nervously sitting in the room while her professors pored over her portfolio. After they reviewed her work, they made comments and zeroed in on problem areas. But still, she passed.
While no recent art majors have failed their sophomore check, some students have realized art wasn’t for them by their first or second semester in the program, she explains.
“Honestly, once you get into Design 2,” Cantrell says, “if you’re not dedicated to it, it’ll weed you out.”
The art department is the only department with a clear-cut sophomore review. However, other departments, like the education program, have a similar process.
The Praxis 1 and acceptance into the Teacher Education Program loom at the end of sopho-more year for education majors, explained Bree Joplin, a junior secondary English education major. Notecards with phrases like “socioeconomic standing in students” pile around her while she mindlessly stabs her pen into her hand. She exempted the Praxis 1 due to her ACT score and GPA, but many education students still had to take the $120 exam. The exam tests potential education majors on broad categories like philosophy. And, in her experience, most people end up passing it since multiple tries are allowed.
However, the teaching field is not quite so competitive as the art field, in Joplin’s opinion. Most education graduates end up finding a job.
“There’s always jobs; you just have to find them,” Joplin explains. “And be willing to move if you have to.”
Indeed, education comprises 5.5 percent of employment in Greenville county and 6.2 per-cent in the United States.
Odds are better for the education major than the art major—or at least, the Department of Labor implies that.
And yet, both majors have some sort of sophomore review. The hard sciences, like biology and mathematics, rely on natural selection to weed out the weaker students. Organic chemistry and calculus aren’t exactly classes a mediocre student can float through. So perhaps, a sophomore check would be superfluous in those majors. But then again, communication and theatre majors have no sophomore review–despite classes being more like art classes than science. Could other majors take a page from the art department?
And according to Cantrell, the sophomore check isn’t even as difficult as the senior show. She remembers seniors crying over the immense amount of work the senior show entails. And on rare occasions, some seniors have even failed their shows.
The art department has a project-based curriculum, which is perhaps why the sophomore check and senior show work effectively in the department. The subjective projects need some objective quantification, through reviews, theories and papers.
Art majors have a taxing journey to their diplomas: projects, critiques and the sophomore review. And for a major some dismiss as easy, the art department challenges students in their courses and techniques.
So the next time you cruise past the Runion Center, consider how hard those students worked to secure their spots in the studio. And maybe, consider how different your major would be with a sophomore check.
