Haverford is rich with academic and extracurricular offerings in the arts and is alive with culture, enhancing the intellectual and aesthetic life of the College.
Haverford is brimming with opportunities to see, hear, and create art. Both the orchestra and various singing groups (such as Chamber Singers and the Chorale) perform regularly. The Union Music Building houses classrooms, practice rooms, the music library, and a small recital hall. The Music Department's Guest Artist Series presents distinguished and emerging performers in public concerts, master classes, lecture-demonstrations, reading sessions, and informal encounters. The Fine Arts Center contains studios for painting and sculpture, photography darkrooms, a woodshop, and student exhibition space. The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, located in the Whitehead Campus Center, presents art exhibitions from the College's collection and from loaned collections of individuals, galleries, and museums. Exhibitions include work from nationally renowned artists as well as artwork by Haverford faculty, students, and alums.
Take A Peek...
Watch and listen to Haverford Students discuss the Arts at Haverford. (2:54)
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The John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities serves as the center for coordinating many of the arts initiatives on campus, and regularly provides funding for student organized seminars, student reading groups, and student initiated arts events. In addition, the campus enjoys regular student-run musical theater productions, a cappella concerts, and other events.
There are a number of ambitious initiatives to enhance the arts at Haverford in the works, including a Creative Residencies Program, which will support up to four annual residencies: one each for the Fine Arts and Music Department and two more campus-wide residencies that will be available to other departments or departmental collaborations; the Curricular Initiative in Visual Culture which will broaden Haverford's engagement with the arts by establishing a new endowed fund to support faculty development in the broad area of visual culture, and to establish a new Post-Doctoral Fellow in Visual Culture to bring to Haverford recently minted Ph.D.s whose interests center on the study of visual culture; the College Art Collections Management and Exhibition Program, which will establish a key professional staff and provide the financial resources they need in order to begin to introduce the College's collections to the campus and wider community; and the Student-Initiated Arts Activity Fund, which will be a new endowed fund that will make it possible to develop a strong co-curricular arts program that will make it possible for Haverford students to pursue creative interests that build upon, complement and go beyond the offerings of our formal curriculum. Haverford's campus master plan also foresees the eventual construction of a comprehensive arts facility.
James House is a student-governed home for the arts. Located in the renovated Safety and Security building, the space is a comfortable, relaxed place for art-inclined students to hang out. James House also provides meeting space for the musical theater group Greasepaint Productions and the Haverford Review literary magazine, and offers studio space for ceramics with a kiln, wheels and other necessary equipment, and numerous closets for art supplies and storage. There's also an all-purpose room located in another wing of the house which may be used for meditation, and an ample supply of board games, Play-Doh, and odds and ends that can be used for collage, sculpture, and anything else that one might dream up.