Visual Culture, Arts, and Media VCAM

Haverford’s new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility is a 24/7 creative hub for students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.

VCAM houses the College’s Interdisciplinary Minor in Visual Studies, the Haverford Innovations Program, a Maker Arts Space, and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and its Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives initiative.

Interior shot of VCAM showing all three levels of the building

VCAM Wins SCUP/AIA-CAE Honorable Mention

VCAM has received a SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture for Building Additions or Adaptive Reuse Honorable Mention. The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) Excellence Awards program is a juried competition that showcases how using strategic, integrated planning can result in exemplary buildings, grounds, institutional success, and careers that inspire.

VCAM sign on the wall inside the building

VCAM featured in Architecture MN

Joel Hoekstra writes that the building "allow[s] makers of every stripe to indulge their creativity—whether it’s baking cookies, crafting a documentary, or soldering a motherboard—whenever the impulse strikes."

A student films in the VCAM using a green screen

VCAM Wins AIA Minnesota Honor Award

VCAM is one of four projects to win an AIA Minnesota Honor Award this year.

VCAM Featured in Architectural Record

Describing the building’s multilevel insertion, Josephine Minutillo writes, “It’s the way those spaces in the new block interact with the rest of the building that makes the project sing.”

Strange Truth 2019

Strange Truth 2019 explores the non-fiction imagination in the film and installation work of mediamakers Christopher Harris, Laura Parnes, Jonathan Olshefski, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon. This year’s series engages with the politics of place, race, history, performance, and cinema itself.

Humanists as Builders

Modern Language Association PMLA recognizes VCAM as a model for interdisciplinary education in the 21st century. Photo: Lara Swimmer Photography.

Inside the VCAM building, a view of three stories

VCAM Building Wins National Education Facility Design Award

Haverford's new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media space in the repurposed Old Gym has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects' 2018 awards program for its innovative and sustainable design.

A view of the VCAM box with Casablanca being projected on the wall

VCAM Welcome from the Director

Welcome to VCAM—a material realization of a key feature of the College’s vision for a 21st-century liberal arts education: that is, the development of students as interpreters and makers of visual media in spaces made for this work.

COOL CLASSES: “Art and the Environment in East Asia”

This course, which is cross-listed in East Asian languages and cultures, environmental studies, and visual studies, examines the relationship between environment and the arts in China and Japan—particularly how artists engage with and respond to nature through varied modes of artistic production and exhibition.