Yale University School of Art

About

Yale began teaching the fine arts in the late 1860s, among the first American universities to do so. Its modern reputation dates from the 1950s, when Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, led the design department. Albers taught colour as a matter of relationships, through exercises with sheets of coloured paper later gathered in Interaction of Color (1963), training students to test perception rather than follow rules.

Graduates of the late 1950s and 1960s included Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Brice Marden and Nancy Graves. Alvin Eisenman built one of the first graduate programmes in graphic design, with Paul Rand among the teachers, and Walker Evans taught photography from the mid-1960s. Later painters such as John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas studied there, and the photographers Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson graduated from its photography programme.