- A Brief History of the Department:
Before now, there existed two separate departments, which were the Department of Fine Arts, and Department of Applied Arts, under the defunct Faculty of Creative Arts before their merger in 1987 to become the Department of Fine and applied Arts, under Faculty of Arts. The Department is currently under the Faculty of Environmental Sciences in line with NUC requirements as obtainable in other Institutions. Presently the Department has been split into two Departments namely Department of Visual Arts and Department of Industrial Design, awaiting NUC resource verification exercise.At the moment, there are seven areas of specialization namely: Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Graphic Design, Textile Design/Technology, Metal Design and Art History. All these seven units offer compulsory courses where Drawing, Art Education, Art History and Computer Aided Design (CAD) are required courses for all the areas of specialization in the Department and students are expected to register them.
For the type of education that would be relevant to the Nigerian University graduate of Fine Arts or the Applied Arts, the current state of the discipline needs a change in the direction for the Fine Arts that will be relevant to the future. Without this, the Fine Arts programme content as it is at the moment in the Department would be quite irrelevant or inadequate for the students as they graduate, especially with the contemporary sophistication of the world in terms of technology. This is the reason for the restructuring/review of the existing programmes as it obtains at present in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts.
