College of Fine Arts Fast Facts

  • As the state’s only comprehensive college of fine arts, WSU’s College of Fine Arts brings together all of the visual and performing arts within one college
  • It offers students the chance to train with legends (such as faculty opera stars Sam Ramey and Alan Held) and showcase skills in venues big and small throughout Kansas’ center of arts and culture.
  • WSU is a haven for creativity and is home to theaters, labs and studios—and more than 500 annual fine arts performances and presentations each year.
  • The Ulrich Museum of Art’s collection contains more than 6,000 works of modern and contemporary art.
  • The campus boasts one of the largest and most renowned outdoor sculpture collections of its kind.
  • Wiedemann Hall is home to the great Marcussen organ, the first of its kind to be built in North America.
  • WSU students get free admissions to all fine arts performances.
  • Wichita State alumni Joyce DiDonato, Samuel Ramey, Alan Held and James Billings are Grammy-winning opera singers. Karla Burns is a Tony-nominated Broadway performers.
  • The distinctive mural by Joan Miro that adorns the exterior of the Ulrich Museum is composed of more than one million pieces of colored venetian glass. It is the only mural the Spanish master created on the North American continent.
  • WSU students, faculty and staff comprise about 85 percent of the professional Wichita Symphony Orchestra.
  • SHIFTSPACE gallery is WSU’s student-run gallery, located in downtown Wichita, which brings WSU artists and the community together.
  • Shocker Studios offers an interdisciplinary BAA in media arts (one of only a handful in the country)—with creative tracks in animation, audio production, game design and filmmaking.
  • The only dance program in the state to be nationally accredited by the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD).