Contact: Christie McNeal
STARKVILLE, Miss.—A longtime faculty member and coordinator of sculpture at Mississippi State is the university’s new head of the Department of Art.
Effective July 1, Associate Professor Critz Campbell will lead the College of Architecture, Art and Design department, home of the state’s largest undergraduate studio art program.
Campbell said he wants “to ensure that students receive a world-class education that prepares them to contribute to the conversations and concepts of contemporary art and design while growing our creative economy.”
Teaching in the department since 2005, the West Point native was hired into the university’s first tenure-track position for sculpture.
“Mississippi is my home, and working at Mississippi State has become the greatest gift of my career,” Campbell said. “The opportunity to prepare students for creative lives and to expand the expectations of what that means is deeply gratifying and important to our department and Mississippi’s future. This is especially true in the rapidly changing world of visual communication.”
He continued, “I am excited to move us forward as the premier art department in the state and to broaden our visibility and impact nationally.”
Campbell earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990. He studied as a post-graduate exchange student at the Arco Centro de Communicao Visual in Lisbon; at Penland School of Crafts as a CORE Fellow; and at Parnham College in the United Kingdom with a focus on furniture design. He is a trustee on Penland School of Craft’s board, where he chairs the personnel committee and serves on the executive and programming committees. He is a recent recipient of the 2019 Jane Crater Hiatt Fellowship from the Mississippi Museum of Art.
For more on the College of Architecture, Art and Design and its Department of Art, visit www.caad.msstate.edu and www.caad.msstate.edu/academics/majors/art. Campbell’s work may be viewed at www.critzcampbell.com.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.