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Fine Arts & Design Studios (FADS)

Fueling a desire to create, FADS includes hallway gallery spaces, a covered outdoor courtyard and a first-floor multiple-use classroom.

Students creating in a Fine Arts & Design Studio graphic design classroom

Just steps away from the Midwest Trust Center, the Wylie Hospitality and Culinary Academy, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Fine Arts & Design Studios (FADS) facility exudes synergy and imagination.

FADS contains the following programs:

Within this 37,000-square-feet facility, you’ll find:

  • Hallway gallery spaces that allow you to regularly experience art and challenge you to think beyond the classroom.
  • A covered outdoor courtyard, which functions as a year-round workspace for student and faculty artists alike.
  • Top-notch safety features, including ventilated studios, separate spaces for metalworking and woodshop, and more.
  • A first-floor multiple-use classroom that promotes cross-discipline collaboration.

The addition to campus joins the Wylie Hospitality and Culinary Academy and our performing and visual arts facilities – the Midwest Trust Center and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art – to create an Arts Neighborhood.

“In the fine arts are these silos of specialties, but the trend is to break through those silos,” says Fine Arts Professor Mark Cowardin. “Painters are embracing more materials, and sculptors are working with ceramics and drawing. We want that sort of cross-pollination, not only with our students but with our professors. We are encouraging a creativity zone where we can build on our reputation and present to our students the opportunity for innovation.”

Excellent facilities allow JCCC to work with the best students. This expanded, modern environment is a creativity zone, allowing us to build on our reputation and introduce students to a new kind of innovation. This increases exposure and encourages enrollment in the creative arts, an industry that’s crucial to the future of Kansas City’s economic growth.

Expect to find students like Valerie Hird making the most of this new building. Hird’s high school counselor advised her to enjoy art as a hobby, not a career, so she enrolled in a nursing program. She intended to do art on the side but found herself physically and emotional exhausted at the end of the day.

Then she discovered graphic design.

“Life just isn’t the same when you’re not making something,” says Hird, who is enrolled in the Graphic Design program. “I know a degree from JCCC will prepare me, and I’ll have something the market will value.”