The eight-week program in “the most creative city in America” will provide opportunities to explore some of the greatest movies, paintings, and photographs in the European and American traditions.

Santa Fe, NM [October 26, 2026] — The Graduate Institute at St. John’s College Santa Fe has announced the launch of a new Summer Visual Arts Program, a comprehensive eight-week program including seminars, tutorials, a preceptorial, and a lab component. In Santa Fe, which researchers recently dubbed “the most creative city in the United States” thanks to its art openings, galleries, and museums, students will have opportunities to learn about great works of visual art and explore profound questions about the artworks they study together on and off campus.

“The Summer Visual Arts Program extends the distinctive approach to learning of St. John’s College to a broader community of learners. By bringing together great works of art, classics, and thoughtful conversations, the program invites students to experience how the St. John’s way of learning can open new ways of seeing, questioning, and understanding the world,” says St. John’s College President J. Walter Sterling. “We are delighted to offer an opportunity in which the arts become not simply objects of appreciation, but invitations to the kind of inquiry and conversation at the heart of the St. John’s education.”

Students will examine some of the greatest movies, paintings, and photographs in the European and American traditions, while reading and discussing a selection of classic readings in aesthetics. In addition to learning from the greatest artists in the Western tradition, students will also perform basic exercises in drawing, sketching, and composition to discover what they learn from the artworks and see from the world around themselves. The program will visit works of various artists and thinkers—from Plato to Heidegger, da Vinci to Rothko, Atget to Arbus, Keaton to Lynch.