While thousands of art students attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston every year, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, better known as MassArt, also in Boston, attracts the more alternative-minded art enthusiasts. The school offers undergraduate programs in an array of modern art subjects, such as animation and graphic design, as well as environmental and industrial design. MassArt also provides hands-on workspaces. One of these, the Studio for Interrelated Media, is meant to encourage the blending of art, including sound installations and robotics.
Although Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is a full-range liberal arts school, its art department is well known and, more importantly, employs some of the more original alternative teaching methods in the country. Rather than focusing on grades and predefined majors, Hampshire allows students to design their own curriculum, and evaluates them on their portfolio of work as a whole. This enables art students to create their own custom major by combining such areas of study as animation or environmental design with other non-art programs, such as psychology or even animal behavior.
A relatively young school, Savannah College of Art and Design, commonly known as SCAD, was founded in 1978 and has since offered modern artistic subjects ranging from interactive game design to urban architecture design. The school now has study programs in foreign cities, including Hong Kong and Lacoste, France. The former focuses on high-technology art subjects, including motion media design and game development, while the latter takes place in a commune in Provence and focuses on sculpting, painting and photography.
Located in one of the most alternative-leaning cities in the country, Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, was established by the Portland Museum in 1910. Much smaller than nearby Reed college, PNCA has a student body of fewer than 600 people, and the campus is spread among warehouses in the city's Pearl district. The nine undergraduate degrees PNCA offers include contemporary animated arts and an intermedia major, in which students are encouraged to explore interdisciplinary art through combined media. The school also offers an MFA in applied crafts and design, which includes environmental and industrial art design study.