Visual & Studio Arts

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1060

Technical exploration, perception, development of ideas, intuition, invention, representation, and communication are at the core of this class. The course will begin in an observational mode, introducing practical information about the fundamentals of painting: color, shape, tone, edge, composition, perspective, and surface. We will paint still lifes and transcribe a masterwork. The work of both old masters and contemporary painters will be looked at. We will take a trip to a museum to look at paintings in the flesh. The course will include demonstrations of materials and techniques, slide presentations, films and videos, reading materials, homework assignments, group and individual critiques. In the second half of the course, we will complete a series of projects exploring design principles as applied to nonobjective (abstract) artworks. Using paint, with preparatory collages and drawings, we will engage with strategies for utilizing nonobjective imagery towards self-directed content. Each week will bring a new problem, with lessons culminating in independent paintings. Projects will emphasize brainstorming multiple answers to visual problems over selecting the first solution that comes to mind. The last part of the course will be devoted to a personal project. Students will establish their theme of interest, which they will present during our conference meetings; then will carry out research and preparatory work to develop a series of paintings. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to solve painting problems and illuminate visual ideas. Revisions are a natural and mandatory part of this course. The majority of class time will be spent in a studio/work mode as a lab, where ideas are being worked out and meaning is made. It is important that students are curious and travel to unexpected places rather than merely relying on existing skills and experiences, instead challenging themselves to openness and progress. The process will be part critical thinking, part intuition, and in large part physical labor. Working rigorously inside and outside of class is required. The goal is to establish the roots of a healthy and generative personal studio practice. Students will also strengthen their knowledge of art history and take into consideration the wider cultural, historical, and social contexts within which art is being made today. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• Yevgeniya Baras

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1314

This studio course will look at art-making through a sustainable lens. How can artists create in an ecological way? How can we imagine an alternate future through art-making? How can we use visual art to communicate ideas when language fails? We will explore various modes of creation—working with found objects, engaging the landscape, temporal artworks, and ecological narratives. We will look at different modes of sculptural creation, thinking about the material footprint and the life of the artwork beyond the studio. Studio work will be accompanied by an analysis of historical and contemporary artists whose work addresses ideas around sustainability and the environment, including Walter de Maria, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maren Hassinger, Agnes Denes, Maya Lin, Meg Webster, Amy Balkin, Delcy Morelos, Mark Dion, and Theaster Gates. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• Katie Bell

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1350

Although amateurs often confuse the terms, "abstract video" is a new art form that is very different from the experimental film movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Often drawing from the digital worlds of games, signal processing, 3D modeling, and computational media, abstract video has become an important new aspect of art installation, site-specific sculpture, and gallery presentations. This project course will be an introduction to the use of video as a material for the visual artists. Using open-source software and digital techniques, students will create several small works of video abstraction intended for gallery installation, ambient surrounds, and new media screens. Artists will include Refik Anadol, the Light Surgeons, Ryoji Ikeda, and more. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• Angela Ferraiolo

First-Year Studies—Fall and Spring

ARTS 1000

Using small, hands-on projects, this project aims for digital and computational literacy in interactive and installation art. Discussions and prompts survey foundational concepts of these new art forms, including noise, feedback, emergence, and generative artificial intelligence. This project is required for first-year students in architecture, drawing, new genres, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. In fall and spring, students will meet weekly as a group, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies ARTS course.

Faculty

• Angela Ferraiolo

First-Year Studies—Fall and Spring

ARTS 1000

Note: Taught by John O'Connor in fall and Vera Iliatova in spring.

Through hands-on projects, discussions, and critiques, students will experiment with developing ideas across mediums—drawing, sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and more. Sessions will include multidisciplinary workshops, artist talks, and advising conversations, introducing students to each other and to the breadth of visual-arts disciplines. With a goal to foster camaraderie and cross-disciplinary exploration, the course will culminate in a group gallery show connecting first-year artists with the wider college community. In fall and spring, students will meet weekly as a group; corequisite First-Year Studies ARTS course.

Faculty

• Vera Iliatova
• John O’Connor

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1007

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of relief printing techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Students will work with linoleum and woodblock materials. Students will develop drawing skills through the printmaking medium and experiment with value structure, composition, mark making, and interaction of color. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using printing equipment, printing an edition, critically discussing one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented by technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• Vera Iliatova

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1057

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. Students will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• John O’Connor

First-Year Studies—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 1022

A photograph presented alone and without a description in words is a simple utterance. “Ooh,” “Aah,” and “Huh?” are its proper responses. When pictures are presented in groups with accompanying text (of any length) and perhaps in conjunction with political or poetic conceptual strategies, any statement becomes possible. The photographs can begin to function as a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire treatise. Whether working in fiction, nonfiction, or in a fictive space, artists such as Robert Frank, Jim Goldberg, Roni Horn, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, and numerous others have been in the process of transforming photography with their work. Or perhaps they have created a medium: the new narrative photography. In this course, students will initially study the work of these “narrative” photographers and either write about their work or make pictures in response to it. The culmination of this experience will be students’ creation of their own bodies of work. If you have a story to tell, a statement to make, or a phenomenon that you wish to study and describe, this course is open to you. No previous photographic experience or special equipment is necessary. The opportunity to forge a new medium is rare. This course will aim to create the forum and the conditions necessary for all to do so in a critical and supportive workshop environment. Photographers studied will include: Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Sophie Calle, Eve Sonneman, Bill Owens, Bill Burke, Adrian Piper, Hamish Fulton, Susan Meiselas, Anne Turyn, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Tacita Dean, Alfredo Jaar, Allan Sekula, Gillian Wearing, Taryn Simon, Joel Sternfeld, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Sussman, Shirin Neshat, Richard Prince, Clarissa Sligh, Wendy Ewald, Lawrence Weiner, Jim Goldberg, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paul Graham, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Walker Evans, Eugene Smith, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Chris Verene, Larry Sultan, Diana Markosian, Helen Levitt, and more. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Faculty

• Joel Sternfeld

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3367

This course will look at typologies of labor, with their embedded leisure and amenities used as tools for greater work output. Questions will arise regarding the work/life versus work/leisure paradigm and the blurred line between them. Counter examples will include the festivals and fairgrounds as a site of leisure and the home that functions as a device of release from work; but is work still happening on these sites? Through readings and other media—drawing, collage, and mapping—students will identify the experiences in these materials, how they function with or against the norms of society, and what the future of these spaces linked to “play” symbolizes for them. What aspects of leisure are considered necessity versus desire, and what is the role of aesthetics in these spaces? Students will design an intervention of the chosen site as a means of critique, analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual design within our present political, social, economic, and climatic issues—which are inextricably linked to our production and reproduction, with labor and leisure at its core.

Faculty

• Nick Roseboro

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3559

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition and corresponding exhibition catalogue on domestic space. Students will research the house, based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

Faculty

• Nick Roseboro

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3057

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. We will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice.

Faculty

• John O’Connor

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3045

Prerequisite: one semester of a drawing, painting, or sculpture course

This course will invite students to engage with the environment in a variety of art in both traditional and nontraditional ways. The course will begin with a short workshop of “en plen air” watercolor painting techniques, moving toward offsite field trips. Students will then engage with organic materials in the creation of both art materials and drawing and painting instruments. The course will end with a curated public-engagement project generated by the students. Students will complete projects that could include creating an archive, following a lifecyle, building an herbarium, or writing a field guide—all of which encourage students to work out of the studio and in the “expanded field.”

Faculty

• Marion Wilson

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3049

A three-part course, students will first use water-based media in both traditional and nontraditional ways to create evocative paintings on paper with pigments (both art and non-art) suspended in water. Watercolor is one of the oldest pigment-based media and continues to be used widely by artists, illustrators, designers, and architects in finished paintings or as preparatory studies and, thus, will be one focus of the class. This course will introduce some of the effects of layering, transparency, translucency, and absorbency inherent in the watercolor medium. We will use landscape, portraiture, and other subject matter to represent water, light, flesh, atmosphere, and solid earth. In conferences, students will be able to explore a specific theme or content. Students will also learn sustainable painting practices through organically-created pigments. The second sequence of this course will use the human form while considering the ways the body has been represented and used in art of the 21st century. Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color have transformed the way we see and construct the world, as well as how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame in part from an exhibition curated by Apsara DiQuinzio at Berkeley Art Museum in 2022, course work prompts will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, and gender alchemy. The course’s third emphasis will be on the development and understanding of an artist’s practice. Through studying visiting artists, the use of the watercolor blocks, and specific assignments, students will bring their practice out into the world.

Faculty

• Marion Wilson

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3450

This course will be about extraterrestrial ambivalence, the tragedy of the cyber commons, haunted houses and dead malls, pissing in the data stream, putting sugar in the gas tank, and creepy crawling toward ambiguous utopias. Through shared readings, discussions, guest interventions, and lectures, students and residents of the Wartburg Senior Living Facility will collaboratively create a text for performance, treating the ensemble, the classroom, and the commune as imperfect, messy sites for speculating about the future. We will traverse the slow-motion disasters of capital and collapse, its false horizons and concealed architectures, anarchist thought, and ontological slippage. Taking an intergenerational and cross-disciplinary approach, we will assemble a fractured, provisional text. The resulting work will consider an imagined future imbued with the inherent instability of cooperation, language, and shared authorship. Students will engage in writing exercises in small groups and in collaboration with Wartburg residents to craft characters, fictional oral histories, and speculative futures that will serve as the foundation for a collectively written performance text. Our work will expand into a companion course in the spring, where students will collaboratively bring the written text to life through devised performance, puppets, objects, costumes, music, and sets, culminating in a public performance developed in ongoing dialogue with Wartburg residents.

Faculty

• Tura Oliveira

Advanced, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

ARTS 4112

Prerequisite: at least 25 visual-arts credits and permission of the instructor; additional creative-arts credits considered

Note: Taught by John O'Connor in fall and Katie Bell in spring.

This course is designed for seniors committed to deepening their art-making practice over an extended period. Students will maintain individual studio spaces and are expected to work independently, creatively, and critically—challenging both themselves and their peers to explore new ways of thinking and making. The course will include prompts that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to art and culminates in a solo gallery exhibition during the spring, accompanied by a printed book documenting the show. Students will engage in regular critiques with visiting artists and faculty; discuss readings and a range of artists; visit galleries and studios; and participate in the Visual Arts Lecture Series, a program of lectures given by prominent contemporary artists and held at Sarah Lawrence College. Beyond studio work, students will develop skills in presenting their work—including writing artist statements and exhibition proposals, interviewing artists, and documenting their art. A series of professional-practice workshops will further prepare students for life beyond college.

Faculty

• John O’Connor
• Katie Bell

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3418

Making a drawing is always a kind of performance. Through any means necessary, a body reaches across time and space to make contact with its world. This course will explore how and why drawings get made through diverse intentions and contexts. Guided by contemporary and modern art historical precedents, we will explore the dynamic and intertwined relationship between performance art and other interdisciplinary approaches to drawing. In our weekly hands-on studio work, students will respond to a guiding question or theme. We will use both conventional and unorthodox materials and experiment with everyday objects. For example, in asking where does my body end and space begin, we will construct our own sculptural apparatuses and body extensions to produce our images. Coursework will also involve conceptual exploration that culminates in a final project of students’ own choosing. Open to all skill levels, this course is designed for those interested in process-based inquiry. Potential concepts or themes include: embodiment and phenomenology, identity and culture, memory and time, technology and digital media, collaboration and interactive art, vibrant matter and ecologies.

Faculty

• Kerry Downey

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3455

Note: Prior participation in the fall course is not required.

An echo, response, and expansion of the fall course, Future-Tense Liquidation I: Collaboration, Speculation, and Archaeologies of the Future (ARTS 3450), this course will invite students and Wartburg residents to bring to life the speculative, intergenerational text developed in fall by animating it through performance. The course will center on the messy, collective act of making through puppetry, movement, sound, installation, and costume. Futures paved over, marked down, seized, sold to the highest bidder...in this course, we open the body and the performance up to possession by the ghosts of those dispossessed futures. Students will work in small groups and in ongoing workshops and dialogue with Wartburg residents to generate the visual, sonic, and material world of the piece: building objects, writing songs, choreographing gestures, and repurposing debris. Emphasis will be placed on collaboration across difference, material experimentation, and the unpredictability of process. Readings and references from fall will remain in rotation, with new material introduced in response to the needs of the developing work. Guest artists in sound, movement, and performance will guide workshops at Wartburg attended and facilitated by SLC students. The course will culminate in a public-performance event, with all its seams, fractures, and ambiguities visible. This course welcomes students in visual art, theatre, performance, music, video, sound, design, dance, writing, or any other interdisciplinary practice.

Faculty

• Tura Oliveira

Open, Seminar—Fall and Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3350

Although amateurs often confuse the terms, “abstract video” is a new art form that is very different from the experimental film movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Often drawing from the digital worlds of games, signal processing, 3D modeling, and computational media, abstract video has become an important new aspect of art installation, site-specific sculpture, and gallery presentations. This project course will be an introduction to the use of video as a material for the visual artists. Using open-source software and digital techniques, students will create several small works of video abstraction intended for gallery installation, ambient surrounds, and new-media screens. Artists studied will include Refik Anadol, the Light Surgeons, Ryoji Ikeda, and more.

Faculty

• Angela Ferraiolo

Intermediate, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

ARTS 3353

Prerequisite: New Genres: Abstract Video (ARTS 3350), New Genres: Diary Forms Artificial Intelligence (ARTS 3351), or New Genres: Art from Code (ARTS 3392)

This course will be a hands-on, project-based studio that explores special topics in art and technology, including generative art, simulation, interactive narrative, artificial intelligence, interactive sound, and immersive transmediality. Students will be expected to experiment with a wide range of electronic practices and will be guided through the design of individualized reading lists and tutorials based on personal interest. Students should plan on producing two portfolio works of interactive, computational, or artificial-intelligence art and at least one comprehensive, yearlong installation project that expands upon skills, conceptual thinking, and creativity.

Faculty

• Angela Ferraiolo

Open, Concept—Fall | 2 credits

ARTS 3071

In this course, we will explore the process of collage as a method for creating dynamic compositions. Collage is a way to communicate complex emotions, layered ideas, and nonlinear stories. We will learn different techniques of collage, using found materials, photographs, and craft supplies. Collage will be utilized as a preparation toward making a series of paintings that will also become a part of paintings. At the core of this class is openness to material experimentation, interest in learning how to communicate through paint as well as nontraditional painting materials, and learning about other artists who have used collage and assemblage in their work. The class follows a series of prompts or visual problems posed by the instructor. By the end of the course, a series of works will be produced. Each student will investigate topics of interest through methods of collage and painting. Some visual materials that we will reference are stained-glass windows, quilts, tiles, mail art, and book art, as well as artists who have used/use collage in their paintings/drawings/sculpture today. 

Faculty

• Yevgeniya Baras

Open, Concept—Fall | 2 credits

ARTS 3087

In this course, we will look at ways in which we can build a collection of inspiration and research. Guided by students’ interests and previous knowledge, we will use this research to work toward a body of paintings that pushes past expectations. This will take form as readings, exploratory walks, in-class collaboration, weekly prompts, and longer projects. This course will be guided by the principle that artists can work intentionally toward research and that there is also unexpected research that happens when you are curious and open. We will discuss and play with strategies for facilitating both. We will talk about artists’ collections and Wunderkammers, also known as cabinets of curiosities, and students will be encouraged to build their own collection over the course of the semester. This course will be a supportive environment for those just starting out, as well as for students with more making experience.

Faculty

• Niki Kriese

Open, Seminar—Fall and Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3060

Technical exploration, perception, development of ideas, intuition, invention, representation, and communication are at the core of this class. The course will begin in an observational mode, introducing practical information about the fundamentals of painting: color, shape, tone, edge, composition, perspective, and surface. We will paint still lifes and transcribe a masterwork. We will look at the work of both old masters and contemporary painters. We will take a trip to a museum to look at paintings in the flesh. The course will include demonstrations of materials and techniques, slide presentations, films and videos, reading materials, homework assignments, and group and individual critiques. In the second half of the course, we will complete a series of projects exploring design principles as applied to nonobjective (abstract) artworks. Using paint, with preparatory collages and drawings, we will engage with strategies for utilizing nonobjective imagery toward self-directed content. Each week will bring a new problem, with lessons culminating in independent paintings. Projects will emphasize brainstorming multiple answers to visual problems over selecting the first solution that comes to mind. The last part of the course will be devoted to a personal project. Students will establish their theme of interest, which they will present during conference meetings; then, they will carry out research and preparatory work to develop a series of paintings. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to solve painting problems and illuminate visual ideas. Revisions are a natural and mandatory part of the course. The majority of class time will be spent in a studio/work mode—as a lab where ideas are being worked out and meaning is made. It is important that students are curious and travel to unexpected places rather than merely relying on existing skills and experiences, instead challenging themselves to openness and progress. The process will be part critical thinking, part intuition, and in large part physical labor. Working rigorously inside and outside of class is required. The goal is to establish the roots of a healthy and generative personal studio practice. Students will also strengthen their knowledge of art history and take into consideration the wider cultural, historical, and social contexts within which art is being made today.

Faculty

• Yevgeniya Baras

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall and Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3479

Prerequisite: Introduction to Painting (ARTS 3060) or equivalent

This course will start with a foundation of figure drawing and painting to set the stage for further exploration in identity, collaboration, and touch. We will use the body as an opportunity to build skills in proportion and perspective but also to consider the body as a location of power and vulnerability. From lectures and independent research, we will learn about traditional and experimental portraiture and think about how we can use both to communicate. We will consider the different roles involved in a work of art (maker, collaborator, subject, viewer, etc.). We will discuss topics such as clothing and fashion, agency, the five senses, and Frankenstein, to name a few. There will be an emphasis on working from observation, as well as from imagination, invention, and material experimentation. We will begin with weekly prompts and transition to longer projects and incorporate conference work, building toward a body of 8-12 completed paintings.

Faculty

• Niki Kriese

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3426

This course will introduce students to the practice and principles of performance art, exploring diverse ways of using the body in relation to audience, site/context, and duration. Performance art’s ties to experimental and avant-garde movements and modes of political resistance make it an ideal medium for exploring themes of identity and power and, equally, forms of improvisational play. Students will develop their own performance style of expression unique to their creative and intellectual interests. As a highly adaptive and interdisciplinary medium, this course will invite students to combine performance art with other visual-arts mediums (painting, sculpture, installation, and video) and to activate any past experiences in theatre, dance, music, ritual, comedy, athletics, and more.

Faculty

• Kerry Downey

Open, Concept—Fall | 2 credits

ARTS 3156

While every image that we create contains an element of the self, only the self-portrait holds the photographer’s distinct personal perspective at its center. As we grapple with fluctuating times and shifting notions of identity, we will explore the ways in which the practice of self-portraiture can also shift. How can we challenge and expand the boundaries of this way of making work? The work of photographers who have used a variety of modes of self-portraiture will be presented for robust discussion, among them Tarrah Krajnak, Paul Sepuya, and Carrie Mae Weems. Through weekly exercises and supported by in-class critique, students will experiment with a variety of alternative approaches to the self-portrait—still life, landscape, portraiture, and more conceptual and collaborative practices, such as text art—alongside traditional methods, with the aim of finding an individual approach to the expression of the self.

Faculty

• Samantha Box

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3135

The shifting ways in which identity has been articulated, both historically and contemporaneously—such as around class, race, gender, queerness, religion, diaspora, or the intersection of those ideas—makes this conceptual space one that is ripe for examination, deconstruction, and reformation along one’s embodied understanding of self. In this course, we will examine the work of photographers from the 19th century to the present. who have used various strategies—from documentary image-making to portraiture and self-portraiture, still-life, and landscape—to place identity at the center of their practice. Key contextual readings will provide an understanding of the histories and politics surrounding these practices. Concomitantly, through assignments and supported by in-class critique, students will experiment with these modes of image-making—ultimately creating a body of work that articulates, through imagery, the personal vocabulary of their identity/identities.

Faculty

• Samantha Box

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3166

From the inception of photography, images have served as a means of identification, as seen in mugshots, and in misidentification, as exemplified by Cindy Sherman’s portraits where she adopts the personas of Hollywood B-movie starlets. In this course, we will explore various paradigms of self-transformation through photography. We will study artists who engage in this practice and use their work as prompts for creative exploration. We will look specifically at the work of Hippolyte Bayard, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Anna Gaskell, Nicki Lee, Gillian Wearing, and others. The ultimate goal of the course will be to examine the nature of the self, the possibilities of self-reinvention, and the role of the camera as a tool for transformation.

Faculty

• Joel Sternfeld

Open, Concept—Fall | 2 credits

ARTS 3031

In 1981, Sally Eauclaire summed up the first decade of fine-art photography by coining the term, “The New Color.” She used this coined term as the title of her book, which documented many of the important images of that decade. The chromatic aesthetics of that decade have endured. Is a new palette or a new approach to color in photography possible? In this course, students will be asked to do graphic analysis of color that attempts to break through to “The New New Color.”

Faculty

• Joel Sternfeld

Open, Seminar—Fall and Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3111

A photograph presented alone and without a description in words is a simple utterance. “Ooh,” “Aah,” and “Huh?” are its proper responses. When pictures are presented in groups with accompanying text (of any length) and perhaps in conjunction with political or poetic conceptual strategies, any statement becomes possible. The photographs can begin to function as a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire treatise. Whether working in fiction, nonfiction, or in a fictive space, artists such as Robert Frank, Jim Goldberg, Roni Horn, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, and numerous others have been in the process of transforming photography with their work. Or perhaps they have created a medium: the new narrative photography. In this course, students will initially study the work of these “narrative” photographers and either write about their work or make pictures in response to it. The culmination of this experience will be students’ creation of their own bodies of work. If you have a story to tell, a statement to make, or a phenomenon that you wish to study and describe, this course is open to you. No previous photographic experience or special equipment is necessary. The opportunity to forge a new medium is rare. This course will aim to create the forum and the conditions necessary for all to do so in a critical and supportive workshop environment. Photographers we will look at include: Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Sophie Calle, Eve Sonneman, Bill Owens, Bill Burke, Adrian Piper, Hamish Fulton, Susan Meiselas, Anne Turyn, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Tacita Dean, Alfredo Jaar, Allan Sekula, Gillian Wearing, Taryn Simon, Joel Sternfeld, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Sussman, Shirin Neshat, Richard Prince, Clarissa Sligh, Wendy Ewald, Lawrence Weiner, Jim Goldberg, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paul Graham, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Walker Evans, Eugene Smith, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Chris Verene, Larry Sultan, Diana Markosian, Helen Levitt, and more.

Faculty

• Joel Sternfeld

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3128

Experimentation—focused play—is one of the foundations of a robust and evolving visual practice. No matter where you are in your image-making journey, through focused play one can identify and break through conscious or unconscious blocks and boundaries around ways of making photographs and, in so doing, open pathways of creative growth. In this course, through weekly targeted exercises and supported by in-class critique, students will engage with a range of visual experiments that will challenge their relationship to the image and to image making—thus finding the expansive agency that focused play and experimentation can bring to their creative pursuits.

Faculty

• Samantha Box

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3118

Over its relatively short history, photography has often relied on well-worn conventions—the landscape, the portrait, the snapshot. Like all artistic mediums, every advancement in photography builds upon what has come before. In this course, we will explore how these developments have unfolded within some of photography’s most dominant tropes. Through discussion and practice, we will work toward creating images that radically mutate and reimagine these traditions. We will study the work of artists who have disrupted expectations, challenged formal norms, and redefined what a photograph can be. Students will be encouraged to question their own habits as image makers and to embrace experimentation as a means of pushing beyond the familiar.

Faculty

• Joel Sternfeld

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3207

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of relief-printing techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Students will work with linoleum and woodblock materials. Students will develop drawing skills through the printmaking medium and experiment with value structure, composition, mark making, and interaction of color. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using printing equipment, printing an edition, critically discussing one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented by technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations. 

Faculty

• Vera Iliatova

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3212

This course will be an opening foray into the possibilities of painterly printmaking and experimental processes that merge printmaking with painting and drawing. The course will also cover fundamentals, such as basic drawing and color mixing. As a means to explore an individual idea, students will investigate a wide range of possibilities offered by monoprint techniques and will experiment with inks and paints, stencils, multiple plates, and images altered in sequence. Students will begin to develop a method to investigate meaning, or content, through the techniques of painterly printmaking. There will be an examination of various strategies that fluctuate between specific in-class assignments and individual studio work. In-class assignments will be supplemented with PowerPoint presentations, reading materials, film clips and video screenings, group critiques, homework projects, and gallery visits.

Faculty

• Susan Ziegler

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3208

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of intaglio techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Throughout the course, students will practice dry point, etching, aquatint, soft-ground, and sugar-lift techniques. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using a print shop, printing an edition, talking critically about one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented with technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations.

Faculty

• Vera Iliatova

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3209

This course will explore both hand-drawn and digital methods of silkscreen printmaking. Techniques studied will include stencil, photo-emulsion, monoprint, multistep reduction, and multicolor printing. Students will engage with the expansive artistic possibilities of variation, repetition, and printing editions on paper and textiles. Students will be encouraged to engage with the medium experimentally and combine techniques as they develop individual projects. In addition to class assignments and personal studio work, we will further consider the medium through slideshows, videos, and gallery visits.

Faculty

• Susan Ziegler

Open, Concept—Spring | 2 credits

ARTS 3030

In this course, we will explore the powerful impact of color in the visual arts. Students will investigate color theory through a series of problems and experimental projects. We will consider questions of individual perception, cultural significance, symbolism, and emotional expression. The class will collectively analyze the use of color by visual artists working in a broad range of disciplines. Students will complete a series of individual and collaborative studio projects, using cut paper, collage, paint, and found materials. Related readings, short videos, and slideshows will be assigned throughout the semester.

Faculty

• Susan Ziegler

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3314

This studio course will look at art making through a sustainable lens. How can artists create in an ecological way? How can we imagine an alternate future through art making? How can we use visual art to communicate ideas when language fails? We will explore various modes of creation—working with found objects, engaging the landscape, temporal artworks, and ecological narratives. We will look at different modes of sculptural creation, thinking about the material footprint and the life of the artwork beyond the studio. Studio work will be accompanied by an analysis of historical and contemporary artists whose work addresses ideas around sustainability and the environment, including Walter de Maria, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maren Hassinger, Agnes Denes, Maya Lin, Meg Webster, Amy Balkin, Delcy Morelos, Mark Dion, and Theaster Gates.

Faculty

• Katie Bell

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3355

This course will ground technical learning of sculptural fabrication within a critical examination of digital society at the planetary scale. Equipping students with accessible digital sculpture techniques that can scale to advanced creative workflows, the course will introduce core Rhino modeling skills, develop methods for smartphone-based 3D-scan-to-3D-print fabrication, reframe the notion of the digital/virtual within the context of the planetary, and foreground making through materiality. Focusing on the intersection of digital tools with the elements of earth and water, students will engage how digital tools interface with energy infrastructure, critical land studies, sustainable ecology, and supply-chain ethics. Utilizing digital fabrication methods to cast with biomaterials, we will explore the conceptual possibilities of our tools and media as co-makers with the planet. Artists such as Allan Sekula, Agnes Denes, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Julian Charrière, alongside various examples from architecture and neolithic art, will complement our explorations. 

Faculty

• Charlotte Greene

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

ARTS 3318

This course will familiarize students with tools and methods in woodworking and metalwork, including joinery and welding. This practical knowledge will be put into a series of assignments considering interspecies design and using skills as a sculptor to make functional form with outdoor sculpture and ecological stewardship in mind. In this course, we will look at artists who work on constructed material form and public sculpture. We will also look at the merging of landscape architecture and gardens toward a holistic approach to building site-specific sculpture and ideate toward a proposal for public works.

Faculty

• Jessica Segall

Open, Concept—Spring | 2 credits

ARTS 3316

This course will be an open-ended exploration of the links between drawing and sculpture. Students will explore drawing as a means of communicating, brainstorming, questioning, and building. Assignments will promote experimentation and expand the ways in which we use and talk about drawing by interrogating an inclusive list of materials. The course will consider unusual forms of mark making, such as lipstick left on a glass and a tire track on pavement. Each student will cultivate a unique index of marks, maintaining his/her own sketchbook throughout the course. The course will provide contemporary and historical examples of alternate means of mark making, such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback, Gordon Matta-Clark, David Hammons, and Janine Antoni, among others.

Faculty

• Katie Bell

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3354

This course will explore the potential of figuration within contemporary sculptural practice. What can we achieve by incorporating a humanoid figure into our sculptural works? How far can the human form be pushed while remaining legible? Who controls and is invested in this legibility? What do histories of figuration have in common with objectification and dehumanization? And can we extract utility, today, from these dynamics? Alongside material demonstrations, lectures, readings, and critiques, we will investigate unpopular media in order to explore the work of contemporary artists alongside ideas and genres such as the uncanny valley, horror, science fiction, and more.

Faculty

• Joseph Buckley

Open, Concept—Spring | 2 credits

ARTS 3359

This course will introduce techniques within the Adobe Creative Cloud that are foundational for communicating and working in the professional creative context. Offering a hands-on entry into the technical and conceptual possibilities of digital-media production, the course will emphasize core skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign while also inviting students to reflect on how digital tools shape storytelling, authorship, and visual culture. Students will engage in short-form projects that explore image manipulation, vector graphics, and layout design. No prior experience is required.

Faculty

• Charlotte Greene

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3576

This course will explore techniques of sculptural fabrication through the lens of quantum materialism. We will study digital fabrication tools from the perspective of phenomenology, considering the emergence of technology within the realm of deep time and quantum physics. Pulling from the philosophy of technology, the course will situate materiality at the subatomic level and complicate the line between the organic and the machinic. We will reflect on how the tools and techniques of digital sculpture themselves contribute to conceptual meaning within works of art. The course will introduce core Rhino modeling skills for first-time students and strengthen modeling techniques for students with more experience. Artists and thinkers such as Albert Samreth, Ralph Lemon, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, American Artist, Robert Barry, Tavares Strachan, and Alice Aycock will complement our explorations.

Faculty

• Charlotte Greene

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

ARTS 3299

This course will guide students through woodworking, metal, and casting with a focus on material history, function, and meaning. Introductory exercises in each material will be paired with inquiry into the value of working with wood, metal, water (casting), earth (clay), and fire (metalworking). We will look at the historical use and prevalence of material, including craft and modernism, to more ecologically conscious contemporary art. We will examine the sourcing and supply lines of material and their impact, practical uses, and weaknesses while completing weekly exercises to familiarize students with tools, materials, and approaches to working in built form.

Faculty

• Jessica Segall

Open, Concept—Spring | 2 credits

ARTS 3276

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works of artists, with a focus on primary sources such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews—and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

Faculty

• Jessica Segall