Global Arc

This course studies contemporary representations of Black Europeans in film, music, and popular culture in dialogue with critical works about diaspora, citizenship, and transnational blackness. We will read critical works by scholars who focus on Black Europe including,Tiffany Florvil (Germany), Grada Kilomba (Portugal), SA Smythe (Italy) among others as we explore different ways in which Black European artists engage with questions of national and transnational belonging. Students will write, conduct research, and engage in hands-on creative film and media projects as they think critically along with the various cultural and critical texts.

This course is designed to allow students to explore more deeply the process and meaning of painting. Students will complete a set of structured assignments and are encouraged to develop an independent direction. Contemporary critical theory is integrated into the course. One studio class, four hours per week. Prerequisite: 203, 204 and instructor's permission.

This seminar will frame the idea of black film as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race, rather than black film as a demographic, or a genre, or a reflection of the black experience, or something bound by a representational politics of positive and negative stereotypes. Black film will be critically considered as an interdisciplinary practice that enacts a distinct visual and expressive culture alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media. Students will consider new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality within this overarching concept of black film.

To become a working filmmaker today, one has to master the short film - being a filmmaker no longer means creating feature films exclusively, if at all. This course will focus on the technical challenges of being short as well as the conceptual challenge of being funny.The collaborative, in-class production of short film comedies will be augmented by critical analysis of the short comedy genre throughout film history, by in-class readings and discussions, and by visits from industry professionals.The ultimate goals will be not only learning how to discern successful short comedy content and why it "works," but learning how to make it as well.

An introduction to fundamental techniques of copper plate etching, and relief printing. Assignments focus on applications of various printmaking techniques, while encouraging independent development of subject matter. Critiques will occur throughout the term. Students are encouraged to draw regularly outside of class to cultivate themes and content applicable to their prints. Field trips to the University's museum and the library's graphics collection will complement class work. Two studio classes, five hours per week.

Since its inception, the technical development of photography has arisen out of specific historical and political circumstances that have "naturalized" its practice and ideologically coded its apparatus. Through critical discussions, material examinations, and studio projects, this seminar will take a reflexive approach to photographic technology past, present, and future. What can earlier periods of photography reveal about our current condition? How do lens-based technologies relate to determinations of race, class, and gender? What does it mean to be a photographer, to take photographs, and to agree or disagree with its apparatus?

This studio class engages with photographs that have been deemed difficult, wrong, shocking, inappropriate, and/or subversive. Does photography have unique moral obligations that are distinct from other mediums? What are the moral and ethical responsibilities of photographers today? Discussion is foundational to this course, with the goal of having open, generous, and generative conversations. Students will develop a semester long individual project that culminates in a final portfolio of photographs. Students will engage with multiple case studies of photographs and photographers whose work has drawn controversy drawing from global examples.

A continuation of 211, 212, or 213 this course focuses on hybridizing analog and digital technologies using the the view camera and making a cohent body of work. The connections between traditions of art, philosophy, science, and photography will continue to be important. One three-hour class and three hours of independent laboratory. Prerequisites: 211, 212, or equivalent experience and instructor's permission.

This course is a history of photography tied to practice and designed to provide a deeper understanding of the medium's historic timeline through engagement with physical processes. Students will be introduced to the practices involving chemistry and optics that drove the development of multiple types of imagery retrospectively known as "photography." The emphasis will be on materiality and photographs as socially salient objects. Students will create their own visual statements and may mix hand-made processes with modern intermediaries such as digital negatives for hand-applied emulsions or scanning negatives and printing digitally.

This course will examine the practical and theoretical issues of photographic portraiture. Photography's pervasiveness has described and defined notions of identity, race, and gender. We will explore the history of the photographic portraiture as well as work of contemporary artists working in a post-modern age where representation and identity are deconstructed. Students will learn technical skills such as large format camera use, studio lighting, and printing. Assignments will explore conceptual strategies, and students will exhibit their work for periodic critique.