Global Arc

How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields - Creative Writing, Visual Art, Theater, Dance, and Music - under the guidance of professionals. Two-week units introduce each field and involve "lab" experience in each. In class, we will focus on the basic principles of aesthetics, with the ultimate goal of designing, collaborating on, and critiquing original projects across disciplines and media. Full attendance is mandatory.

This class will focus on the career-long writing about jazz, blues, rock and R&B of Amiri Baraka (nee Leroi Jones) and the significant impact it has had on cultural politics, scholarship and esthetics from the early 1960s to the present. Baraka's work as an activist and his gifts as a poet/novelist/playwright/political essayist allowed him to inject considerable lyricism, eloquence, learning and passion into the previously moribund fields of African American music history and journalism. His music writing also affected the tenor of future public advocacy for jazz via the NEA 's Jazz Masters awards and Jazz At Lincoln Center.