Global Arc

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.

This is a project-driven course for the intermediate or advanced studio student. This course explores the variety of ways contemporary artists use photography, including but not limited to, documentary, conceptual, alternative processes and experimental methods, installation, narrative fiction or directional, collage, and serial images, as well as traditional modernist methods. Each student will produce two independent projects that are intended to emulate the methodology and practice of a chosen contemporary artist.

This course will explore ways that language can take on material properties and how objects can have syntax and be "read". Through studio assignments, readings, and discussions, students will investigate the idea of language as a tangible material that can be sliced, bent, inserted, reproduced, embedded, and scattered, as in the work of such modern artists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Susan Howe, Marcel Broodthaers, or Jenny Holzer. In each instance, our perception of meaning through language, and our perception of lived experience through material form, are both altered by their engagement with the other.

Over the past fifty years, many visual artists have taken up the process and methods of academic research as an impetus for works of art. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and studio projects, students in this class will engage the immediate context of the University as source material for their artworks, and as a means of exploring the effect that research and knowledge production might have on contemporary artistic practice. How does art produce knowledge? How does the knowledge it produces differ from that of other disciplines? In what ways do artists and researchers use similar source material to different ends?

What we'll be writing together won't quite be art criticism and it won't quite be traditional historical writing either, what we'll be writing together is something more akin to poetry, fiction, art criticism and theory fused into a multivalent mass. Keeping in mind that language can hold many things inside of itself, we'll use somatic and idiosyncratic techniques as a lens, reading a range of poets, theorists, critics, writers and artists who are all thinking with art while writing about bodies, subjectivity, landscape, and the inminiable forms that emerge from the studio.