Global Arc

When a filmmaker is fully accomplished, the content and form of a film function in complete union. This full-bodied, heartfelt expression represents a total view or world view. Students will watch a variety of feature-length fiction films and more personal, avant garde films. What is actually brought forth by the architecture of these visions? How do the films view the world? How do these films actually see? Films include those by Rossellini, Dreyer, Becker, Bresson, Hitchcock, etc., along with shorter works by Jack Chambers, Stan Brakhage, Nathanial Dorsky, etc. One three-hour seminar, one three-hour film showing.

This studio class will explore a broad range of approaches to art-based performance: from instruction pieces and happenings/events, the body as language and gestures, to various forms of lecture performance. Through this lens, students will investigate techniques of narrative, site, the role of the audience, duration, voice, choreography and movement, props/installation, and documentation. Through readings and critiques, students will engage a new vocabulary in assessing the area of performance art. The class aims at giving the student a foundation of techniques, language, and range of positions for developing art-based performance work.

A second-level film/video workshop focusing on digital media production. Short works of film/video art will be analyzed in class as a guide to the issues of aesthetic choice, editing structure, and challenging one's audience. Students complete two short videos and a longer final project, and view one film each week outside of class time. Prerequisites: 261 or 262 and instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

A second-level film/video workshop focusing on digital media production. Short works of film/video art will be analyzed in class as a guide to the issues of aesthetic choice, editing structure, and challenging one's audience. Students complete two short videos and a longer final project, and view one film each week outside of class time. Prerequisites: 261 or 262 and instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

There are unlimited ways in which to record and portray the world around us. In this class, we will analyze classic and contemporary strategies for making a documentary film, and see if we can invent some new ones of our own. The emphasis is on making. A wide range of films will be screened, but the course is mainly dedicated to having each student shoot and edit a medium length (20-30 minute) documentary. It's important to know what came before, and as important to learn about the present by being a part of creating it.

An intermediate exploration of narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques.

This course will approach questions of gender, sexuality, and power in popular media, from early cinema's appeals to middle-class female audiences at the turn of the last century, to the contemporary use of social media by feminist activists of color. Gender, sexuality, and identity will be viewed at the intersections of other biological and social categories, including race, class, orientation, ability, and ethnicity. We will examine the ways in which different media forms can be used to complicate, reinforce, exploit, or challenge those hierarchies.

This course investigates painting as a medium in the widest possible sense; as pictorial representation, assemblage, concrete color, spatial intervention; installation, performance and multimedia. Students will look at an array of objects, practices, and techniques that challenge conventional definitions of painting throughout, an underlying question of "what counts" as painting will be examined. However, this class is neither a historical narrative nor a deductive reasoning of what painting is or might mean. Rather, these questions will evolve through the studio processes of experimentation, contemplation and making.

How can posthumous research on a curatorial subject influence the structure and form of an exhibition or a new conceptual artwork? This course retraces the steps taken to produce McClodden's 2015-2019 artistic and curatorial work centering the lives of three Black gay men - poet Essex Hemphill, writer/poet Brad Johnson, and composer Julius Eastman - in order to examine key concepts central to research-based practice. Students will be expected to produce a research/exhibition study of an artist whom they feel has been obscured posthumously.

A required seminar for art and archaeology Program 2 majors and visual arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, and photography, with an emphasis on developing a studio practice. Critiques of students' work, and excursions to artists' studio round out the course. One three-hour seminar.