Global Arc

A studio course in which students are encouraged to develop an independent direction while being challenged with projects on issues such as: narrative, abstraction, conceptual strategies, collage, computer-aided drawing, and drawing-based installation. Sources include photography, drawing from life, and utilizing one's own imagination. Study of developments in contemporary drawing will parallel the course projects. Prerequisites: 201, 202, and instructor's permission. Two three-hour classes.

A studio course focused on advanced problems in painting practice, including pictorial structure in abstraction and representation, color in relationship to space and light, working process, and materials. This course, although structured, encourages development of independent work. Group critiques will be conducted. Students gain awareness of historical models as well as contemporary art, as they build and analyze the relationship between student work and contemporary painting culture. Two studio sessions-five hours a week. Prerequisites: 303 or 304 and instructor's permission.

A studio course focused on advanced problems in painting practice, including pictorial structure in abstraction and representation, color in relationship to space and light, working process, and materials. This course, although structured, encourages development of independent work. Group critiques will be conducted. Students gain awareness of historical models as well as contemporary art, as they build and analyze the relationship between student work and contemporary painting culture. One four-hour studio class. Prerequisites: 303 or 304 and instructor's permission.

Drawing is a distinct process; it can also serve as a mode of documentation or as a preparatory step in many other processes. This allows drawing to point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and/or to serve as a model or plan for what is to come. We will explore these multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through approaches that emphasis a wide range of formal effects - illusionistic form, space, flatness, mark-making, opacity, transparency - while simultaneously exploring how artists have turned to drawing to record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize. One four-hour studio class.

Student-initiated problems in photography will be explored in close working relationship with the instructor. Emphasis will be on integrating practice and critical thought. One three-hour class, three hours of independent laboratory. Prerequisites: VIS 211 or VIS 212; and VIS 313 or VIS 315; or permission of instructor.

This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of VIS 215 Graphic Design. Advanced Graphic Design is structured around three studio assignments that connect graphic design to other bodies of scientific knowledge, aesthetic experience, and scholarship. Studio work is supplemented by critiques, readings and lectures. Motivated students will refine their approaches to information design and visual problem solving, as well as develop the critical acumen for decoding and producing graphic design in a variety of traditional and electronic media.

This seminar will give senior Practice of Art concentrators and certificate students in the visual arts a more structured and collegial environment for developing their thesis exhibitions. Over the course of the semester students will research and develop their art, their influences, and their aesthetic underpinnings to be presented as a formal proposal for their thesis project for group discussion. Material choices, exhibition design, and publicity strategies also will be addressed. Assigned readings will support and challenge received ideas of what art is and what the form and content of an art exhibition might entail.

This class will explore the art of storytelling through the aesthetics of film editing. By focusing on the editing process, students will not only learn how to edit their work but also how to better plan the writing, casting, sound design, and shooting of a film to better serve the editing process. Through screenings of award-winning films, informal class discussions with their directors, and exclusive access to raw scenes and footage, students will learn how to conceptualize the entire film production process as well as be introduced to accomplished professionals in the field.

This class will be a series of material investigations in relation to the human body at rest. Each student will design, build, and critically analyze a custom bed frame that exploits the inherent properties of a singular material-ash wood-across a spectrum of rigid and flexible structures. Laboratory testing and creative work will be augmented by lectures on the cultural history of "the bed" as a site of function, fantasy, aesthetics, and politics, from Egypt and the Bauhaus to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. One larger goal (among many) in the class will be to compare methods of evaluation in visual art, engineering, social policy, and the occult.

This class concentrates on the editing process. Students will re-edit samples from narrative and documentary films and analyze the results. We will also critique ongoing edits of your own thesis films. Guest speakers will come to talk about rough-and find-cut editing, sound design, and sound mixing. Editing is about shaping the story through image, dialogue, additional sound and music. No matter how well (or badly) a film is directed and shot, its final result depends profoundly on the artfulness of its editing. This course will give you a better understanding of how many ways there are to approach and solve the puzzle of editing a film.