Art & Art History Student News - Open Seats - Spring 2021 - Enroll today!

Wintermester course offered for 3 weeks - December 18, 2020- January 10, 2021
Digital Arts 2 — ARTS 4126 — An online Wintermester course
Professor: Françoise Duressé-Stimilli
Description: Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a story across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. This course will focus on the concept: If Walls Could Talk and explore the question of what it means to inhabit a place/space. You will gather family and local stories in order to frame a location and/or understanding of the lived environment. The short assignments and final project will address and establish relationships between the architectural materials, their shapes, and those specific historical moments that defined them, thus allowing a new understanding of the studied spaces and the messages they carry for the lived environment.  

Collecting family & friends' oral histories around the meaning of place, you will create an animation using Rotoscoping, an animation technique that traces frame-by-frame over motion picture footage, in this case, the interview footage (documentary diaristic-style video medium), to produce realistic action. You will also enhance the narrative by integrating creative backdrops and using traditional and non-traditional painting and drawing, sketches, and photographs as an imaginative device to revisit and reinvent the architectural spaces you have visualized in your oral histories.  

The projects for this course will allow you to create with your hearts, think with your guts, and relate your work to the larger world. Ultimately, you will make work in response to the world you live in. 

ARTF 5023 [grads] CINE 4023 [undergrads]
Tues/Thurs 12:45-2pm online/remote
Professor: Hanna Rose Shell
Description: Agnès Varda, one of the most extraordinary filmmakers of the last century, produced documentaries, fiction films, memoirs, photography, and installation artworks over the course of eight decades. Her contributions to art, culture and feminism provide creative and intellectual material for new forms of engagement with contemporary art, film and the humanities today.

This seminar considers Varda’s extraordinary body of multilingual moving image artwork – from her groundbreaking feminist contributions to the French New Wave, to documentary work with the Black Panthers and in East L.A., to her multichannel and experimental documentaries. Aspects of philosophy, production, reception, and the cultural, political and aesthetic landscapes in which Varda’s work emerged will be discussed.

ARTS 5097 (graduate students only)
Thurs. 2:30-5 pm online/remote. 3 credits
Professor: Hanna Rose Shell
Description: Thesis Writing Seminar is an intentional, as well as empathic, space for writing and thinking through the complicated issues – social, political, psychological, aesthetic, environmental and so many more – currently facing our work, and our world. This class provides a supportive context for working on process and product, and the cultivation of their productive intermingling.

Students will collaborate with the professor at the outset in order to set parameters and guidelines, collaboratively shaping a constructive and inclusive classroom culture. Crosspollination encouraged.

ARTF 5610  Image Makers Graduate Seminar
Friday 1-5 pm ATLAS 102
Professor: Jeanne Liotta
Description: In a 4 hour period we spend the first half screening works and discussing texts on the subject, and the second half in studio visits/group critique (2 people per week)

ARTS 4097
Tuesday, 9:35am-12:05pm
Professor: Megan O'Grady
Hybrid remote/on-line
Description: In this culture writing class, we’ll listen in on and contribute to the conversation across visual arts and literature, touching on other forms of expression, from pop culture to design. Art, of course, does not exist solely in a museum or gallery, and we will consider both its social context as well as, more personally, art’s capacity to challenge us, to incite empathy or self-scrutiny, to provoke and inspire. We will study—partly by close reading of published articles, partly through the submission and discussion of your own work—the craft of cultural writing, honing our skills as deep noticers, researchers, and thinkers while keeping our eyes on the horizon. Whose stories are being told and who is absent from the conversation? How do various cultural forms cross-pollinate and influence each other? And how do our arguments about a particular art object connect to broader dreams about politics, freedom, community, and our sense of the possible? For this class, you will be writing a review, an artist profile, and a critical essay, with the ambition that we will challenge and blur the conventions of these forms and deepen our identities as writers. You will also keep a writing notebook and a personal reading list which will be updated throughout the semester.

ARTH 6939.004/CMDP 6871.001  Grad Seminar: Mellon, Environmental Futures
Professor: Erin Espelie
MONDAYS  12:45-3:15PM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online
Description: Deep Horizons: Making Visible an Unseen Spectrum of Ecological Casualties & Prospects (ARTH 6939 / CMPD 6871: Environmental Futures II) 

This graduate seminar aims to traverse art, biology, cinema, history, indigenous studies, linguistics, and sociology to investigate questions of the changing planet as it affects specific peoples, communities, wildlife species, and ecosystems in varying and inequitable ways. Creative vantages and social science investigations allow us to better perceive where economic privilege and mercenary desires clash with environmental foresight. Visiting artists and scholars will allow us to expand our conversations not only across disciplinary boundaries, but also across geographies and institutions. (Permission required)

ARTS 3097.004 
Special Topics:  Sound Art
Instructor: Joanna Bugajska
MONDAYS  4:10-6:30PM  Taught Remotely
Description: Sound Art, unlike music, is not organized around rhythm and scale. This course will explore ways artists are using sound as an art medium, how sound works, and how you can generate, shape, and organize it for creative expression. 

ARTS 3097.001 
Special Topics:  Visual Storytelling
Instructor: Joanna Bugajska
FRIDAYS  12:30-2:50PM  Taught Remotely
Description: Visual Storytelling focuses on how artists tell stories in still, sequential and moving images through video, sound, performance, and other means. The course examines methods and tools to analyze how technology and the internet have influenced storytelling in art.

ARTH 4919.001  Capstone Seminar: Contemporary Indigenous Art
Professor: Annette DeStecher
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS 11:10-12:25PM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online
Description: Indigenous artists are receiving increasing critical acclaim and recognition in film, visual arts, new media, music, and literature, reaching wide audiences. This course will explore the diversity of Indigenous arts today and the interests of Indigenous artist and creators. 

ARTH 6939.002  Grad Seminar: Power and Visuality after the Conquest
Professor: James Cordova
MONDAYS  3:35-5:05PM  Taught Hybrid in Person/Online,Remote

ARTH 6939.003  Grad Seminar: Portraiture: The Big Reveal
Professor: Annette DeStecher
TUESDAYS: 2:20-4:50PM  Taught Hybrid remote/Online
Description: Portraits reveal what people want to show the world- and often, what they want to hide. We will explore themes in portraiture, from the funerary portraiture of Etruscan tombs to Victorian death masks, to Japanese portraiture, secular and sacred, and portraiture in America, from images of social elites, to celebrities, to political cartoons, to the selfie. 

ARTS 1010.004  Intro to Studio Art
Instructor: Kaitlin McColgan
FRIDAYS 9:10-2:10PM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online

ARTS 1020.002  Intro to Studio Art 2
Instructor: Alejandra Abad
MONDAYS/WEDNESDAYS 6-8:30PM Taught Hybrid Remote/Online

ARTS 1020.004  Intro to Studio Art 2
Instructor: Dennis Doyle
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS  3:55-6:25PM Taught Hybrid in person/Online Remote

ARTS 2085.001  Ceramics 2:  Handbuilding 
Instructor: Sasha Alexandra
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS 9:35-12:05PM  Taught Hybrid in person/Online Remote

ARTS 2504.002  Basic Sculpture, Materials and techniques 
Instructor: Amy Hoagland
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS 12:45-3:35PM Taught Hybrid in person/Online Remote

ARTS 3085 Ceramics 3
Ceramics 3: Tableware - Designing wheel-thrown, cast, functional forms
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS  2:20-4:50PM  Taught In Person
Description: This course will explore wheel-throwing and casting technologies to generate forms in multiples for use at the table. Students will explore advanced glaze application and formulation, learning about various approaches to surface design on dinnerware and sculptural centerpieces.

ARTS 3097.005  SPECIAL Topics:  Professional Arts Practices
Instructor: Martha Russo
TUESDAYS  3:30-6PM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online
Description: Explores strategies to forge a sustainable, productive, fulfilling career in the arts. Through a series of readings, assignments, field trips, and presentations by faculty and staff in the Art and Art History Department, students will learn to define, promote, support, and find the most effective systems to have a rewarding life in the arts. Through the Practicum Speakers’ Series, students will engage with three art professionals who will give insight into the evolution of their art practices, ideas about work/life balance, and how to be part of a growing professional network.

ARTS 4017.001  Special Topics:  Transmedia: Photo and Video
Professor: Luis Valdovino
MONDAYS/WEDNESDAYS  9:10-11:40AM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online
Description: This course will explore the hybridization of digital media in photography and video. The revolutionary DSLR cameras are transforming the world of photography and video into a hybrid media where photography and video coexist together. The course will explore the creative photographic possibilities that can be explored in video from still and moving image practices. Through class screenings, projects, demonstrations, discussions and readings, students will explore the creative engines of transmedia.

ARTS 4202.001  Advanced Painting /Portfolio
Professor: Alvin Gregorio
TUESDAYS/THURSDAYS  12:45-3:15PM Taught Hybrid Remote/Online 

ARTS 5075.001  Grad Ceramics
Professor: Kim Dickey
MONDAYS/WEDNESDAYS  1:30-3:30PM  Hybrid In person/Remote, Online — Meets remotely on Mondays

ARTS 5504  Grad Sculpture
Professor: Yumi Roth
MONDAYS/WEDNESDAYS  1:50-4:20PM  Hybrid In person/Remote, Online — Meets remotely on Wednesdays

ARTH 6939.001 
Grad Seminar: DeKooning and Abstract Expressionism
Professor: Albert Alhadeff
TUESDAYS  9:35-12:05PM  Taught Hybrid Remote/Online
Description: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, a glorious moment in American Art, a harsh, combative and contentious period---some saw it as a boxing match, others as messy throw of paint on canvas and still others as our common American destiny realized (from Thoreau’s Walden Pond to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road). Let’s study it together!