Courses

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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.

This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. Students will be introduced to a range of drawing issues, as well as a variety of media, including charcoal, graphite, ink and oil stick. Subject matter includes still life, the figure, landscape and architecture. Representation, abstraction and working from imagination will be explored.

An introduction to the materials and methods of painting. The areas to be covered are specifically color and its interaction, the use of form and scale, painting from a model, painting objects with a concern for their mass and its interaction with light.

Operating at the intersection of art, science and technology, this course investigates how scientific theories shape aspects of culture and society. We will engage in the practice of "speculative design", creating sculptures, wearables, and artifacts that envision different futures, while reflecting on social, political, and ethical implications of various technologies. Students will develop skills in industrial design, digital fabrication, and digital image making, while applying them to critical social discourse.

An introduction to the processes of analog photography through a series of problems directed toward the handling of film-based cameras, light-sensitive paper, darkroom chemistry, and printing.

This studio course introduces students to aesthetic and theoretical implications of digital photography. Studio emphasis is on mastering digital equipment and techniques, managing print quality, and generally becoming familiar with all aspects of the digital workspace.

This studio course introduces students to graphic design with a particular emphasis on typography. Students learn typographic history through lectures that highlight major shifts in print technologies and through their engagement in studio design projects.

Students in this course will consider the ways in which a graphic design object's characteristics are affected by its ability to be copied and shared, and by the environment in which it is intended to circulate.

This course engages students in the decoding of and formal experimentation with the image as a two-dimensional surface. Students take a hands on approach to formal experimentation through an array of modes and technologies including the photocopier, the computer, the camera, letterpress and silkscreen printing to address the most basic principles of design, such as visual metaphor, composition, hierarchy, and scale.

This studio production class will engage in a variety of timed-based collage, composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques. Students will be taught the fundamental techniques of 2D animation production.

A studio introduction to sculpture, particularly the study of form, space, and the influence of a wide variety of materials and processes on the visual properties of sculpture.

This class experiments with 3D fabric construction, weaving, knitting, knotting and more as a means for making sculpture.

In the real world, what relationships have the necessary friction to generate compelling films? Documentary Filmmaking will introduce you to the craft, history and theory behind attempts to answer this question.

An introduction to 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 teaches the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media by providing technical instruction in camera operation, nonlinear editing, and sound design paired with the conceptual frameworks of shot design, visual composition, film grammar and cinema syntax.

This course will examine photography's ongoing negotiation of evolving color technologies.

This course is course designed for students interested in learning the fundamentals of working with clay.

This course will introduce students to core screenwriting principles and techniques. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays.

In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics.

A required seminar for Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas.

This course is designed to endow students with the conceptual and practical skills that will enable them to design for productions in the theater program.

Drawing is a distinct process; it can 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 emphasize 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.

This class combines hands-on experience of nineteenth-century photographic processes with the study of surviving images and readings on cultural and scientific forces driving photographic inventions.

This seminar provides senior Practice of Art and VIS certificate students a context for investigating and discussing contemporary art exhibition practices

This year, Extraordinary Processes will be a series of structural and mechanical explorations in response to the fantasy of setting the human body in motion. Each student will design, build, and critically analyze a personal means of transportation that exploits the inherent properties of an environmentally critical material — ash wood — across a spectrum of rigid, semi-rigid, and flexible systems.

This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.