This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing.
Visual Arts Courses
Visual Arts
An introduction to the materials and methods of painting.
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.
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.
This course introduces students to techniques for decoding and creating graphic messages in a variety of media, and delves into issues related to visual literacy through the hands-on making and analysis of graphic form.
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 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.
Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, this course will provide an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off.
In this course, you will be asked to develop your own voice in sound as an art material. Through the making of physical objects and use of audio technologies, we will think about sound expansively, as physical material, personal experience, and as concept. Along the way we will explore the extensive works of pioneers in sound art and contemporary music, learn new skills, and investigate ideas about sound which can inspire your own creative explorations. Building on diverse practices from Experimental Music to the Fine Arts, this will be a creative, open — and fun — journey into sound as art material.
Through hands-on exercises, screenings, critical readings and group critiques, this course teaches the basic tools and approaches for film production with digital media.
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.
Students in VIS300/DAN301 will create sculptures that relate directly to the body and compel performance, interaction, and movement. Students will also create dances that are informed by garments, portable objects, and props. Works will be designed for unconventional spaces, challenge viewer/performer/object relationships, augment and constrain the body, and trace the body's actions and form. The class will consider how context informs perceptions of the borders between performance, bodies, and objects. A lecture series of prominent choreographers and artists will accompany the course. This studio course is open enrollment.
This course will examine photography's constant negotiation of evolving technologies. Students shoot black and white and color film and scan and print it digitally to broaden their photographic strategies, their technical skills, and their understanding of the medium of photography. A range of tools will be introduced, including analogue film development, scanning negatives, Photoshop processing, and inkjet printing.
This course explores the history of photographic portraiture as well as the work of contemporary artists working in a post-modern age where representation and identity are deconstructed.
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.
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.
A second level film/video workshop focusing on digital media production. Students complete one short film (8-12 minutes long) during the term in any style/genre (narrative, documentary, experimental, hybrid, etc). In class, short films will be analyzed regarding writing, directing, editing, sound design, and musical score. Students also view short films and videos each week outside of class.
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.
The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance installation.
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.
Students in this advanced screenwriting course will work both independently and in small groups to learn how to develop, pitch, outline, and draft an original television show.
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 seminar provides senior Practice of Art Track and VIS certificate students a context for investigating and discussing contemporary art exhibition practices.
This course will introduce students to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting “true stories” pulled from various non-fiction sources.