How do you connect your verbal and your visual brain? This course will be a series of provocations to making art. Black playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and White lighting designer Jane Cox will lead the group in connected investigations in writing and lighting as well as intertwined historic and aesthetic notions of Whiteness and Blackness. We will focus our imagination on theatrical and poetic connotations of dark and light as well as the production and philosophies of light. Classes will consist of discussions and creative exercises, and we will work towards a showing of creative projects at the end of the semester.
Courses
Spring 2021 Courses
Atelier
How might our obsession with convenience constrict our humanity? Is it possible to critique and dismantle systems of oppression from within? How do we reconcile the artist's need to enter into the experience of the Other with the need to be aware of structural inequities and the asymmetrical distribution of power? Join Christine Jones and Gabriel Kahane for a semester-long exploration of how we may aspire to change the world through art-making in a moment widely described as dystopian.
Taught by Bridget Kearney (Lake Street Dive) and Paul Muldoon (Rogue Oliphant) with class visits from guest singer/songwriters and music critics, this course is an introduction to the art of writing words for music, an art at the core of our literary tradition from the Beowulf poet through Lord Byron and Bessie Smith to Bob Dylan and the Notorious B.I.G. Composers, writers and performers will have the opportunity to work in small songwriting teams to respond to such emotionally charged themes as Gratitude, Loss, Protest, Desire, Joyousness, Remorse, and Defiance.
Inspired by the experience of Black Civil War soldiers, the visual aesthetics of 19th century posters, and contemporary hip-hop, the award-winning writer and historian Imani Perry and the visual artist Mario Moore will collaborate on a groundbreaking new project. Using hip-hop to reimagine the soundscape of battle in the mid-1800s, Moore and Perry will negotiate both the historical record and the idea of what might have been. Students will work alongside Moore and Perry in drawing on language, visual prints and audio to make connections between the 19th century and our own revolutionary moment.
Creative Writing
What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, two decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, “Flower Power,” psychedelia, and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films like Easy Rider, and engaging with the music of the times (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors) we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and not merely reflect the times but pose important questions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity at large.
What is “The American Dream”? Is it an ideal, a shared cultural goal, a perennial challenge? A riddle, a chimera? How does the American Dream manifest itself in individual works of art?
The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers a perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
Modern queer writers have long written about the rich and complicated relationship straight cis women have had with queer men. And yet, outside of queer literary circles, little attention has been paid to how these relationships challenge or replicate traditional family structures, and form a community outside of the status quo. We will examine the stories male writers constructed and analyze women writers who held a mirror up to those straight and queer men who were drawn to lesbian culture. By examining photography and painting, we will further look at the artist's relationship to and identification with queerness, or straight female power.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
A continuation of work begun in Introductory Playwriting, in this class, students will complete either one full-length play or two long one-acts (40-60 pages) to the end of gaining a firmer understanding of characterization, dialogue, structure, and the playwriting process. In addition to questions of craft, an emphasis will be placed on the formation of healthy creative habits and the sharpening of critical and analytical skills through reading and responding to work of both fellow students and contemporary playwrights of note.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
All literature is short — compared to our lives, anyway — but we'll be concentrating on poetry and prose at their very shortest. The reading will include proverbs, aphorisms, greguerias, one-line poems, riddles, jokes, fragments, haiku, epigrams and microlyrics. Imagism, contemporary shortists, prose poems, various longer works assembled from small pieces, and possibly even flash fiction. Students will take away from the thrift and edge of these literary microorganisms a new sense of what can be left out of your work and new ideas about how those nebulae of pre-draft in your notebooks might condense into stars and constellations.
What we'll be writing together won't quite be art criticism and it won't quite be traditional historical writing either, what we'll be writing together is something more akin to poetry, fiction, art criticism and theory fused into a multivalent mass. Keeping in mind that language can hold many things inside of itself, we'll use somatic and idiosyncratic techniques as a lens, reading a range of poets, theorists, critics, writers and artists who are all thinking with art while writing about bodies, subjectivity, landscape, and the inimitable forms that emerge from the studio.
How can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible? Do fields like neuroscience help us understand the universal principals behind screenwriting and do tech advances that alter the distance between audience and creator, man and machine, also influence content of our stories?
This advanced screenwriting workshop will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current “golden age of television.” Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes, and engage in in-depth discussion about story, series engine, character, structure, tone and season arcs. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, and complete the first draft of the pilot episode and season arcs by end of semester.
This course will explore, through theory and (especially) practice, the rewriting/revising of plays, screenplays and teleplays. Students will begin the semester with a written piece of dramatic material that they wish to develop further. Through discussion, writing exercises, group feedback, and the study of existing scripts, each student will devise a revision process that is appropriate for their material and emerge with a new draft.
Taught by Bridget Kearney (Lake Street Dive) and Paul Muldoon (Rogue Oliphant) with class visits from guest singer/songwriters and music critics, this course is an introduction to the art of writing words for music, an art at the core of our literary tradition from the Beowulf poet through Lord Byron and Bessie Smith to Bob Dylan and the Notorious B.I.G. Composers, writers and performers will have the opportunity to work in small songwriting teams to respond to such emotionally charged themes as Gratitude, Loss, Protest, Desire, Joyousness, Remorse, and Defiance.
Dance
How does the use of one’s imagination spark social and systemic change in the world? What does it mean to devote one's life to this kind of work? Blurring the lines between the creative and political experience, students will be introduced to the radical contemporary practices that interdisciplinary artists use to build creative, impactful lives. Our texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. Every other week the class hosts an artist talk series featuring pioneering artists.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
This course offers a broad, embodied introduction to the breadth of contemporary dance. We will be moving, reading, watching, and writing about dance. Contemporary issues, such as Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and American exceptionalism will be viewed through the lens of contemporary dance. We will try on the styles of essential creators in the field in an effort to understand their POV. We will create work ourselves (no experience necessary) to learn about the expressive and communicative potential of dance. We will be moving and meditating to release tension, increase personal awareness, and boost authenticity.
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the unique aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities while school as we know it is on pause? We’ll dance, sit, question, and create practices and projects. We’ll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We’ll look at stillness as protest and power. We’ll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).
This introductory survey course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore a range of hip-hop dance techniques, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which these dances emerged. Special attention will be given to breaking – the most prominent hip-hop form – as a foundation for exploring other forms of movement. By critically exploring these physical and historical connections, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to develop a personalized style.
This introductory course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore the flow, power and cultural contexts of Breaking. This course will focus on developing a clear foundational Breaking technique in order to build a strong basis for exploring other Hip-Hop forms. By critically exploring this form physically and historically, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to eventually develop a personalized style.
This course is a laboratory space for intentional community where we focus on the creative process in making movement-based performance and dance. I offer prompts for you to make short performances and then we reverse engineer your process through a series of questions. We are interested in understanding how our work sits inside of the contemporary context. We will critique, absorb and discard inherited notions of dance in the service of creating pieces that come from a vital and necessary place. Reading ranges from artist statements to critical theory and you will watch works on video that reframe ideas of the choreographic.
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.
Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews.
This seminar is designed for junior dance certificate students to investigate current dance practices and ideas. Part study and discussion of the processes, aesthetics and politics involved in dance making and viewing — part independent creative practice and critique — this course invites students to a deeper understanding of their own art making perspectives and to those of their classmates.
What can memoirs teach us about navigating the demands of a life in dance, and about the ways these demands are profoundly intersectional: shaped by racial, gender, and class hierarchies and economies? This seminar examines memoir as an activist project and mode of performance illuminating the work of dance. Readings include works by Carlos Acosta, Misty Copeland, Li Cunxin, Mark Morris, Jock Soto, and others. Theories of personal narrative theory and autobiography guide our discussions. Students will conduct oral history interviews and investigate personal papers in local archives as forms of memoir. Emphasis on dancers in the Americas.
A studio course in Contemporary Ballet technique for advanced dancers, with explorations into neoclassical and contemporary choreography through readings, viewings, and the learning of and creation of repertory. Through visits with prominent guest artists, including Sonja Kostich and Stella Abrera, Theresa Ruth Howard, and Phil Chan, students will examine the shifts that "Ballet" is making to stay relevant and meaningful as a "21st" century art form.
Music Theater
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills.
This course explores models of producing and collaboration in the professional theater, with an emphasis on the relationship between reading and producing plays. Students will examine a wide variety of classic and contemporary plays and musicals as literature written for production with a detailed appreciation for what production entails, and will develop an understanding of the aesthetic, dramaturgical and values-based choices involved in producing theater.
Theater & Music Theater
How does the use of one’s imagination spark social and systemic change in the world? What does it mean to devote one's life to this kind of work? Blurring the lines between the creative and political experience, students will be introduced to the radical contemporary practices that interdisciplinary artists use to build creative, impactful lives. Our texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. Every other week the class hosts an artist talk series featuring pioneering artists.
The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.
Modern queer writers have long written about the rich and complicated relationship straight cis women have had with queer men. And yet, outside of queer literary circles, little attention has been paid to how these relationships challenge or replicate traditional family structures, and form a community outside of the status quo. We will examine the stories male writers constructed and analyze women writers who held a mirror up to those straight and queer men who were drawn to lesbian culture. By examining photography and painting, we will further look at the artist's relationship to and identification with queerness, or straight female power.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills.
Theater relies on the physical and emotional vulnerability of live bodies to experience the pity andterror that plague, war, systemic injustice, and more ordinary forms of disease and death inflict. As we face the twin pandemics of our own time, what can "plague drama" (prompted by outbreaks of typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, AIDS, etc.) tell us about how writers use literal and metaphorical diseases to give shape to a given cultural moment? We'll look at a wide variety mostly theatrical texts to explore how playwrights use the medium of the theater to literally embody and thus make visible physical, social, and metaphysical "dis-ease".
In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the unique aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities while school as we know it is on pause? We’ll dance, sit, question, and create practices and projects. We’ll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We’ll look at stillness as protest and power. We’ll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).
This course is a laboratory space for intentional community where we focus on the creative process in making movement-based performance and dance. I offer prompts for you to make short performances and then we reverse engineer your process through a series of questions. We are interested in understanding how our work sits inside of the contemporary context. We will critique, absorb and discard inherited notions of dance in the service of creating pieces that come from a vital and necessary place. Reading ranges from artist statements to critical theory and you will watch works on video that reframe ideas of the choreographic.
In a joint project with students from Fordham University, Georgetown University, Purchase College, and UMass-Amherst, students will create a virtual new media response to Naomi Wallace' play One Flea Spare. This story about strangers quarantining together during London's 17th Century Great Plague, will provoke our wild artistic departure about our own communities' social iniquities, abuses of power, classism, racism, burden on essential workers, fake science, and questions about who can afford to survive a plague and the boundaries of gender and the body. Absolutely no theatre or performance experience necessary, just a desire to be creative.
From the spirits and banshees of oral legends to Bram Stoker's Dracula, from the classic works of Yeats, Synge and Beckett to Garth Ennis's Preacher comics and Anne Rice's Vampire novels, Irish culture has been haunted by the Otherworld. Why has the Irish Gothic had such a long ghostly afterlife on page and stage? Can we learn something about modernist works like those of Yeats and Beckett by seeing them through the perspective of popular fictions of the supernatural?
A continuation of work begun in Introductory Playwriting, in this class, students will complete either one full-length play or two long one-acts (40-60 pages) to the end of gaining a firmer understanding of characterization, dialogue, structure, and the playwriting process. In addition to questions of craft, an emphasis will be placed on the formation of healthy creative habits and the sharpening of critical and analytical skills through reading and responding to work of both fellow students and contemporary playwrights of note.
Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews.
A so-called invisible city, Trenton is one of the poorest parts of the state, but intimately connected to Princeton. Examining the historical and contemporary racisms that have shaped Trenton, we will hear from activists, policy makers, artistic directors, politicians, and artists. Readings include texts about urban invisibility, race, community theater, and public arts policy. The course will follow the development of a new play by Trenton's Passage Theater, about a community-organized sculpture that was removed over "concerns" about "gang" culture. Students will conduct field interviews and work alongside dramatists and playwrights.
This course explores models of producing and collaboration in the professional theater, with an emphasis on the relationship between reading and producing plays. Students will examine a wide variety of classic and contemporary plays and musicals as literature written for production with a detailed appreciation for what production entails, and will develop an understanding of the aesthetic, dramaturgical and values-based choices involved in producing theater.
As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of "real" life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative, and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States — as both industry and creative practice — does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.
This course will explore, through theory and (especially) practice, the rewriting/revising of plays, screenplays and teleplays. Students will begin the semester with a written piece of dramatic material that they wish to develop further. Through discussion, writing exercises, group feedback, and the study of existing scripts, each student will devise a revision process that is appropriate for their material and emerge with a new draft.
Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision/deconstruct/rewrite/appropriate canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition? While their choices might be accused of re-centering and reinforcing "white"narratives that often marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this risky venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one's own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic "rewards"for deploying this method of playmaking? What are risks?
How do you connect your verbal and your visual brain? This course will be a series of provocations to making art. Black playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and White lighting designer Jane Cox will lead the group in connected investigations in writing and lighting as well as intertwined historic and aesthetic notions of Whiteness and Blackness. We will focus our imagination on theatrical and poetic connotations of dark and light as well as the production and philosophies of light. Classes will consist of discussions and creative exercises, and we will work towards a showing of creative projects at the end of the semester.
How might our obsession with convenience constrict our humanity? Is it possible to critique and dismantle systems of oppression from within? How do we reconcile the artist's need to enter into the experience of the Other with the need to be aware of structural inequities and the asymmetrical distribution of power? Join Christine Jones and Gabriel Kahane for a semester-long exploration of how we may aspire to change the world through art-making in a moment widely described as dystopian.
Visual Arts
What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, two decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, “Flower Power,” psychedelia, and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films like Easy Rider, and engaging with the music of the times (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors) we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and not merely reflect the times but pose important questions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity at large.
Documentary filmmakers engage with the world by representing it in a myriad of subjective ways. This course will focus on cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the camera. Through film production, screenings, texts, and discussions, this course will explore the central question of “who has the right tell whose story, and why?” Each student will produce, direct, shoot, and edit two 3-5 minute documentary films.
Using an array of site-specific, creative research methods, students will explore their local environments (inside and out) searching for data and the patterns, stories, and observations that follow. They will catalog and document their findings into evolving multimedia archives, iterating on various modes of collection and communication. Some of the topics covered include: Personal and Local Data, Documentary & Observational Drawing, Sound & Sensory Visualization, Data Collection, Data-Driven Storytelling, and Archival Research and Design.
The great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act. Students will be introduced to the basics of line, shading, proportion, composition, texture and gesture.
An introduction to the materials and methods of painting, addressing form and light, color and its interaction, composition, scale, texture and gesture. Students will experiment with subject matter including still life, landscape, architecture, self-portraiture and abstraction, while painting from a variety of sources.
How does scientific research produce and reinforce concepts of gender? How is sexism propagated through technological media? This course investigates how scientific and technological media shape culture and society, particularly through the lens of gender and sexuality. Through interdisciplinary art making, students will use various technological media to reflect on the social, political, and ethical aspects of technoscientific feminism. Students will develop skills in 3d modeling, rendering, augmented reality, Illustrator, and Photoshop, creating art works in critical social discourse and gender theory.
An introduction to the processes of photography through a series of problems directed toward lens projection, the handling of light-sensitive material, and camera operation. Students will receive a kit that will contain the equipment and materials for analog image making, beginning with cyanotype printing and culminating with large format film exposure and processing.
This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills.
This studio course engages students in the decoding of and formal experimentation with the image as a two-dimensional surface. Through projects, readings, and discussions, students take a hands-on approach to making with an array of technologies (the camera, video camera, computer, solar printing, web publishing) and forms (billboard, symbol, screensaver, book) to address the most basic principles of design, such as visual metaphor, composition, sequence, hierarchy, and scale.
This studio production class will engage in a variety of timed-based composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques. Students will learn foundational methods of 2D animation, acquire a working knowledge of digital animation software and technology, and explore the connective space between sound, image, and motion possible in animated film.
In this course, students will reconsider sound as material through projects exploring physical technologies of sound-making along with listening and viewings of related arts and artists, readings and writings in theories of sound, new media, and phenomenology. This class offers a hybrid experience-an engagement with art-making and seminar, reconsidering our relationship to the body, physical material, and sound embodied in the world.
This course takes an exciting approach to color photography using methods of cameraless and lens based analog photography. We will experiment with Anthotypes, Lumens, Chlorophyll printing, and Polaroids. Several of the materials needed for this course can be found in your backyard or kitchen cabinet!
Narrative Filmmaking 1 is a hands-on production class designed for students from all academic backgrounds to learn about the art of video production and develop their creative voices using cellphones! The course will cover technical aspects of making films, including shot language, sound recording, and editing, and will explore what it means to make images at this critical moment of time.
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.
In an increasingly digital world, this course promotes the hand-made image, teaching students to cut blocks, fashion stencils, plan and execute color layers all in pursuit of the development of subject matter. Block and stencil printmaking can be done anywhere - non-toxically - while still producing strong expressive images.
This course, conducted in English, is a study of Fascism through selected films from World War II to the present. The approach is interdisciplinary and combines the analysis of historical themes with an in-depth cinematic reading of the films.
What we'll be writing together won't quite be art criticism and it won't quite be traditional historical writing either, what we'll be writing together is something more akin to poetry, fiction, art criticism and theory fused into a multivalent mass. Keeping in mind that language can hold many things inside of itself, we'll use somatic and idiosyncratic techniques as a lens, reading a range of poets, theorists, critics, writers and artists who are all thinking with art while writing about bodies, subjectivity, landscape, and the inimitable forms that emerge from the studio.
How can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible? Do fields like neuroscience help us understand the universal principals behind screenwriting and do tech advances that alter the distance between audience and creator, man and machine, also influence content of our stories?
This advanced screenwriting workshop will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current “golden age of television.” Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes, and engage in in-depth discussion about story, series engine, character, structure, tone and season arcs. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, and complete the first draft of the pilot episode and season arcs by end of semester.
Advanced Questions in Photography will examine ways in which lens-based media can interrogate representation, class, gender and race. The class will look artists of the 1960's through 1990's such as Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, Douglas Huebler, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Felix Gonzales Torres, Lyle Ashton Harris and more recent artists Trevor Paglen, Hank Willis Thomas, Jason Lazarus, Walead Beshty and Hito Steyerl.
This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes. VIS 415 is structured around three studio assignments that connect graphic design to other bodies of knowledge, aesthetic experience, and scholarship. The class always takes a local concept or event as the impetus for investigations. Studio work is supplemented by critiques, readings and lectures. Students will refine their approaches to information design and visual problem solving, and to decoding and producing graphic design in print and electronic media.
This sculpture class will engage contemporary approaches to the figure with an emphasis on the figure as body. Students will take a multivalent approach to the historical precedents from which current representations have emerged and explore the limits of what constitutes the body and figuration in contemporary sculpture through the process of class discussions and making sculpture.
Modern art is coeval with the modern market. This seminar examines key moments in this complicated relationship. Under what conditions does an artistic avant-garde emerge? In what ways does it advance the interests of capital? In what ways does it challenge them? How do artistic forms change vis-à-vis transformations in economic modes of production and consumption? These and other questions will be probed with test cases drawn from Impressionist painting, modern architecture, mass culture, Dada, Pop, Minimalism, and postmodernist art.
Inspired by the experience of Black Civil War soldiers, the visual aesthetics of 19th century posters, and contemporary hip-hop, the award-winning writer and historian Imani Perry and the visual artist Mario Moore will collaborate on a groundbreaking new project. Using hip-hop to reimagine the soundscape of battle in the mid-1800s, Moore and Perry will negotiate both the historical record and the idea of what might have been. Students will work alongside Moore and Perry in drawing on language, visual prints and audio to make connections between the 19th century and our own revolutionary moment.
Music
What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, two decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, “Flower Power,” psychedelia, and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films like Easy Rider, and engaging with the music of the times (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors) we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and not merely reflect the times but pose important questions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity at large.
In this course, students will reconsider sound as material through projects exploring physical technologies of sound-making along with listening and viewings of related arts and artists, readings and writings in theories of sound, new media, and phenomenology. This class offers a hybrid experience-an engagement with art-making and seminar, reconsidering our relationship to the body, physical material, and sound embodied in the world.