Artmaking as both creative practice and subject of scholarly inquiry. Weekly collaborative sessions between practicing artists and art historians or scientists, creating dynamic conversations that illuminate shared themes and methodologies. Through a combination of artmaking exercises, close visual analysis, readings, and discussions, students cultivate new approaches to understanding how artworks function as both cultural artifacts and creative expressions. The course emphasizes experiential learning, encouraging students to think like both makers and scholars as they develop critical and practical skills for engaging with visual culture.
Visual Arts Courses
Visual Arts
We are culturally trained to see movies as entertainment, but while they are often entertaining, there is so much more in cinema. The art of film has a unique potential to combine, investigate, and confront ideas across cultures and time. The course will interrogate the way cinema produces, engages with, and represents ideas, extending beyond the sheer visual spectacle and entertainment. Each film will be considered as a sovereign work of art as well as an intersectional field wherein other cultures and ideas are present and investigated. This approach would require both a close reading of each film and a comparative analysis.
The great thing about drawing is that you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll learn from observation methods (still-life, plein-air, and figure drawing) while becoming adept at translating physical and lived experiences onto two-dimensional surfaces. Students will learn the basics of shading, proportion, composition, and gesture through various methods - privileging experimentation and curiosity. Lectures will be held to broaden an understanding of historical and contemporary drawing practices. By the end of the semester, you'll develop a final project of your choosing.
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: life, sketches, maquettes, collages, photographs and imagination. Students will progressively develop personal imagery that will inform an individual final project. Princeton will provide all materials for the painting class.
In this introductory studio course, participants explore the world wide web as an opportunity for self-publishing. We'll understand the web's history and original design as a decentralized system for publishing on one's own terms. But it's easy to forget this, as today the corporate and platformed web captures and sells our data and attention. Through hands-on exercises and projects, this course aims to demystify the web, removing barriers to basic web coding and publishing by focusing on the foundational skills in making websites with HTML and CSS. We'll remember what makes a web a web: links made by humans.
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. The processes will begin with cyanotypes and culminate with large format film exposure and processing, and printing. These processes trace the origins of photography. Final projects will examine new potentials in photographic expression including images that hybridize analog and digital interfaces. The goal of this course is to make art, and by doing so, understand the necessity for the invention of photography.
This course introduces students to 16mm analog film production. The focus of this course is on the completion of a short experimental film originating on analog film. Various hands-on exercises with 16mm film production cameras, lenses, light meters, tripods, and film stocks will prepare students for making their film. Students will also learn dark room motion picture film developing. Analysis of the works of experimental filmmakers will provide historical context of the form.
The practice of graphic design relies on the existence of networks for distributing multiple copies of identical things. 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. Through hands-on design projects, readings, and discussions, students will delve into different material forms of distribution — the printed newspaper, social network software, the community radio station, the PDF.
This class will be a studio introduction to sculpture, with particular emphasis on the study of how form, space, and a wide variety of materials and processes influence the visual properties of sculpture and the making of meaning. A balance of indoor, outdoor, and/or transient assignments will lead to the development of an understanding of contemporary sculpture, as well as basic technical facility with found objects, common materials, natural earthworks, ergonomics, and three-dimensional design.
This course explores Hollywood's fascination with imagining the end of the world. From Cold War mushroom clouds to submerged cities, zombie pandemics, and even the occasional meteor, Hollywood has dramatized the apocalypse in ways that reveal American society at the end of its rope. This course examines how apocalyptic films and series reflect political tensions, technological fears, religious narratives, and climate anxieties in different historical moments in the United States. Students will analyze works that span disaster blockbusters, speculative sci-fi, climate allegories, "slow violence" dramas, and documentary realism.
This class experiments with 3D fabric construction, weaving, knitting, knotting and more as a means for making sculpture. In her essay, "The Materialists", curator Jenell Porter asks, "Why not consider fiber as painting and sculpture, drawing and sculpture, installation and painting, and most problematically, art and craft?" Through this 'both/and' condition, this course introduces a range of art in which textiles are used as the primary material while providing techniques and materials for developing textile-based sculpture. Studio work will be complemented by readings, research presentations, breakout groups, and individual meetings.
This course takes an exciting approach to color photography using methods of cameraless and lens based analog photography. We will experiment with Lumen Printing, analog color printing and Polaroids. Participants are encouraged to experiment, using the medium to convey observations and ideas. The possibilities of color in photographs are endless and together we will expand the ability to interpret color. The class is augmented by lectures, readings, critiques, and a visiting artist.
The "truths" found in traditional archives are incomplete: books and mainstream film productions are often biased; silences and omissions enter every level of archive-making and historical production. Students will engage in the critical analysis of the historical relationship between race, diaspora, and citizenship as they appear in film, media, and cultural productions. Building on original stories and artistic materials presented in class, students will create their own project (short film, podcast, story map). The goal is to make the archive a tool for teaching, learning and an artistic piece for the larger community.
Through a series of short exercises students will learn the craft, history and theory of alternative modes in documentary filmmaking. We will emphasize experimentation with various formal strategies to probe the impulse to engage the "real". Topics in this course will include portraits, interviews, ethnography, space and place, narrativity, personal film, re-enactments and performance. Students will be encouraged to draw unexpected connections and use experimental approaches in their aesthetic pursuits.
This interdisciplinary studio and seminar class will investigate the concept of the archive from an embodied perspective, asking: How can analog and physical memory-keeping counter the digital and the institutional record? When do they work responsibly in tandem? What unexpected forms can story-keeping take? We will work to undermine the totality of the internet, elude surveillance, and complicate historical narratives through oral histories, encounters with the land, ephemeral experimentation, and redaction.
This interdisciplinary studio seminar explores the material, scientific, and cultural dimensions of glass. Co-taught by a sculptor and a material scientist, the course considers glass at both the molecular and artistic levels. Students investigate properties such as thermal expansion, refractive index, and durability while examining how transparency, fragility, and luminosity have shaped technology and visual culture. The seminar pairs scientific inquiry with creative practice: the first half features lectures, demos, and field trips; the second culminates in a glass kiln casting project from wax modeling to mold making and cold working.
Learn how to draw with perspective! Take flat surface lines to three-dimensional depth. Students will acquire skills of drawing one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective creating illusion of depth with spatial relationships. Students will think about line formation and the poetics of lines. With the techniques learned, students will apply into a drawing project of their choosing. Students will gain confidence in learning how to speak about their work and learn various methods to offer valuable feedback to their peers. Students will read and study from artists to gain greater knowledge and a new perspective on drawing.
The nature of this class is experimental. This course explores the way drawing can move beyond straightforward representation, to create a sense of how it feels to have a body in space through gesture, materials, and processes. We will look at the history of what counts as drawing, how artists throughout time have used drawing to examine the boundaries of perception, and how young artists in this time can push this. Themes will include abstraction, figure/ground relationships, duration, color relationships, alternative tools, collage, and process-based iterative series. Lectures, readings, and projects will consider experimental drawing.
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.
What is contemporary art? What defines its contemporaneity? And in which sense can it be called art when it defies categories of modernist art theory? How to define the plural of art when the old art genres have dissolved into countless hybrid forms? And what follows from the artistic destabilization of the border between art and non-art? What are the aesthetic and political implications of an art that addresses its audience and its institutional frameworks as well as questions of globalization, digitalization, historiography, and ecology? The seminar will discuss these problems by looking at philosophy, art criticism, and artist writings.
In a digital world, this course promotes hand-made printed images. Students will examine two kinds of printmaking: relief and intaglio. To make images that matter, students will learn to cut blocks, fashion stencils, plan and execute color layers, etch and drypoint copper plates, and understand the range of mark making possibilities available in printmaking. Students are encouraged to draw regularly to cultivate themes and content, and to develop a basic knowledge of print in contemporary art. Woodblocks have been around since the 8th century; etchings for 500 years. Students will make something completely new from something old.
This course will examine the practice of camera-less photography. Students will work in black and white and color in the analog darkroom with a wide spectrum of processes - photograms, lumen and cliché-verre prints, chemigrams, and digitally produced negatives. The course will require independent and collaborative assignments augmented by readings in the history of camera-less and abstract photography and by visiting artists.
An introduction to the art and craft of lighting design for the stage and an exploration of light as a medium for expression. Students will develop an ability to observe lighting in the world and on the stage; to learn to make lighting choices based on text, space, research, and their own responses; to practice being creative, responsive and communicative under pressure and in company; to prepare well to create under pressure using the designer's visual toolbox; and to play well with others-working creatively and communicating with directors, writers, performers, fellow designers, the crew and others.
This intermediate-level studio course will build on the foundations of animation covered in Animation I. Students will investigate a wider range of techniques and technologies, while experimenting with varied modes of audiovisual storytelling, time-based collage, and motion graphics. For the final project, each student will direct a short film using a blend of analog and digital materials and tools, explored during the semester. Screenings and class discussions will dive more deeply into the history and potential of animation, as well as its connections to other forms of visual art, filmmaking, computation, and design.
Live Art, also known as Performance Art, integrates several disciplines: dance, drama, and visual art as well as architecture, anthropology, sociology, and political science. This course includes classes in creative movement, voice and text, improvisation, mixed media, and technology in performance practice. Composition of the site-specific works provides experiences of space and architecture. Theoretical perspectives consider the principles of interdisciplinary practices from early twentieth century and will focus on socio-political contexts that Live Art historically responds to, giving this innovative practice immediacy and relevance.
An intermediate exploration of 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 picks up where Narrative Filmmaking I left off, expanding on the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media by providing further technical instruction in camera operation, nonlinear editing, dialogue recording, and sound mixing paired with the conceptual frameworks of point of view (narrative stance), master shot technique, performance, and blocking.
This class will focus on how contemporary painting considers the human figure. Portraits without people, the selfie, imagined figures, forgotten figures, fragmented figures, figures from our lives, abstract figures, cyborgs, crowds, and composite figures will be considered within a structure of exploratory painterly approaches. This class will not focus on "how to" paint the figure. No experience painting the figure is necessary.
This course is designed to guide photography students toward a distinct artistic voice, and projects will be assigned to suit individuals’ aesthetic trajectories. Technical components of the class will focus on how digital and analogue photography merge with other practices such as site-specific installation work and time-based media. Materialist and text-based approaches to photography will be encouraged and visiting artists and gallery and museum visits will lean in this direction.
How do Black visual artists draw on cinematic, photographic and historical archives to create innovative new work? How do they "fabulate" new possibilities for understanding the past and envisioning the future differently? And how might aspiring young artists use this work as a source of inspiration? This seminar engages the practice of "critical fabulation" (rigorous archival research and speculative storytelling) in the work of Black contemporary artists, using it as a point of departure for students to craft their own critical responses to these artworks in ways that bring their research and creative practice into conversation.
This studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes. VIS 415 is structured around one semester-length assignment which connects graphic design to the design of software interfaces. The single project allows an individual in-depth investigation of a broader class assignment and will leverage the online setting with students working together to refine their individual projects through a mix of critique and user testing. Studio work is supplemented by guests, readings, and lectures. The course will explore information design and visual problem solving specifically for electronic media.
This course provides a structured environment for students to present their ongoing film projects and receive sustained critical feedback. Throughout the semester, we will screen and discuss each student's work-in-progress, emphasizing artistic development, technical refinement, and conceptual clarity. The course will also include screenings with invited filmmakers and occasional field trips to relevant exhibitions, screenings, or production sites.
Haptic Lab is a hands-on studio course in which digital technologies are informed by tactile experience. The Spring 2026 lab will focus on four technically diverse ideas: pre-cinematic devices, the materiality of language, human prosthetics, and "searched" material. Students will engage in making artworks by hand but also engage in the critical analysis of their transformation into digital space and back again. Course work will be supported by visiting artists and frequent use of the maker spaces in Fine Hall and the Keller Center.