Visual and Studio Arts

Technical exploration, perception, development of ideas, intuition, invention, representation, and communication are at the core of this class. The course will begin in an observational mode, introducing practical information about the fundamentals of painting: color, shape, tone, edge, composition, perspective, and surface. We will paint still lifes and transcribe a masterwork. The work of both old masters and contemporary painters will be looked at. We will take a trip to a museum to look at paintings in the flesh. The course will include demonstrations of materials and techniques, slide presentations, films and videos, reading materials, homework assignments, group and individual critiques. In the second half of the course, we will complete a series of projects exploring design principles as applied to nonobjective (abstract) artworks. Using paint, with preparatory collages and drawings, we will engage with strategies for utilizing nonobjective imagery towards self-directed content. Each week will bring a new problem, with lessons culminating in independent paintings. Projects will emphasize brainstorming multiple answers to visual problems over selecting the first solution that comes to mind. The last part of the course will be devoted to a personal project. Students will establish their theme of interest, which they will present during our conference meetings; then will carry out research and preparatory work to develop a series of paintings. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to solve painting problems and illuminate visual ideas. Revisions are a natural and mandatory part of this course. The majority of class time will be spent in a studio/work mode as a lab, where ideas are being worked out and meaning is made. It is important that students are curious and travel to unexpected places rather than merely relying on existing skills and experiences, instead challenging themselves to openness and progress. The process will be part critical thinking, part intuition, and in large part physical labor. Working rigorously inside and outside of class is required. The goal is to establish the roots of a healthy and generative personal studio practice. Students will also strengthen their knowledge of art history and take into consideration the wider cultural, historical, and social contexts within which art is being made today. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

This studio course will look at art-making through a sustainable lens. How can artists create in an ecological way? How can we imagine an alternate future through art-making? How can we use visual art to communicate ideas when language fails? We will explore various modes of creation—working with found objects, engaging the landscape, temporal artworks, and ecological narratives. We will look at different modes of sculptural creation, thinking about the material footprint and the life of the artwork beyond the studio. Studio work will be accompanied by an analysis of historical and contemporary artists whose work addresses ideas around sustainability and the environment, including Walter de Maria, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maren Hassinger, Agnes Denes, Maya Lin, Meg Webster, Amy Balkin, Delcy Morelos, Mark Dion, and Theaster Gates. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Although amateurs often confuse the terms, "abstract video" is a new art form that is very different from the experimental film movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Often drawing from the digital worlds of games, signal processing, 3D modeling, and computational media, abstract video has become an important new aspect of art installation, site-specific sculpture, and gallery presentations. This project course will be an introduction to the use of video as a material for the visual artists. Using open-source software and digital techniques, students will create several small works of video abstraction intended for gallery installation, ambient surrounds, and new media screens. Artists will include Refik Anadol, the Light Surgeons, Ryoji Ikeda, and more. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Using small, hands-on projects, this project aims for digital and computational literacy in interactive and installation art. Discussions and prompts survey foundational concepts of these new art forms, including noise, feedback, emergence, and generative artificial intelligence. This project is required for first-year students in architecture, drawing, new genres, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. In fall and spring, students will meet weekly as a group, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies ARTS course.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of intaglio techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Throughout the course, students will practice dry point, etching, aquatint, soft-ground, and sugar-lift techniques. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using a print shop, printing an edition, talking critically about one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented with technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

Through hands-on projects, discussions, and critiques, students will experiment with developing ideas across mediums—drawing, sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and more. Sessions will include multidisciplinary workshops, artist talks, and advising conversations, introducing students to each other and to the breadth of visual-arts disciplines. With a goal to foster camaraderie and cross-disciplinary exploration, the course will culminate in a group gallery show connecting first-year artists with the wider college community. In fall and spring, students will meet weekly as a group; corequisite First-Year Studies ARTS course.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of relief printing techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Students will work with linoleum and woodblock materials. Students will develop drawing skills through the printmaking medium and experiment with value structure, composition, mark making, and interaction of color. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using printing equipment, printing an edition, critically discussing one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented by technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. Students will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

This course will guide students through woodworking, metal, and casting with a focus on material history, function, and meaning. Introductory exercises in each material will be paired with inquiry into the value of working with wood, metal, water (casting), earth (clay), and fire (metalworking). We will look at the historical use and prevalence of material, including craft and modernism, to more ecologically conscious contemporary art. We will examine the sourcing and supply lines of material and their impact, practical uses, and weaknesses while completing weekly exercises to familiarize students with tools, materials, and approaches to working in built form.

A photograph presented alone and without a description in words is a simple utterance. “Ooh,” “Aah,” and “Huh?” are its proper responses. When pictures are presented in groups with accompanying text (of any length) and perhaps in conjunction with political or poetic conceptual strategies, any statement becomes possible. The photographs can begin to function as a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire treatise. Whether working in fiction, nonfiction, or in a fictive space, artists such as Robert Frank, Jim Goldberg, Roni Horn, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, and numerous others have been in the process of transforming photography with their work. Or perhaps they have created a medium: the new narrative photography. In this course, students will initially study the work of these “narrative” photographers and either write about their work or make pictures in response to it. The culmination of this experience will be students’ creation of their own bodies of work. If you have a story to tell, a statement to make, or a phenomenon that you wish to study and describe, this course is open to you. No previous photographic experience or special equipment is necessary. The opportunity to forge a new medium is rare. This course will aim to create the forum and the conditions necessary for all to do so in a critical and supportive workshop environment. Photographers studied will include: Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Sophie Calle, Eve Sonneman, Bill Owens, Bill Burke, Adrian Piper, Hamish Fulton, Susan Meiselas, Anne Turyn, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Tacita Dean, Alfredo Jaar, Allan Sekula, Gillian Wearing, Taryn Simon, Joel Sternfeld, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Sussman, Shirin Neshat, Richard Prince, Clarissa Sligh, Wendy Ewald, Lawrence Weiner, Jim Goldberg, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paul Graham, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Walker Evans, Eugene Smith, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Chris Verene, Larry Sultan, Diana Markosian, Helen Levitt, and more. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

A three-part course, students will first use water-based media in both traditional and nontraditional ways to create evocative paintings on paper with pigments (both art and nonart) suspended in water. Watercolor is one of the oldest pigment-based media and continues to be used widely by artists, illustrators, designers, and architects in finished paintings or as preparatory studies and, thus, will be one focus of the class. This course will introduce some of the effects of layering, transparency, translucency, and absorbency inherent in the watercolor medium. We will use landscape, portraiture, and other subject matter to represent water, light, flesh, atmosphere, and solid earth. In conferences, students will be able to explore a specific theme or content. Students will also learn sustainable painting practices through organically created pigments. The second sequence of this course will use the human form while considering the ways the body has been represented and used in art of the 21st century. Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color have transformed the way we see and construct the world, as well as how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame, in part, from an exhibition curated by Apsara DiQuinzio at Berkeley Art Museum in 2022, course work prompts will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, gender alchemy. The course's third emphasis will be on the development and understanding of an artist's practice. Through studying visiting artists, the use of the watercolor blocks, and specific assignments, students will bring their practice out into the world. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

This course will look at typologies of labor with their embedded leisure and amenities used as tools for greater work output. Questions will arise regarding the work/life versus work/leisure paradigm and the blurred line between them. Counter-examples will include the festivals and fairgrounds as a site of leisure and the home that functions as a device of release from work; but is work still happening on these sites? Through readings and other media—drawing, collage, and mapping—students will identify the experiences in these materials, how they function with or against the norms of society, and what the future of these spaces linked to “play” symbolizes for them. What aspects of leisure are considered necessity versus desire, and what is the role of aesthetics in these spaces? Students will design an intervention of the chosen site as a means of critique, analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual design within our present political, social, economic, and climatic issues—which are inextricably linked to our production and reproduction, with labor and leisure at its core.

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition, and corresponding exhibition catalogue, on domestic space. Students will research the house based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. We will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice.

This course will invite students to engage with the environment in a variety of art in both traditional and nontraditional ways. The course will begin with a short workshop of "en plen air" watercolor painting techniques, moving toward offsite field trips. Students will then engage with organic materials in the creation of both art materials and drawing and painting instruments. The course will end with a curated public engagement project generated by the students. Students will complete projects that could include creating an archive, following a lifecyle, building an herbarium, or writing a field guide—all of which encourage students to work out of the studio and in the "expanded field."

A three-part course, students will first use water-based media in both traditional and nontraditional ways to create evocative paintings on paper with pigments (both art and non-art) suspended in water. Watercolor is one of the oldest pigment-based media and continues to be used widely by artists, illustrators, designers, and architects in finished paintings or as preparatory studies and, thus, will be one focus of the class. This course will introduce some of the effects of layering, transparency, translucency, and absorbency inherent in the watercolor medium. We will use landscape, portraiture, and other subject matter to represent water, light, flesh, atmosphere, and solid earth. In conferences, students will be able to explore a specific theme or content. Students will also learn sustainable painting practices through organically-created pigments. The second sequence of this course will use the human form while considering the ways the body has been represented and used in art of the 21st century. Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color have transformed the way we see and construct the world, as well as how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame in part from an exhibition curated by Apsara DiQuinzio at Berkeley Art Museum in 2022, course work prompts will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, gender alchemy. The course's third emphasis will be on the development and understanding of an artist's practice. Through studying visiting artists, the use of the watercolor blocks, and specific assignments, students will bring their practice out into the world.

This course is designed for seniors committed to deepening their artmaking practice over an extended period. Students will maintain individual studio spaces and are expected to work independently, creatively, and critically—challenging both themselves and their peers to explore new ways of thinking and making. The course will include prompts that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to art and culminates in a solo gallery exhibition during the spring, accompanied by a printed book documenting the show. Students will engage in regular critiques with visiting artists and faculty; discuss readings and a range of artists; visit galleries and studios; and participate in the Visual Arts Lecture Series, a program of lectures given by prominent contemporary artists and held at Sarah Lawrence College. Beyond studio work, students will develop skills in presenting their work—including writing artist statements and exhibition proposals, interviewing artists, and documenting their art. A series of professional-practice workshops will further prepare students for life beyond college.

Although amateurs often confuse the terms, "abstract video" is a new art form that is very different from the experimental film movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Often drawing from the digital worlds of games, signal processing, 3D modeling, and computational media, abstract video has become an important new aspect of art installation, site-specific sculpture, and gallery presentations. This project course will be an introduction to the use of video as a material for the visual artists. Using open-source software and digital techniques, students will create several small works of video abstraction intended for gallery installation, ambient surrounds, and new-media screens. Artists studied will include Refik Anadol, the Light Surgeons, Ryoji Ikeda, and more.

This course will be a hands-on, project-based studio that explores special topics in art and technology, including generative art, simulation, interactive narrative, artificial intelligence, interactive sound, and immersive transmediality. Students will be expected to experiment with a wide range of electronic practices and will be guided through the design of individualized reading lists and tutorials based on personal interest. Students should plan on producing two portfolio works of interactive, computational, or artificial-intelligence art and at least one comprehensive, yearlong installation project that expands upon skills, conceptual thinking, and creativity.

In this course, we will explore the process of collage as a method for creating dynamic compositions. Collage is a way to communicate complex emotions, layered ideas, and nonlinear stories. We will learn different techniques of collage, using found materials, photographs, and craft supplies. Collage will be utilized as a preparation toward making a series of paintings that will also become a part of paintings. At the core of this class is openness to material experimentation, interest in learning how to communicate through paint as well as nontraditional painting materials, and learning about other artists who have used collage and assemblage in their work. The class follows a series of prompts or visual problems posed by the instructor. By the end of the course, a series of works will be produced. Each student will investigate topics of interest through methods of collage and painting. Some visual materials that we will reference are stained-glass windows, quilts, tiles, mail art, and book art, as well as artists who have used/use collage in their paintings/drawings/sculpture today. 

In this course, we will look at ways in which we can build a collection of inspiration and research. Guided by students’ interests and previous knowledge, we will use this research to work toward a body of paintings that pushes past expectations. This will take form as readings, exploratory walks, in-class collaboration, weekly prompts, and longer projects. This course will be guided by the principle that artists can work intentionally toward research and that there is also unexpected research that happens when you are curious and open. We will discuss and play with strategies for facilitating both. We will talk about artists’ collections and Wunderkammers, also known as cabinets of curiosities, and students will be encouraged to build their own collection over the course of the semester. This course will be a supportive environment for those just starting out, as well as for students with more making experience.

Technical exploration, perception, development of ideas, intuition, invention, representation, and communication are at the core of this class. The course will begin in an observational mode, introducing practical information about the fundamentals of painting: color, shape, tone, edge, composition, perspective, and surface. We will paint still lifes and transcribe a masterwork. We will look at the work of both old masters and contemporary painters. We will take a trip to a museum to look at paintings in the flesh. The course will include demonstrations of materials and techniques, slide presentations, films and videos, reading materials, homework assignments, group and individual critiques. In the second half of the course, we will complete a series of projects exploring design principles as applied to non-objective (abstract) artworks. Using paint, with preparatory collages and drawings, we will engage with strategies for utilizing non-objective imagery toward self-directed content. Each week will bring a new problem, with lessons culminating in independent paintings. Projects will emphasize brainstorming multiple answers to visual problems over selecting the first solution that comes to mind. The last part of the course will be devoted to a personal project. Students will establish their theme of interest, which they will present during conference meetings; then, they will carry out research and preparatory work to develop a series of paintings. Drawings will often be produced in tandem with paintings in order to solve painting problems and illuminate visual ideas. Revisions are a natural and mandatory part of the course. The majority of class time will be spent in a studio/work mode as a lab where ideas are being worked out and meaning is made. It is important that students are curious and travel to unexpected places rather than merely relying on existing skills and experiences, instead challenging themselves to openness and progress. The process will be part critical thinking, part intuition, and in large part physical labor. Working rigorously inside and outside of class is required. The goal is to establish the roots of a healthy and generative personal studio practice. Students will also strengthen their knowledge of art history and take into consideration the wider cultural, historical, and social contexts within which art is being made today.

This course will start with a foundation of figure drawing and painting to set the stage for further exploration in identity, collaboration, and touch. We will use the body as an opportunity to build skills in proportion and perspective but also to consider the body as a location of power and vulnerability. From lectures and independent research, we will learn about traditional and experimental portraiture and think about how we can use both to communicate. We will consider the different roles involved in a work of art (maker, collaborator, subject, viewer, etc.). We will discuss topics such as clothing and fashion, agency, the five senses, and Frankenstein, to name a few. There will be an emphasis on working from observation, as well as from imagination, invention, and material experimentation. We will begin with weekly prompts and transition to longer projects and incorporate conference work, building toward a body of 8-12 completed paintings.

This course will experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing, as material, the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists reviewed will include John Cage, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. We will review dialogues and movements introducing performance art, such as art interventions, sculpture, installation art, institutional critique, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, Dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and dance/movement. Students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, and improvisation—thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance art genre.

This course will introduce students to the practice and principles of performance art, exploring diverse ways of using the body in relationship to audience, site/context, and duration. Performance art’s ties to experimental and avant-garde movements and modes of political resistance make it an ideal medium for exploring themes of identity and power and, equally, forms of improvisational play. Students will develop their own performance style of expression unique to their creative and intellectual interests. As a highly adaptive and interdisciplinary medium, this course will invite students to combine performance art with other visual-arts mediums (painting, sculpture, installation, and video) and to activate any past experiences in theatre, dance, music, ritual, comedy, athletics, and more.

The shifting ways in which identity has been articulated, both historically and contemporaneously—such as around class, race, gender, queerness, religion, diaspora, or the intersection of those ideas—makes this conceptual space one that is ripe for examination, deconstruction, and reformation along one’s embodied understanding of self. In this course, we will examine the work of photographers from the 19th century to the present. who have used various strategies—from documentary image-making to portraiture and self-portraiture, still-life, and landscape—to place identity at the center of their practice. Key contextual readings will provide an understanding of the histories and politics surrounding these practices. Concomitantly, through assignments and supported by in-class critique, students will experiment with these modes of image-making—ultimately creating a body of work that articulates, through imagery, the personal vocabulary of their identity/identities.

While every image that we create contains an element of the self, only the self-portrait holds the photographer’s distinct personal perspective at its center. As we grapple with fluctuating times and shifting notions of identity, we will explore the ways in which the practice of self-portraiture can also shift. How can we challenge and expand the boundaries of this way of making work? The work of photographers who have used a variety of modes of self-portraiture will be presented for robust discussion, among them Tarrah Krajnak, Paul Sepuya, and Carrie Mae Weems. Through weekly exercises and supported by in-class critique, students will experiment with a variety of alternative approaches to the self-portrait—still-life, landscape, portraiture, and more conceptual and collaborative practices, such as text art—alongside traditional methods, with the aim of finding an individual approach to the expression of the self.

From the inception of photography, images have served as a means of identification, as seen in mugshots, and in misidentification, as exemplified by Cindy Sherman’s portraits where she adopts the personas of Hollywood B-movie starlets. In this course, we will explore various paradigms of self-transformation through photography. We will study artists who engage in this practice and use their work as prompts for creative exploration. We will look specifically at the work of Hippolyte Bayard, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Anna Gaskell, Nicki Lee, Gillian Wearing, and others. The ultimate goal of the course will be to examine the nature of the self, the possibilities of self-reinvention, and the role of the camera as a tool for transformation.

In 1981, Sally Eauclaire summed up the first decade of fine-art photography by coining the term, “The New Color.” She used this coined term as the title of her book, which documented many of the important images of that decade. The chromatic aesthetics of that decade have endured. Is a new palette or a new approach to color in photography possible? In this course, students will be asked to do graphic analysis of color that attempts to break through to The New New Color.

A photograph presented alone and without a description in words is a simple utterance. “Ooh,” “Aah,” and “Huh?” are its proper responses. When pictures are presented in groups with accompanying text (of any length) and perhaps in conjunction with political or poetic conceptual strategies, any statement becomes possible. The photographs can begin to function as a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire treatise. Whether working in fiction, nonfiction, or in a fictive space, artists such as Robert Frank, Jim Goldberg, Roni Horn, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, and numerous others have been in the process of transforming photography with their work. Or perhaps they have created a medium: the new narrative photography. In this course, students will initially study the work of these “narrative” photographers and either write about their work or make pictures in response to it. The culmination of this experience will be students’ creation of their own bodies of work. If you have a story to tell, a statement to make, or a phenomenon that you wish to study and describe, this course is open to you. No previous photographic experience or special equipment is necessary. The opportunity to forge a new medium is rare. This course will aim to create the forum and the conditions necessary for all to do so in a critical and supportive workshop environment. Photographers we will look at include: Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Sophie Calle, Eve Sonneman, Bill Owens, Bill Burke, Adrian Piper, Hamish Fulton, Susan Meiselas, Anne Turyn, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Tacita Dean, Alfredo Jaar, Allan Sekula, Gillian Wearing, Taryn Simon, Joel Sternfeld, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Sussman, Shirin Neshat, Richard Prince, Clarissa Sligh, Wendy Ewald, Lawrence Weiner, Jim Goldberg, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paul Graham, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Walker Evans, Eugene Smith, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Chris Verene, Larry Sultan, Diana Markosian, Helen Levitt, and more.

Experimentation—focused play—is one of the foundations of a robust and evolving visual practice. No matter where you are in your image-making journey, through focused play one can identify and break through conscious or unconscious blocks and boundaries around ways of making photographs and, in so doing, open pathways of creative growth. In this course, through weekly targeted exercises and supported by in-class critique, students will engage with a range of visual experiments that will challenge their relationship to the image and to image-making—thus finding the expansive agency that focused play and experimentation can bring to their creative pursuits.

Over its relatively short history, photography has often relied on well-worn conventions—the landscape, the portrait, the snapshot. Like all artistic mediums, every advancement in photography builds upon what has come before. In this course, we will explore how these developments have unfolded within some of photography’s most dominant tropes. Through discussion and practice, we will work toward creating images that radically mutate and reimagine these traditions. We will study the work of artists who have disrupted expectations, challenged formal norms, and redefined what a photograph can be. Students will be encouraged to question their own habits as image makers and to embrace experimentation as a means of pushing beyond the familiar.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of relief-printing techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Students will work with linoleum and woodblock materials. Students will develop drawing skills through the printmaking medium and experiment with value structure, composition, mark making, and interaction of color. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using printing equipment, printing an edition, critically discussing one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented by technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations. 

This course will be an opening foray into the possibilities of painterly printmaking and experimental processes that merge printmaking with painting and drawing. The course will also cover fundamentals, such as basic drawing and color mixing. As a means to explore an individual idea, students will investigate a wide range of possibilities offered by monoprint techniques and will experiment with inks and paints, stencils, multiple plates, and images altered in sequence. Students will begin to develop a method to investigate meaning, or content, through the techniques of painterly printmaking. There will be an examination of various strategies that fluctuate between specific in-class assignments and individual studio work. In-class assignments will be supplemented with PowerPoint presentations, reading materials, film clips and video screenings, group critiques, homework projects, and gallery visits.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of intaglio techniques while also assisting students in developing their own visual imagery through the language of printmaking. Throughout the course, students will practice dry point, etching, aquatint, soft-ground, and sugar-lift techniques. Students will explore the history of printmaking media, the evolution of subject matter and technique, and the relationship of graphic arts to the methods of mechanical reproduction. Course objectives will include becoming familiar with using a print shop, printing an edition, talking critically about one’s work, and developing a process of visual storytelling. The course will be supplemented with technical demonstrations, critiques, field trips, and keynote presentations.

In this course, we will explore the powerful impact of color in the visual arts. Students will investigate color theory through a series of problems and experimental projects. We will consider questions of individual perception, cultural significance, symbolism, and emotional expression. The class will collectively analyze the use of color by visual artists working in a broad range of disciplines. Students will complete a series of individual and collaborative studio projects, using cut paper, collage, paint, and found materials. Related readings, short videos, and slideshows will be assigned throughout the semester.

This course will explore both hand-drawn and digital methods of silkscreen printmaking. Techniques studied will include stencil, photo-emulsion, monoprint, multistep reduction, and multicolor printing. Students will engage with the expansive artistic possibilities of variation, repetition, and printing editions on paper and textiles. Students will be encouraged to engage with the medium experimentally and combine techniques as they develop individual projects. In addition to class assignments and personal studio work, we will further consider the medium through slideshows, videos, and gallery visits.

This studio course will look at art making through a sustainable lens. How can artists create in an ecological way? How can we imagine an alternate future through art making? How can we use visual art to communicate ideas when language fails? We will explore various modes of creation—working with found objects, engaging the landscape, temporal artworks, and ecological narratives. We will look at different modes of sculptural creation, thinking about the material footprint and the life of the artwork beyond the studio. Studio work will be accompanied by an analysis of historical and contemporary artists whose work addresses ideas around sustainability and the environment, including Walter de Maria, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maren Hassinger, Agnes Denes, Maya Lin, Meg Webster, Amy Balkin, Delcy Morelos, Mark Dion, and Theaster Gates.

This course will ground technical learning of sculptural fabrication within a critical examination of digital society at the planetary scale. Equipping students with accessible digital sculpture techniques that can scale to advanced creative workflows, the course will introduce core Rhino modeling skills, develop methods for smartphone-based 3D-scan-to-3D-print fabrication, reframe the notion of the digital/virtual within the context of the planetary, and foreground making through materiality. Focusing on the intersection of digital tools with the elements of earth and water, students will engage how digital tools interface with energy infrastructure, critical land studies, sustainable ecology, and supply-chain ethics. Utilizing digital fabrication methods to cast with biomaterials, we will explore the conceptual possibilities of our tools and media as co-makers with the planet. Artists such as Allan Sekula, Agnes Denes, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Julian Charrière, alongside various examples from architecture and neolithic art, will complement our explorations. 

This course will familiarize students with tools and methods in woodworking and metalwork, including joinery and welding. This practical knowledge will be put into a series of assignments considering interspecies design and using skills as a sculptor to make functional form with outdoor sculpture and ecological stewardship in mind. In this course, we will look at artists who work on constructed material form and public sculpture. We will also look at the merging of landscape architecture and gardens toward a holistic approach to building site-specific sculpture and ideate toward a proposal for public works.

This course will be an open-ended exploration of the links between drawing and sculpture. Students will explore drawing as a means of communicating, brainstorming, questioning, and building. Assignments will promote experimentation and expand the ways in which we use and talk about drawing by interrogating an inclusive list of materials. The course will consider unusual forms of mark making, such as lipstick left on a glass and a tire track on pavement. Each student will cultivate a unique index of marks, maintaining his/her own sketchbook throughout the course. The course will provide contemporary and historical examples of alternate means of mark making, such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback, Gordon Matta-Clark, David Hammons, and Janine Antoni, among others.

This course will explore the potential of figuration within contemporary sculptural practice. What can we achieve by incorporating a humanoid figure into our sculptural works? How far can the human form be pushed while remaining legible? Who controls and is invested in this legibility? What do histories of figuration have in common with objectification and dehumanization? And can we extract utility, today, from these dynamics? Alongside material demonstrations, lectures, readings, and critiques, we will investigate unpopular media in order to explore the work of contemporary artists alongside ideas and genres such as the uncanny valley, horror, science fiction, and more.

This course will explore techniques of sculptural fabrication through the lens of quantum materialism. We will study digital fabrication tools from the perspective of phenomenology, considering the emergence of technology within the realm of deep time and quantum physics. Pulling from the philosophy of technology, the course will situate materiality at the subatomic level and complicate the line between the organic and the machinic. We will reflect on how the tools and techniques of digital sculpture themselves contribute to conceptual meaning within works of art. The course will introduce core Rhino modeling skills for first-time students and strengthen modeling techniques for students with more experience. Artists and thinkers such as Albert Samreth, Ralph Lemon, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, American Artist, Robert Barry, Tavares Strachan, and Alice Aycock will complement our explorations.

This course will introduce techniques within the Adobe Creative Cloud that are foundational for communicating and working in the professional creative context. Offering a hands-on entry into the technical and conceptual possibilities of digital media production, the course will emphasize core skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign while also inviting students to reflect on how digital tools shape storytelling, authorship, and visual culture. Students will engage in short-form projects that explore image manipulation, vector graphics, and layout design. No prior experience is required.

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works and artists with a focus on primary sources, such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews, and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

This course will guide students through woodworking, metal, and casting with a focus on material history, function, and meaning. Introductory exercises in each material will be paired with inquiry into the value of working with wood, metal, water (casting), earth (clay), and fire (metalworking). We will look at the historical use and prevalence of material, including craft and modernism, to more ecologically conscious contemporary art. We will examine the sourcing and supply lines of material and their impact, practical uses, and weaknesses while completing weekly exercises to familiarize students with tools, materials, and approaches to working in built form.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This yearlong seminar offers an introduction to histories of modern and contemporary art through two distinct themes: place and space. In fall, we will explore the place of the Hudson Valley through the category of Hudson River School landscape painting, asking how Euro-American artists portrayed ideologies of imperialism, settler-colonialism, and Western expansionism through the genre of landscape. We will also explore how Indigenous and Black artists have defined place, land, and embodiment as counter-histories to the dominant white, Western norm. Along the way, we will ask broader questions, such as: What can art tell us about humans’ relationships to land and environment? How does art shape our understanding of climate crisis and the Anthropocene or how humans have indelibly altered the earth? In spring, we will explore the category of sculpture in relationship to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the space of the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. Our aim will be to explore how sculptures and installations shape how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will also research the Sarah Lawrence College archives to write about public sculptures, both past and present, on campus. This course will introduce students to the skills of close reading, visual analytical writing, and archival and library research. Assignments may include visual analysis essays, reading responses, peer reviews, and collaborative digital humanities projects. Conference projects will entail writing a long-form research paper or presenting your research in an alternate format, such as a podcast or online exhibition. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include field trips to area museums, introductions to campus resources, and research sessions. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

Focusing on Europe and its intersections with the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course will explore how artists in the long 19th century responded to the economic, political, and social upheavals of modernity and imperialism. We will look to artists depicting plantation economies, sanitizing the slave trade, and abolitionists forging a new visual rhetoric to depict bodily freedom and personhood. We will consider how artists reveled in capitalist spectacle, leisure, and entertainment, including through the nascent medium of photography. We will also grapple with how realism and materialism became tools to voice politics amidst revolution and nationalism, social inequality, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Readings and lectures will introduce the movements of neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, aestheticism, and neo-impressionism— and dig deeper to take up questions of collective and individual; center and periphery; gender, race, class, and sexuality; and land, landscape, and industry. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

The visual arts and architecture constitute a central part of human expression and experience, both growing from and influencing our lives in profound ways that we might not consciously acknowledge. We will explore intersections between the visual arts and cultural, political, and social history with the goal of using art-history methods and theories to deal critically with works of art. This course is not a survey; rather, it will include a limited number of artists and works of art and architecture, which students will learn about in depth through formal analysis, readings, discussion, research, and debate. We will endeavor to understand each work from the point of view of its creators and patrons and by following its changing reception by audiences throughout time, including the ways in which those changes evoke political and social meanings. To accomplish this, we will need to understand some of the languages of art. The course, then, is also a course in visual literacy: the craft of reading and interpreting visual images on their own terms. We will also discuss a number of issues of contemporary concern; for instance, the destruction of art, free speech and respect of religion, the art market, and the museum.

This course will be about how we perceive objects, sites, and spaces in the world. We will look closely at how modern and contemporary critics and artists have defined the medium of sculpture in relation to the body, light, and touch; the pedestal, the museum, the monument, and the public sphere; commodities and everyday objects; and photography, video, and film. We will begin with how theorists and writers described sculptural perception in the Enlightenment and beyond, consider the legacies of neoclassicism and the fraught status of sculpture in modernism, and conclude our story with large-scale installations in contemporary art. Along the way, we will explore sculptors remaking the category of sculpture by upsetting expectations for a stable object and blurring the boundaries between public monument and private encounter; using reproducible media to display their objects in the public realm; and making objects that incorporated commodities, functional things, bodies, raw matter, and detritus. The course will touch on discourses of neoclassicism, modernism, race and cultural memory, surrealism, minimalism, site-specificity, installation, feminism, and participatory art. Exploring a range of focused case studies—whenever possible through works in person—this course will ask what a 20th-century sculpture was and how it operated in the public realm. This lecture-seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums.

A number of contemporary politicians would have us believe that Medieval Europe was an almost uniquely Christian place and that the other two Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Islam—were fleeting and insignificant forces in the development of Europe and the Mediterranean. The arts, however, tell a different story. It is not a story of a utopia of tolerance and understanding, nor is it one of constant hostility and opposition between religious groups. The arts, instead, reveal multiple different ways that relations between different religious groups are constructed in societies, in times of war and peace, and in times of tension and productive interaction between different religious groups. The works we will explore are fascinating and historically revealing. The themes will be traced in mosques, churches, and synagogues; in palaces and gardens; in paintings, costume, and luxury arts, seeing how rich the act of grappling with difference can make a society. To understand these relations, we will also explore theories of interaction and question some of the ways in which religious difference has been characterized in the arts in the past.

This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, we will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio's divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

This discussion-based lecture with screenings is designed to provide an overview of animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content in artist-animated film. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with a focus on the history and cultural cross currents in these works. The course will survey a wide range of animated work from a diverse selection of artists. The focus of the course will be on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation, including hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and, more recently, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) independents. The guiding factor in selecting works for review will be the artist, in most cases, retaining control of their own work; this differs from the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems. As a class, students will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system versus an animation studio's divisions of labor. Animation production will not be taught in this course; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts and documentation of this project will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world.

This video-production seminar will explore, in depth, the rich world of film/video making as artistic expression. Students will complete a series of assignments and short films through lecture, discussion, and screenings of media, including artist interviews, work, readings, and visits. The course will explore moving-image forms and styles that blur the boundaries of narrative, poetic, and abstract filmmaking. There is, by definition, no formula for this kind of work; rather, this course will introduce the language and techniques of film production alongside strategies for the use of film and audio design as creative expression. In this fast-paced course, we will direct concerns to an exploration of the relationship to the aesthetics, politics, and language of filmmaking in its broadest context. We will work on concept development, visual planning, and production pathways. Frequent discussions about student-produced work and about the work of professional artists will broaden the understanding and appreciation of experimental film and will expand creative boundaries. In this context, we will analyze the pioneering work of many experimental film/video artists, including Tacita Dean, Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Colburn, Bill Fontana, Nigel Ayers, and Young-Hae Chang, among others.

The television show Hoarders: Buried Alive. Artist Andy Warhol’s junk collection, consisting of receipts, junk mail, and takeout menus. Professional organizer Marie Kondo and her minimalist ideals. Big-screen televisions, fast fashion, and floating islands of plastic trash contrasted with the promises of decluttering, downsizing, and shrinking homes. From fantastic depictions of people overwhelmed with their accumulation of things to popular self-help books that promise freedom and joy in the form of a clean home, this course will be concerned with the judgments we make about people and their relationship to their stuff. This course will begin to unpack "abject object orientations" by investigating figures like the archivist, the hoarder, the minimalist, and the collector. The course will ask how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape our judgments of people and their relationship to things. By looking to depictions of whom Scott Herring calls "material deviants" across performance art, film, and memoir, we will describe the cultural logics through which speaking of a person's orientation toward objects becomes a way of making ethical claims about them. For major assignments, students will develop three total live performances, including two archival “show and tells,” and a final autoethnographic performance unpacking students' own relationship to things. Archival “show and tells” will center an object from trips to the Sarah Lawrence Archives and can be either solo or group performances. Potential field-trip sites may include the Hudson River Museum, local thrift and resale stores, and the Yonkers Public Library Local History Room. No previous performance experience is required.

In recent decades, dialogues among architects, designers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have markedly increased in frequency, leading to the creation of a new field of interdisciplinary study: neuroarchitecture. The formation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in 2002 intensified and facilitated these communications across disciplinary boundaries. The architecture-neuroscience conversation is productive in both directions. Advances in contemporary understanding of the neural dynamics of constructive perception can inform architects; for example, mapping of neural pathways can provide points of access to the variety of largely unconscious processes that contribute to humans’ responses to the built environment. On the other hand, consideration of the complexities and specificities of buildings created by architects, engineers, and builders encourages neuroscientists and psychologists to advance their understandings of how a host of cognitive and emotional processes are integrated. The study of the responses of brains and bodies to buildings brings together work on sensory perception, attention, emotion, imagination, memory, planning, spatial navigation, aesthetics, and language. We will listen in on these lively architecture-neuroscience conversations by sampling from the wealth of new cross-disciplinary writings, such as Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander’s Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment and Michael Arbib’s When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation Between Neuroscience and Architecture. A vital component of this course will be furthering the conversation by applying the concepts discussed in our readings to our own lived experience of the built environment. Many of the examples presented in weekly lectures will come from the instructor's experiences with the cities of New York and Edinburgh. The examples that students bring to our weekly seminars will draw on their own lived experience of diverse environments. Throughout the semester, we will explore how the design of healthy, sustainable buildings can enhance well-being.

This course will analyze children’s media, specifically preschool media through middle school, using cognitive and developmental psychology theory and methods. We will examine specific educational television programs with regard to cognitive and social developmental issues related to family life, peer relationships, and education issues. Because media has an enormous impact on children’s behavior, this has increasingly become a subject of interest among researchers and the public. This course will address that interest by applying cognitive and developmental psychological research and theories for the development and production of educational media. In addition, the course will help identify essential elements that determine the positive and negative qualities of media for children. Finally, the course will examine and evaluate how psychological theories and frameworks can guide the successful production of children’s media (e.g., social cognitive theory). Projects and assignments will include weekly class discussions on peer-reviewed journal articles, watching television programs, group preschool television pitchbook preparation, child observations interacting with screens, and media artifact critiques, as assigned.  

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. — John Berger

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in measuring and explaining the phenomena of visual perception. In this course, we will study how the visual brain encodes basic aspects of perception—such as color, form, depth, motion, shape, and space—and how they are organized into coherent percepts, or gestalts. The main goal will be to explore how the study of visual neuroscience and art can inform each other. One of our guides in these explorations will be the groundbreaking gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, who was a pioneer in the psychology of art. The more recent and equally innovative text by the neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, will provide our entry into the subject of neuroaesthetics. Throughout our visual journey, we will seek connections between perceptual phenomena and what is known about brain processing of visual information. This is a course for people who enjoy reflecting on why we see things as we do. It should hold particular interest for students of the visual arts who are curious about scientific explanations of the phenomena that they explore in their art, as well as students of the brain who want to study an application of visual neuroscience.

Students will delve into the fundamentals of social media from both creator and user perspectives. This course will offer an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history and evolution of social-media platforms and their impact on cognition, mental health, and knowledge acquisition. Through a combination of psychological journal articles and mass-communication resources, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how social media influences and shapes contemporary life, making them feel knowledgeable and informed. Topics covered will include influencer culture, the 2024 election, and the effects of social media on children and adolescents, among other topics. In group projects, students will design influencer pages from conception to execution, incorporating lessons on strategic content creation, audience engagement, and ethical considerations. By integrating theory with practical application, this course will offer a nuanced view of social media’s role in modern society and will equip students with the skills to effectively navigate and contribute to this dynamic digital landscape and study its effects on its use and digital safety.

More often than not, sports and the arts are seen as two distinct fields with little in common. Those interested in international sports events rarely pay attention to international arts events and/or world expos, and vice versa. News organizations and mainstream media overall accentuate their differences. In this course, we will connect these frequently separated fields to parse out their identicality and differences. Through a close examination of international sports, expos, and biennales, we will tease out what they share, as well as how and where they depart from each other. We will start with Raymond William’s The Sociology of Culture, following it up with writings by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on sports and the arts. We will build on these texts by reading specific accounts of historical and contemporary events, as well as interrogating visual materials. All three international events are normatively represented as sites of leisure and consumption. Going beyond these twin dimensions, an examination of their underlying practices of production will enable us to see the centrality of money, work, and labor in each of these activities/events. This examination will then allow us to interrogate the claim that art is “superior” to sports and, instead, see the relation of each to politics and market forces. In this vein, we will examine their relationship to gentrification, nationalism, tourism, and corporate power, as well as to their ability to serve as sites of resistance and as critique of local, national, and global inequities. In other words, we will see these events in terms of their multiplicity of meaning, complexity, and contradictions. Among possible conference topics, students could examine specific international events and their relationship to local sites, peoples, or politics; undertake analyses of media coverage; examine policy perspectives and justifications for location choices and/or the re-making of space; and/or examine these events, individually or collectively, in relation to issues of class, gender, race, and/or nation.

This course will survey visual forms of expression across Latin America that record history and represent cultural memories, struggles, and identities. By approaching material sources, students will broaden their comprehension skills and activate discourse production to engage critically in oral and written discussions about historical and social challenges. Among other sources, we will address political violence and resistance through comics such as El Síndrome Guastavino and Violencia política en el Perú, films such as Nostalgia de la luz and La noche de los 12 años, and arpilleras textile art. As students are introduced to Mexican muralism in the 20th century, they will broaden their understanding by analyzing contemporary expressions of street art and graffiti in Brazil and Cuba. Students will also learn about the cholets, Andean architecture from El Alto, and floating houses across delta rivers and lakes. Alongside photography, we will explore the use of body art, from the funerary rituals of Indigenous Selk'nam to Afro-Caribbean masquerades, Mara gang tattoos, and feminist activism. In this seminar, students will examine material culture to deepen their understanding of discursive structures such as description, exposition, narration, comparison, and argumentation. Students will also enhance their Spanish language skills by expanding their vocabulary and effectively applying linguistic and grammatical resources. Throughout the course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop written and oral communication skills in Spanish, as well as critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Museo de El Barrio, Institute for Latin American Art, Hispanic Society of America, and Bronx Museum of the Arts. In addition to class time, students will attend a weekly conversation session with a language tutor. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

The growing recognition of Latin American comics as a subject of academic study in the 21st century has further diversified the medium in the region. This course will explore the representation of Indigenous identities and cultural narratives in contemporary Chilean comics, focusing on works published during the 2000s boom. This moment was driven by various factors, such as collaborative projects, the strengthening of distribution circuits, efforts by independent publishers, access to global comic industries, and state funding opportunities. Students will engage with frameworks from comics studies and critical theory to analyze how these graphic sources challenge hegemonic representations and contribute to broader discussions on Indigenous representation, cultural resistance, and transnational dialogues on race and ethnicity. Students will analyze comic genres ranging from historical fiction and fantasy to superheroes and horror, the course will examine how Indigenous cultures are represented within the framework of post-indigenism, as studied through Alemani's research. Rather than merely recalling pre-Hispanic myths or questioning identity in response to colonial wounds, contemporary Chilean comics position Indigenous narratives within a globalized world through complex sequential narratives and hybrid aesthetics. Among other references, Chajnantor draws on Japanese manga to depict cultural aspects of the high plateau and the Atacama desert, while the Varua saga examines historical milestones and oral traditions to reconstruct Rapa Nui cultural memory. Adventure comics shape Mapuche superhero resistance in Guardianes del Sur, and manga-inspired robots depict a Selk’nam futurist society after settler colonialism in Mecha Selk’nam. The collaborative project Mitoverso creates a universe of superheroes inspired by folk stories, while Los fantasmas del viento articulates the intersection of Indigenous groups and European descendants in the Patagonian region. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research visit to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Society of Illustrators, Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase, and The Drawing Center. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within the Americas? The field of speculative fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horror by studying Merla-Watson and Olguín and to criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas by studying Colanzi. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of fiction—such as space-time travel, horror, robots, alternative realities, zombies, and genetics—they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje. In this advanced seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of contemporary speculative fiction in multiple forms, such as literature, comics, film, and performance within the United States-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. Topics studied may include: from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to her theory on Queer Futurities and from critical race theory to movies such as La Llorona, Juan de los muertos, and Sleep Dealer. This trajectory will also range from mainstream franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, to superheroes depiction in El Alto and Tierra del Fuego. We will focus on transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán and artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Edgar Clement. We will also reflect on Futurisms made by mestizos, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbeans while assessing the scopes of climate change and environmental crisis within these communities. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Center for Fiction, Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and Museum of the Moving Image. Sources will be in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, while class discussions and assignments will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

Radial, bilateral, transverse: symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. —Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations

This course will be part workshop and part an exploration of reading and writing in established, evolving, and invented forms. Featuring essays on form by contemporary poets, we will use An Exaltation of Forms, edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes, alongside books by a wide array of poets and visual artists to facilitate and further these discussions. Students will direct language through the sieves and sleeves of the haiku, sonnet, prose poem, ghazal, haibun, and more. Expect to move fluidly between iambic pentameter, erasures, comic poems, and the lipogram (in which students will not be allowed to use a particular letter of the alphabet in their poem). Students should expect to complicate their notion of what “a poem in form” is. We will utilize in-class writing exercises and prompts. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read several types of narratives—children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, and graphic novels—trying our own written hand at many of these styles. Readings will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students might create graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures, as examples of past imaginations. This course will be especially suited to students with an interest in another artistic form or a body of knowledge that they would like to make accessible to nonspecialists. 

Who does not love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or perhaps like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites from childhood work so well and so universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed, discussing what makes them so beloved. We will look at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, and books about friendship—with the potential of also examining young adult literature and what successful children’s history and biography might look like. We will discuss the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, and notions of appropriateness for various age levels. Invariably, the course will discuss childhood—students' own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, and nursery rhymes such as Mother Goose poems. Class sessions will be both lecture and conversational, and group conferences will involve reviewing our writing. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When talking about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than by the conscious mind. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss dreamlike narratives with the goal of understanding how the patently impossible can be made to feel as if it is actually happening, what sort of truths are rendered through unreality, and how authors can open themselves to the promptings of the unconscious and become alert to the complex interactions of images and narrative gestures. As part of the process, students will write two- to three-page imitations of the works discussed in class. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.  

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout. 

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.