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Learning to draw is as much about learning how to use your hand as it is learning how to see. The focus of this course is learning to draw from observation and developing close looking skills; to that end this course will expand your capacity to see and represent what you see by inviting you to explore an array of methods, materials, and techniques. 

In this course we will engage drawing’s portable and responsive nature by working outside of the studio art classroom, opening the possibility of encounters that influence your subject matter and approaches to drawing. Students will practice and expand their skills of drawing from direct observation (not from photographs or other images) by working on-site in different indoor (non-classroom) locations on campus and working outdoors, or plein air. 

The course will be for sustained work on an animation or projection design project, and should be a space for both experimentation, ambition and consistent endeavor. The first half of the semester will be concerned with conceptualizing and framing the world of the animations or projections, by research, drawings, investigation, imagining. The second half will be creating the animation or projections.

The class will be both looking at abstraction as well as more figurative based work. The class will include a mixture of creating assemblages in a variety of means and materials, and using both digital and analogue means from paint, to sand to animated forms. Objects will be cut out with scissors or the laser cutter, animated with pins or digital pins in software (After Effects), layers will be used to create depth in three dimensions, a multiplane or using the Z axis.

The class will be concerned with animating inanimate objects by primarily stop motion.  Locations will be constructed, objects to animated formed, and lighting explored in order to create the imaginary world. A variety of filmmakers and techniques will be looked at during the course of the semester, with individual research undertaken and presented.  Students will be expected to produce a variety of short projects over the first seven weeks based on current affairs and future worlds, followed by a longer more sustained project.

In this course we will examine the role of music as a vehicle for political and social change in Africa. Our focus will be music-making throughout the continent of Africa during the nationalist struggles that resulted in independent African states and how musicians responded (and continue to respond) to the persistent challenges faced by those post-colonial states.

This course will explore the construction and experience of gender and sexuality in the Middle East through a performative lens. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, queer and gender studies, anthropology and Middle Eastern history, the course will examine performance (music, dance, theater, poetry and more) as a process of representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of sexuality and gender identities. This course will delve into the ways that performance, gender, and sexuality relate to ethnicity, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and religion.

Since its inception, film has been used for propaganda - disseminating information with a particular slant, whether subtle or obvious - by regimes and independent players across the political spectrum. As the means of production and circuits of distribution become ever more accessible to individuals, we have moved from an era of focused agitprop into a new era of diffused disinformation.

This course is an introductory level print media and drawing class. Students will learn about relief printmaking through demonstrations of techniques, hands-on experience, and critiques. Techniques include but are not limited to wood cut and linoleum cut. With this simple process, we will be able to explore color printing in depth. This course is also an introduction to making 2D images and the study of visual language. Students who have experience beyond the introductory level are welcome.

This course is an introduction to unique prints, or prints that are not necessarily printed as an edition. We will emphasize the making of mixed media prints using a broad range of methods from monotypes to digital prints. The class is structured around a series of projects where rigorous experimentation is encouraged.

The German term Gesamtkunstwerk roughly translates as a “total work of art” and refers to an artistic endeavor wherein various art forms are melded together to form a unified whole. Through the amalgamation of art, craft, music, and performance, Gesamtkunstwerk evokes a realm distinct from our everyday experience.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx

How does love emerge under conditions of war? This seminar explores what it means to sustain intimate relations in the face of overwhelming violence. Through the Anthropology of Kinship, as well as through methods developed across the fields of Queer Studies, Black Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, this course considers how intimacy and love figure in the production and maintenance of racialized, classed, and gendered difference.

How can anthropology help us listen more critically and carefully? Each class session will consider one ethnographic approach, which students will apply to their listening. Following in the anthropological tradition, where concepts both reveal social processes and are themselves modified by the material at hand, students will consider how podcast episodes they listen to can be elucidated by and also place pressure on each class’s conceptual approach.