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Each term, Bennington Visual Arts offers a program of 4-5 lectures by visiting arts professionals: artists, curators, historians and critics, selected to showcase the diversity of contemporary art practices. Designed to enhance a broader and deeper knowledge of various disciplines and issues in the Visual Arts and to stimulate campus dialogue around topical issues in contemporary art and culture, these thematically curated presentations offer students the opportunity to engage with art by emerging and internationally-known artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

This discussion-animated, readings-based seminar provides art historical, cultural, and critical contexts for the Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS). In addition to our ongoing interrogation of the public lecture as such, students present their own work (in any field) and analyze the technical and stylistic aspects of structuring an effective and engaging ‘talk.’ The course provides unique opportunities for interaction with visiting artists, curators, critics, and historians.

Chromophilia, refers to intense passion and love for color. What is it about color that has the power to induce reverie, and conversely to manipulate, or disgust? How does color work? What is the role of color in visual art? In language? How do we understand and respond to color from phenomenological, poetic, philosophical, and societal vantage points? How as artists can we become effective stewards of our passionately-loved and yet ever-shifting chroma?

Join a public dialogue about global contemporary art and ideas! Each year the New York nonprofit apexart holds an open call for curatorial proposals. Out of hundreds of submissions from around the world, three are chosen to become apexart exhibitions through an online jury process. Students in this class will be part of the jury. Initial readings and assignments will address the history of New York nonprofit spaces and apexart’s position within that landscape over three decades.

This seminar explores the cinematic vampire as a symbolic curator, critic, and connoisseur, one who collects, consumes, and reflects cultural concerns. Through films paired with philosophical and critical texts, we examine how vampires serve as mirrors, archivists, aesthetes, and subversive observers and how filmmakers stylistically foreground or reframe aspects of the vampire mythos.

Viewed from the outside, the French-speaking world offers enticing images of beauty, pleasure, and freedom. From the inside, however, it is a complicated, often contradictory world where implicit codes and values shape the most basic aspects of daily life. This course will give you an insider’s perspective on a cultural and communicative system whose ideas, customs, and belief systems are surprisingly different from your own.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are” –Brillat-Savarin

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Fall ‘25

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

Why is a Mayan food, chocolate, such a high-stake product in French-speaking countries ?

French literature and film have always reciprocally inspired one another – as early as 1897, Lumière represented the main characters of Hugo’s Les Misérables. This course will offer students the opportunity to analyze literary representations of women and their film adaptations in terms of intermediality and intertextuality. Adaptations will include: La Princesse de Clèves (La Fayette/Sauder), La Religieuse (Diderot/Rivette), La Noire de… (Sembène/Sembène), La Prisonnière/La Captive (Proust/Akerman). Students will focus on various adaptation strategies and approaches.