Art (ART)
ART 1101 - Art as Experience (3 Credits)
Art as Experience is an introductory course that expands a student's understanding of the ideas and practices of art today. Studio projects will introduce a broad range of mediums from drawing and collage to digital photography and video installation. Students will explore and respond to resources at Cornell University and the course will be supplemented with readings, critiques and field trips. The course will culminate in an exhibition where students will be responsible for the organization and installation of self-directed art work.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022
ART 1102 - Art as Experience: TransMedia (3 Credits)
Working with cameras, audio recorders, physical computing boards and computer software, this course introduces students to digital art creation, manipulation and theory. Students will have hands on experience with digital image acquisition, recording and editing video and sound, and computer programming for interactive media based applications. Learning will be fun, challenging, exciting and will open the student to new possibilities for creating dynamic media art. Topics addressed during the course will include digital photography, digital video, audio and video editing, stop-animation, slow-motion video, macro photography, programming for audio/ visual interaction, and physical computing.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022
ART 1103 - Art as Experience: Sculpture (3 Credits)
Sculpture is distinguishable from other visual arts through its inherent use of space and reliance on an enormous range of materials. It is in our space, it makes us move in a certain way and it makes us want to move in a certain way. Because sculpture is physical like us, we respond to it on a visceral level. Sculpture can also be made out of literally anything, and each anything already comes with its own meanings and associations. All of these are givens, even before we decide what our work is about. This is what makes sculpture so powerful and exciting, and also so challenging. This course begins by exploring these givens though a number of very specific assignments and discussions. After a level of class-wide proficiency has been attained each student will develop their own line of inquiry and develop highly individualized projects. Students learn basic woodworking, mold making, casting in both plaster and concrete. Classes include process and materials demonstrations, introductions to relevant artists' work, and discussions about student projects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022, Summer 2021
ART 1104 - Art as Experience: Photography (3 Credits)
This course introduces students to the technical, aesthetic and conceptual aspects of lens-based photography. Students will work with digital and or film photographic processes. Summer offerings may alternate between digital and film photography, depending on the instructor. They will learn the principles of capturing an image, managing, and editing. They will also practice the proper techniques of fine-tuning an image. This course challenges the student to broadly explore photography and apply the concepts and techniques learned to create work that is innovative and compelling. Students will learn the fundamentals of seeing and articulating their vision through photography. They will develop the capacity to produce well-crafted and effectively structured images that communicate meaningful content.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2022, Summer 2021
ART 1201 - Painting for Non-Majors (3 Credits)
Studies the language of painting through color, form, materials, and techniques. Aspects of traditional and modern pictorial composition are studied including proportion, space, and color theory through the representation of a variety of subjects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2022
ART 1500 - Summer Drawing I (3 Credits)
General course introduces students to principles and techniques of representation. Emphasis is on creating the illusion of space and form through line, the rendering of light and shade, and studies in perspective. Students have the opportunity to explore various media such as charcoal, chalk, pencil, pen, ink, and wash.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022
ART 1501 - Drawing for Non-Majors (3 Credits)
This foundation drawing course introduces students to a broad range of conceptual and technical approaches. It introduces traditional and nontraditional materials, and covers diverse pictorial strategies and subject matter. A significant component is exposure to art historical precedents. This course also serves as an introduction to critique techniques and to the discipline of maintaining a journal.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: non-B.F.A. students.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
ART 1503 - Summer Drawing II (3 Credits)
General course in drawing that emphasizes figure study and life drawing. Builds on the foundation of ART 1500 and concentrates on the analytical study of the figure. Students explore a variety of materials, traditional and contemporary.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023, Summer 2022 ART 1504 - Introduction to Drawing in Rome (3 Credits)
This course introduces students to principles and techniques of representation. Emphasis is on creating the illusion of space and form through line, the rendering of light and shade, and studies in perspective. Students have the opportunity to explore various media such as charcoal, chalk, pencil, pen, ink, and wash. Assumes no prior knowledge of drawing.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 1601 - Photography for Non-Majors (3 Credits)
This class is an aesthetic and practical education within the realm of images. Students will become capable in the processes of photography and delve into the history and thinking surrounding the medium. They will learn to relate their images to other images which they have made, as well as to contemporary and historical images. The class includes technical lessons and aesthetic explorations. The class will advance via frequent group critiques. This class is for students who are excited about using photography as a creative and inquiring medium, and concurrently gaining technical knowledge to make this happen.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Summer 2020
ART 1602 - Introduction to Photography in Rome (3 Credits)
Drawing on Rome's historic and contemporary resources for inspiration, this course introduces photography as a means to visual interpretation and authorship. It addresses concepts essential to lens based artistic practice, as well as the technical foundations of digital photography. In this course students learn about diverse approaches to image making with the camera, and develop a body of work referencing their Rome experience. The course includes lectures, critiques, studio assignments, and visits to museums, galleries, and photography studios.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 1901 - Studio Art for Non-Majors (3 Credits)
Introduction to the visual language of the studio arts. Students learn and apply the basic elements of design and begin to understand the principles of organization. Through the exploration of a variety of two-dimensional and three-dimensional media (drawing, painting, wire, and clay) students become familiar with basic techniques used to develop art works. The course is designed to enhance visual literacy for students who may have little or no background in art or design. Media will be determined by instructor and may vary by semester.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023
ART 1909 - Internship Practicum (1 Credit)
Students secure a professional internship with an art organization where they engage in challenging professional activity designed to assist them in experience across the breadth of art practice. The organization may be any art-related business, institution, or studio. Students are required to maintain a regular journal reflecting their engagement with the practice, submit a 5-10 page paper to the instructor summarizing the relevance of the internship experience to their professional goals and obtain an official letter from the internship sponsor confirming successful performance of internship responsibilities.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 2103 - First-Year Studio Research Workshop (4 Credits)
This course considers the social, cultural, economic, political, and art historical influences that define and redefine contemporary art and artists in the twenty-first century. First year BFA students will be introduced to art as a dynamic aesthetic, analytical, subjective and social form of expression, communication, thought and material production. A wide range of works and ideas and approaches will be explored taking a non-hierarchal approach.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
ART 2201 - Painting: Language of Painting (4 Credits)
This course is an introduction to understanding how the embodied process of painting can create meaning and resonance and provide possibilities of expression where words are not sufficient. Through focus on color theory and pictorial composition, students will explore ways to build their own visual vocabulary while gaining technical facility and knowledge of materials and processes.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 2301 - Print Media: The Cultures of Print (4 Credits)
This is an inclusive course that offers an expanded study of traditional printmaking processes through experimental print media. Print media is a critical practice grounded in the history of all printed matter and the printed form as a social medium. Students will participate in a comprehensive range of technical and aesthetic approaches centered in a range of strategies including the art work as multiple, digital and cultural production. Special attention will be paid to not only the aesthetic and technical challenges but also the attitudes toward the role of art, the ways of producing it, and its intended impact. We will study different histories and forms of printmaking that bridge the gap between the intimate and public forms of address. These issues of critical discourse will challenge traditional definitions of intaglio, lithography, relief, screen-printing, digital printmaking, and laser-cutting technology.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024
ART 2401 - Introduction to Sculpture (4 Credits)
This course introduces students to artistic practice in three dimensions using a variety of materials and approaches. Problems require the student to address materials in terms of cultural and historical context. Assumes no prior knowledge of sculpture.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 2501 - Drawing: Contemporary Art Practice Through Drawing (4 Credits)
This course provides students entering the B.F.A. program a gateway to contemporary art practice through drawing. Drawing here is conceived both as a self-sufficient medium and as a tool useful for the conceptual and practical development of ideas in other media. A wide range of technically and conceptually conceived assignments will introduce students to the breadth of contemporary practice and drawing itself.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: B.F.A. students.
Exploratory Studies:
(EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 ART 2601 - Photography: Introduction to Photography (4 Credits)
This course explores camera and lens as devices that frame and translate three-dimensional space to a two-dimensional surface. Through assignments and individual investigation, students acquire a deeper understanding of visual perception and photography as medium for personal expression. This course introduces students to photographic processes and assumes no prior knowledge of photography.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 2701 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Intersections (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 2701
This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the methods employed in media arts, sound and performance. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the strategies and historical context of these disciplines. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary studio setting with a specific focus on one of these areas. Through hands-on experience, they will delve into contemporary artistic practices, honing their technical skills to develop and realize their creative projects. Potential topics covered include video and animation, digital image production, sound art, performance art, and movement
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 2907 - Visual Imaging in the Electronic Age (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARCH 3702, CS 1620, ENGRI 1620
Interdisciplinary survey course designed to introduce students in the creative arts, science, and engineering to the concepts of 2D and 3D digital pictorial representation and display. It is a concept course that concentrates on why rather than how. Topics include perspective representations, display technology, how television works, bandwidth concepts, digital photography, computer graphics modeling and rendering, color perception, 3D data acquisition, volumetric imaging, and historical precedents, primarily from the art world.
Distribution Requirements: (MQR-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
ART 2910 - Ask Olive: Introduction to B.F.A. Program, Curriculum, and Advising (1 Credit)
The mission of the class is to learn about the possibilities that Cornell offers for entering B.F.A. students' artistic and curricular development. Through a series of seminars, strategic advising session, and planned activities, students will build a community together, investigate the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary arts practices, learn about our AAP in New York Program, and understand the possibilities Cornell offers for artistic and curricular development.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: B.F.A. students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021
ART 3001 - Rome Studio (4 Credits)
This class will concentrate on the development, through research and material experimentation, of a studio practice informed by historical and social context. Different research and production methodologies will be encouraged to develop a practice that is critical, self-sustaining, and flexible. Specific attention will be paid to implications of transferring artistic practice to Rome, i.e., the way the specificities and generalities of a new geographical setting inform one's work. Required course for B.F.A. students participating in Rome.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL); (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 ART 3006 - Advanced Practice (4 Credits)
This class will concentrate on the development, through research and material experimentation, of a studio practice informed by historical and social context. Different research and production methodologies will be encouraged to develop a practice that is critical, self-sustaining, and flexible. This course is conceived as an introduction to the concentrated studio practice developed further in the following two thesis semesters.
Prerequisites: four 2000-level studios, ART 2103, and at least three additional ART studios.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
ART 3011 - LAND: Art, Ecology and Environmental Activism (4 Credits)
In this moment of climate collapse, the relationship of art to the land has an urgent new meaning. LAND surveys artist's engagement with land from a material, historical, spiritual and political perspective including transcendentalism, land art, earthworks, neighborhood-based projects, to eco arts and activism culminating in collaborative site-specific projects. Students will learn about local ecologies, and the plant and animal life that their projects will intersect with and serve. This class will participate in the physical cultivation and maintenance of a mini-forest which will require digging, planting, as well as other tending and doing connected to a web of sustainable artist-initiated land-based works. Students can expect to spend time outdoors at off-campus locations.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025 Learning Outcomes:
- Expand imaginative and aesthetic capacities to respond to field study, climate crisis, and indigenous practices in contemporary art making.
- Develop skills with multidisciplinary practices of installation, collaboration, field work, and social practice through hands-on projects.
- Gain the skills to cultivate native species and regenerate forests.
- Learn processes of harvesting and processing plants to create art making material.
- Acquire wide-ranging interdisciplinary knowledge about the local ecologies of the Ithaca area and its habitat through self-directed research.
- Gain familiarity with a wide range of international artists addressing land-based practices, including issues of biodiversity and climate crisis, learning about the strategies and critical concepts they employ.
ART 3091 - Directed Readings in Art (1-2 Credits)
Independent reading allows a student the opportunity to investigate special interests that are not treated in regularly scheduled courses. The student develops a plan of study to pursue under the supervision of a faculty member.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: third-year B.F.A. students in good standing or permission of instructor.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 3092 - Independent Studio in Art (1-2 Credits)
Independent studio allows a student the opportunity to investigate special interests that are not treated in regularly scheduled courses. The student develops a plan of study to pursue under the supervision of a faculty member.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: third-year B.F.A. students in good standing or permission of instructor.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 3093 - Directed Research in Art (1-2 Credits)
Independent research allows a student the opportunity to investigate special interests that are not treated in regularly scheduled courses. The student develops a plan of study to pursue under the supervision of a faculty member.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: third-year B.F.A. students in good standing or permission of instructor.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 3099 - Special Topics Studio (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 2501 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
ART 3102 - Contemporary Rome Seminar (4 Credits)
Introduces students to contemporary art in Rome through studio visits, gallery exhibitions, and museum collections. Lectures by artists, critics, and others. Traces art from idea to realization and explores the gallery and its relationship to artists and to promotion of art, the role of the art critic and museum, and art collecting.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL); (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 ART 3104 - Sound, Music, Public Space (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3104
What do we learn when we turn an ear to the commons? Who determines what sounds are desirable or undesirable in a community and what are the stakes of that negotiation when it comes to public space? This seminar will study the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim space, and shape their public spaces. We will engage the work of artists who have called our attention to the social aspects of listening. We will listen to public art projects, films, concerts, field recordings, installations, informal sonic practices, and political interventions as we read about the contested control of public space.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
Learning Outcomes:
- Be able to discuss the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim, and shape their public spaces.
- Be able to respond to the spatial situations, policies, and community dynamics that determine public sound events critically and creatively.
- Be able to propose and create projects that respond to a public space, are manifested within a public space, and engage the listening public.
ART 3105 - Instructions for Art: Text Scores in Art, Music and Performance (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3105
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)
ART 3199 - Theory and Criticism: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 2103 and 2501 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021
ART 3201 - Painting: Spatial Transpositions in Painting (4 Credits)
This topical painting course uses traditional and experimental strategies to address contemporary issues in the mediation of spatiality. Spaces addressed include: theoretical and information spaces, virtual and cyberspaces, surveillance and control spaces, filmic and narrative spaces, and image and game spaces. The emphasis of this course will be on articulating critical approaches to these contemporary spaces through their transposition and delivery in the medium of painting.
Prerequisites: ART 2201 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
ART 3202 - Painting: Painting Intent and Context (4 Credits)
Students are encouraged to develop visual applications or interpretations of a chosen subject matter, whether this subject matter is inherently visual or non-visual (e.g., experientially or conceptually manifested outside of a visual frame of reference). Emphasis is placed on experimentation with pictorial languages and identifying an appropriate scale of production and mode of delivery, ranging from two-dimensional picture plane to site-specific installation.
Prerequisites: ART 2201 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
ART 3203 - Painting: Painting Film (4 Credits)
This course investigates the potential of film as a resource for paintings. Through the study of a number of films of various genres we will attempt to discover new ways of thinking about how paintings can function. Topics relevant to both painting and film addressed in this course will include narrative, appropriation, temporality, sequence, montage, framing and scale. Although paintings are derived from a myriad of different sources, this particular investigation of film can act as a metaphor for mining the potential of other disciplines and forms of expression.
Prerequisites: ART 2201 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Fall 2018, Spring 2017
ART 3205 - Painting: Materials and Processes (4 Credits)
ART 3299 - Painting: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 2201 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
ART 3301 - Print Media: Belonging and Representation: Relinking to Site and Unfolding the Dynamics of Display (4 Credits)
In this course, students visit campus facilities and regional sites to learn and gather information about their cultural location. These visits will be contextualized by issues of public and private space, land use, and history of place. Students plan projects in response to site visits and use the print studio as an intermediary space for production based on this research. The course concludes with an exhibition installation in the college galleries or specific sites.
Prerequisites: ART 2301 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2010
ART 3305 - Print Media: Hybridity and Syncretism in Print (4 Credits)
Printmaking's evolving language, a hybrid vocabulary of newly available materials, tools and methods with traditional techniques, is expanding the concept of the printed edition, grassroot practices, expanding our understanding of a variety of print cultures and their intended audience, and facilitating new and radical explorations of scale, dimension, content and display. This course encourages students, like many contemporary artists working in print media, to define printmaking in their own terms by stressing traditional and experimental platemaking, digital printing and fabricating, editionable collage and hand-finishing techniques, and strategies for successfully merging these disparate methods into finished prints.Beyond Cornell, this course offers field trips to the Editions/Artist Book Fair, IPCNY Print Fair, and professional print shops and print collection of the Johnson Museum. Depending on the semester this course may involve a collaborative project with a visiting artist.
Prerequisites: ART 2301.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
ART 3306 - Print Media: The Art of the Book and the Object Multiple (4 Credits)
This course examines the Artist's Book and the Object Multiple, which expand the definition of an edition by being 3-dimensional, tactile, and often collaborative or text-based. Students will have the option to produce hand-made objects of various forms (for example, Louise Bourgeois' sewn books), digitally-printed and bound artists' books (such as Amy Sillman's zines), or any combination of the two (or example, Kiki Smith's editioned porcelain sculptures) and have access to digital printers, CNC routers, and various other fabricating machines as well as traditional printing presses. The class will be divided into units focusing on traditional skills in bookmaking, with guest instruction from the Wells Book Arts Center; on mold-making and casting, with emphasis on 3-D fabricating capabilities; and finally on the natures of hand-made multiples versus their machine-made digital cousins.Studio work will be supplemented with a field trip to New York to visit the Artist Book and Object Multiple collection at the MoMA. Depending on the semester this course may involve a collaborative project with visiting artist or pairings-up with writers and poets to produce textual editions.
Prerequisites: ART 2301.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018, Spring 2018
ART 3307 - Print Media: To Publish is to Make Publics (4 Credits)
This class will explore the potential of printed media to bridge the gap between public and private modes of address. This course will integrate theory, history and practice. On the production side, we will learn how to use a Risograph printer to make high volume editions and book binding techniques. On the historical side, we will study histories of printmaking as they relate to social and political movements. On the theoretical side, the course will be contextualized through readings that will expand our understanding of what we mean by public, private and circulation. This course welcomes all and any student regardless of their previous print or image making experience.
Prerequisites: ART 2301 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
ART 3399 - Print Media: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 2301 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Spring 2025, Summer 2024, Fall 2023
ART 3404 - Sculpture: Installation (4 Credits)
Site-specific installations will be mediated through a variety of materials and individual and collaborative research. This course expands an awareness of traditional (welding, metal casting) and non-traditional materials (papermaking, rubber, fabric) though figurative modeling, abstract carving, and three-dimensional form and design.
Prerequisites: ART 2401, or architecture design studio, or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2020
ART 3499 - Sculpture: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 2401, or architecture design studio, or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
ART 3501 - Drawing: Pictorial Languages (4 Credits)
This course explores the capacity of drawing to visualize complex representations, experience and informational systems using a wide range of materials and formats. Students pursue both experimental and more developed individual, serial, and collaborative drawing projects that challenge and question the conventional boundaries of drawing.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2016
ART 3502 - Drawing: The Body (4 Credits)
This course investigates the human body as a pictorial subject. Emphasis is placed on the development of descriptive methodologies reinforced by a study of human surface anatomy and historic/contemporary applications. Relevance to a wide range of visual disciplines including sculpture, photography, digital media in addition to painting and drawing will be explored.
Prerequisites: ART 1501 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Fall 2017
ART 3503 - Drawing as Research (4 Credits)
This course focuses on the use of drawing as a way to organize and refine the conceptual and formal considerations central to each student's individual lines of inquiry regardless of his/her primary medium/discipline/field. While looking at the role of drawing in contemporary art as well as its potential as an interdisciplinary practice, we will explore various drawing approaches that can both problematize and clarify the research process. Emphasis is placed on developing strategies to re-present nonvisual and/or immaterial conditions and information. Projects will be explorations of the prompts from assigned texts and will often incorporate collaborative exchanges as a form of action-based critique.
Prerequisites: Any 1000- or 2000-level drawing studio and one upper-level ART studio or permission of instructor.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
ART 3599 - Drawing: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Prerequisites: ART 1501 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018
ART 3699 - Photography: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Advanced studio course related to photography. Topics vary each semester.
Prerequisites: ART 2601 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 3704 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Decolonizing Performance (4 Credits)
How do we decolonize our bodies, our practices and our education? This course interrogates the theory and practice of body-based performance in contemporary art through the lens of decolonization. How can we challenge and destabilize the established hierarchies and histories and traces of colonialism using art as a tool of empowerment, and revision of a conflicting past. The course invites you to think of performance as a practice that blurs the line between art, life and politics, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and direct action. Centering the work of BIPOC, and Latin-American artists as well as indigenous epistemologies in relation to process, place-based learning and making. Exploring the use of the body as an expressive medium and critical site of research and action.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
ART 3705 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Sound (4 Credits)
This advanced class will continue the investigation of ways of using sound in the creation of an artwork. Methods of using sound in disciplines outside of art will shape our considerations. Historical approaches to sound art to contemporary experiments using sound will be examined in this studio course.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2013, Fall 2011, Fall 2010
ART 3707 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Interaction (4 Credits)
How does interaction change the artwork and the experiencer? In the course models of interactivity specific to sound, performance, and media art will be explored. Historical to contemporary ways that artists have used the notion of interactivity will be examined alongside emergent practices shaped by fields outside of art.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2015
ART 3708 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Experimental Moving Image (4 Credits)
This course will expand on the applications of media technologies and moving image as art practice. Working with software and techniques for video, animation and emerging media, this course will work on creative research and experimentation while considering the context and history of technology in art and contemporary practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
ART 3799 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
ART 3803 - Art History: Italian Cinema (4 Credits)
This course examines the cinematic representation of Italy with particular emphasis to the use of settings and space. We will explore how the visions of urban and rural spaces reflect the evolving cultural, social and political fabric of a nation in a period of rapid and often traumatic historical change. The course will feature screening of films set in several Italian locations, from Rome to Milan, from Naples to Venice, from Sicily to the Apennines, and represent different moments of Italian contemporary history. We will take advantage of the unique opportunity to study this cinema while residing in Rome and traveling in Italy, through the experience of the real settings that have figured so prominently in Italian cinema. Each session consists of an in-class lecture and a film screening. The course will also include one or two guest lecturers each semester.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 3804 - Black Sound and Visual Culture (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 3804
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the strategies that sound artists, composers, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers have employed to use Black sounds as a sign. We will explore intersections between sound and image throughout the African diaspora. Intersections in question include the place of sound art within different Black musical and visual traditions, Black music as a resource for painting and sculpture, the visual design of Black music projects, the Black soundscape and the built environment, acoustic ecology and mapping in Black communities, and African diasporic filmmaking as a sonic art form.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP), (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024 Learning Outcomes:
- Students will be able to articulate the arguments artists and cultural critics have made for and against the terms Black sound and Black music.
- Students will gain familiarity through exhibitions, screenings, and readings with the role Black sound and music have played in the visual arts and culture.
- Students will be able to identify some important concepts and techniques related to creative works made at the intersection of sound and image production throughout the African Diaspora.
- Students will have direct engagement with visual and sound artists whose work engages the material or idea of Black sound/music.
ART 3874 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ARTH 4774, ANTHR 4774
The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2017
ART 3899 - Art History: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AAP)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021
ART 3900 - Many Art Worlds Are Possible (1.5 Credits)
There are many art worlds. This special topics field study course offers an expansive perspective on contemporary art where students learn about and experience art within the context of a specific location, meet artists, curators, critics, arts writers, and visit local art institutions. Locations vary based on instructor and will include Berlin, Mexico City, New York, and Chicago. For 7 weeks in the spring or fall semester students will learn about the history and context of the place that they will visit through readings, lectures, and visitors, followed by a two-week intensive visit to the area in summer or winter.
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will have a broader perspective and understanding of contemporary art practice.
- Students will have an expanded understanding of art contexts that include international perspectives.
- Students will have detailed knowledge of the culture, history, and/or current condition of the professional art world of the location being visited.
- Students will recognize the many ways “the global is reflected in the local” within the United States and beyond.
- Students will appreciate the complexity of contemporary cultural systems and know the fundamental principles of intercultural understanding and communication.
- Students will understand the global context of their chosen career and have blended international perspectives into their professional development.
ART 3901 - Many Art Worlds Are Possible (1.5 Credits)
There are many art worlds. This special topics field study course offers an expansive perspective on contemporary art where students learn about and experience art within the context of a specific location, meet artists, curators, critics, arts writers, and visit local art institutions. Locations vary based on instructor and will include Berlin, Mexico City, New York, and Chicago. For 7 weeks in the spring or fall semester students will learn about the history and context of the place that they will visit through readings, lectures, and visitors, followed by a two-week intensive visit to the area in summer or winter.
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will have a broader perspective and understanding of contemporary art practice.
- Students will have an expanded understanding of art contexts that include international perspective.
- Students will have detailed knowledge of the culture, history, and/or current condition of the professional art world of the location being visited.
- Students will recognize the many ways “the global is reflected in the local” within the United States and beyond.
- Students will appreciate the complexity of contemporary cultural systems and know the fundamental principles of intercultural understanding and communication.
- Students will understand the global context of their chosen career and have blended international perspectives into their professional development.
ART 3902 - International Professional Practice (1 Credit)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Fall 2017
ART 4003 - Thesis I (4 Credits)
This course continues the independent studio research and production of the Advanced Practice course to prepare students for ART 4004 - Thesis II. During Thesis I, students begin to research, develop, and clarify their thesis proposals through dialogues, readings, and critiques with members of the Core Thesis Faculty. Emphasis is on deepening awareness of the intention and reading of the work and situating individual interests within and against historical, theoretical, and conceptual contexts.
Prerequisites: ART 3006.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 4004 - Thesis II (4 Credits)
This course is the final B.F.A. studio semester in which students develop and present an independent body of work that may take the form of an exhibition or some other project. Students will work with members of the Core Thesis Faculty to define and refine the positions formulated within each work and to foster the ability to speak about one's own work as well as the work of others. Emphasis is placed on developing strategies of productive self-criticality to inform their work both during and beyond the thesis semester.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 4100 - Senior Seminar (4 Credits)
This advanced seminar is designed to accompany the first semester of Thesis studio. The class fosters investigation of artistic intentionality and its relation to visual expression and its discursive treatment. It begins with assignments structured to identify the conceptual, social, historical, and formal considerations relevant to each student's artistic practice. Once identified, these become the basis for rigorous research and consideration. This undertaking is designed to support advanced thesis projects and art practices going forward.
Prerequisites: all required 3000-level ART studios. Corequisite: ART 4003.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
ART 5001 - Image Text Workshop (2-3 Credits)
This course addresses pertinent issues relative to the techniques, technologies, genres, or methodologies in image, text, or relevant hybrid practices. Topics vary each semester. Course can be repeated for credit.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop a familiarity with canonical and contemporary works in a range of genres.
- In this course, students will develop an ability to identify and deploy the structure and technique characteristic of various compositional modes, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry and hybrid-genre works.
- In this course, students will develop an advanced competence in the fundamentals of clear written expression.
- In this course, students will develop a consistent writing practice.
ART 5010 - Visiting Artist Workshop (1 Credit)
Individual studio visits/critiques with visiting artists, writers, editors, curators and publishers. Colloquia will include attendance at visiting artist lectures and readings as well as events associated with the annual symposium.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop an informed awareness of the current professional landscape in image, text, and related hybrid fields.
- In this course, students will revise and strengthen creative strategies and vocabularies.
- In this course, students will develop understanding of exhibition, publication, and other professional activity.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to effectively describe, critique, and discuss creative work.
ART 5011 - LAND: Art, Ecology and Environmental Activism (4 Credits)
In this moment of climate collapse, the relationship of art to the land has an urgent new meaning. LAND surveys artist's engagement with land from a material, historical, spiritual and political perspective including transcendentalism, land art, earthworks, neighborhood-based projects, to eco arts and activism culminating in collaborative site-specific projects. Students will learn about local ecologies, and the plant and animal life that their projects will intersect with and serve. This class will participate in the physical cultivation and maintenance of a mini-forest which will require digging, planting, as well as other tending and doing connected to a web of sustainable artist-initiated land-based works. Students can expect to spend time outdoors at off-campus locations.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
Learning Outcomes:
- Expand imaginative and aesthetic capacities to respond to field study, climate crisis, and indigenous practices in contemporary art making.
- Develop skills with multidisciplinary practices of installation, collaboration, field work, and social practice through hands-on projects.
- Gain the skills to cultivate native species and regenerate forests.
- Learn processes of harvesting and processing plants to create art making material.
- Acquire wide-ranging interdisciplinary knowledge about the local ecologies of the Ithaca area and its habitat through self-directed research.
- Gain familiarity with a wide range of international artists addressing land-based practices, including issues of biodiversity and climate crisis, learning about the strategies and critical concepts they employ.
ART 5092 - Graduate Independent Studio in Art (1-4 Credits)
Independent studio allows a student the opportunity to investigate special interests that are sometimes not treated in regularly scheduled courses. The student develops a plan of study to pursue under the supervision of an Art faculty member.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.
Exploratory Studies:
(SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 ART 5097 - Image Text: Special Topics Seminar (2-3 Credits)
Intensive intellectual inquiry of ideas and genres as applied to creative work across a range of relevant disciplines and practices. Exploration of cultural and scholarly histories in keeping with the expertise of faculty. Through focused research, debate and analysis, students investigate significant philosophical, aesthetic, political and social frameworks.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023
ART 5100 - Image Text Field Practicum (1-3 Credits)
Professional development practicum organized around presentations and individual and small group critiques with writers, artists, curators, collectors, gallerists, editors, publishers and other relevant professionals. Conducted in New York, Rome, or other locations.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop an informed awareness of the current professional landscape in image, text, and related hybrid fields.
- In this course, students will develop resources and tactics to pursue opportunities for exhibition, publication or other professional activity.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to effectively describe and discuss creative work within a professional, non-academic setting.
ART 5101 - Image Text Independent Field Practicum (1 Credit)
Professional development practicum, developed independently by each student, with faculty review and approval. Students schedule in-person and online meetings and conversations with writers, artists, curators, collectors, gallerists, editors, publishers and other relevant professionals. Organized and conducted independently by each student, with guidance, review and input by faculty.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to M.F.A. Image Text students.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop an informed awareness of the current professional landscape in image, text, and related hybrid fields.
- Develop resources and tactics to pursue opportunities for exhibition, publication or other professional activity.
- Develop the ability to effectively describe and discuss creative work within a professional, non-academic setting.
- Develop the skill and confidence to make contact and develop professional relationships with advanced professionals in the field.
ART 5104 - Sound, Music, Public Space (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 5104
What do we learn when we turn an ear to the commons? Who determines what sounds are desirable or undesirable in a community and what are the stakes of that negotiation when it comes to public space? This seminar will study the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim space, and shape their public spaces. We will engage the work of artists who have called our attention to the social aspects of listening. We will listen to public art projects, films, concerts, field recordings, installations, informal sonic practices, and political interventions as we read about the contested control of public space.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
Learning Outcomes:
- Be able discuss the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim, and shape their public spaces.
- Be able to respond to the spatial situations, policies, and community dynamics that determine public sound events critically and creatively.
- Be able to propose and create projects that respond to a public space, are manifested within a public space, and engage the listening public.
ART 5105 - Instructions for Art: Text Scores in Art, Music and Performance (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 5105
What is at stake when an artist creates a work through a set of linguistic instructions or textual cues? This class will look at early written scores and instructions from artists, performers, and composers, such as Sol Lewitt, George Lewis, Adrian Piper, Felix Gonzales Torres, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Alison Knowles, Anthony Braxton, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. We will also explore early artists’ code-based projects and recent work done with artificial intelligence. In this course we will look at the myriad of reasons artists have used a language-based system to realize an artwork.
ART 5199 - Theory and Criticism: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA. Graduate level course.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
ART 5201 - Painting: Spatial Transpositions in Painting (4 Credits)
This topical painting course uses traditional and experimental strategies to address contemporary issues in the mediation of spatiality. Spaces addressed include: theoretical and information spaces, virtual and cyberspaces, surveillance and control spaces, filmic and narrative spaces, and image and game spaces. The emphasis of this course will be on articulating critical approaches to these contemporary spaces through their transposition and delivery in the medium of painting.
ART 5202 - Painting: Painting Intent and Context (4 Credits)
Students are encouraged to develop visual applications or interpretations of a chosen subject matter, whether this subject matter is inherently visual or non-visual (e.g., experientially or conceptually manifested outside of a visual frame of reference). Emphasis is placed on experimentation with pictorial languages and identifying an appropriate scale of production and mode of delivery, ranging from two-dimensional picture plane to site-specific installation.
ART 5203 - Painting: Painting Film (4 Credits)
This course investigates the potential of film as a resource for paintings. Through the study of a number of films of various genres we will attempt to discover new ways of thinking about how paintings can function. Topics relevant to both painting and film addressed in this course will include narrative, appropriation, temporality, sequence, montage, framing and scale. Although paintings are derived from a myriad of different sources, this particular investigation of film can act as a metaphor for mining the potential of other disciplines and forms of expression.
ART 5205 - Painting: Materials and Processes (4 Credits)
ART 5299 - Painting: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024
ART 5301 - Print Media: Belonging and Representation: Relinking to Site and Unfolding the Dynamics of Display (4 Credits)
In this course, students visit campus facilities and regional sites to learn and gather information about their cultural location. These visits will be contextualized by issues of public and private space, land use, and history of place. Students plan projects in response to site visits and use the print studio as an intermediary space for production based on this research. The course concludes with an exhibition installation in the college galleries or specific sites.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
ART 5305 - Print Media: Hybridity and Syncretism in Print (4 Credits)
ART 5306 - Print Media: The Art of the Book and the Object Multiple (4 Credits)
ART 5307 - Print Media: To Publish is to Make Publics (4 Credits)
This class will explore the potential of printed media to bridge the gap between public and private modes of address. This course will integrate theory, history and practice. On the production side, we will learn how to use a Risograph printer to make high volume editions and book binding techniques. On the historical side, we will study histories of printmaking as they relate to social and political movements. On the theoretical side, the course will be contextualized through readings that will expand our understanding of what we mean by public, private and circulation. This course welcomes all and any student regardless of their previous print or image making experience.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
ART 5399 - Print Media: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
ART 5404 - Sculpture: Installation (4 Credits)
Site-specific installations will be mediated through a variety of materials and individual and collaborative research. This course expands an awareness of traditional (welding, metal casting) and non-traditional materials (papermaking, rubber, fabric) though figurative modeling, abstract carving, and three-dimensional form and design.
Prerequisites: architecture design studio or permission of instructor.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
ART 5499 - Sculpture: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Topics TBA.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
ART 5501 - Drawing: Pictorial Languages (4 Credits)
This course explores the capacity of drawing to visualize complex representations, experience and informational systems using a wide range of materials and formats. Students pursue both experimental and more developed individual, serial, and collaborative drawing projects that challenge and question the conventional boundaries of drawing.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
ART 5502 - Drawing: The Body (4 Credits)
This course investigates the human body as a pictorial subject. Emphasis is placed on the development of descriptive methodologies reinforced by a study of human surface anatomy and historic/contemporary applications. Relevance to a wide range of visual disciplines including sculpture, photography, digital media in addition to painting and drawing will be explored.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
ART 5503 - Drawing as Research (4 Credits)
This course focuses on the use of drawing as a way to organize and refine the conceptual and formal considerations central to each student's individual lines of inquiry regardless of his/her primary medium/discipline/field. While looking at the role of drawing in contemporary art as well as its potential as an interdisciplinary practice, we will explore various drawing approaches that can both problematize and clarify the research process. Emphasis is placed on developing strategies to re-present nonvisual and/or immaterial conditions and information. Projects will be explorations of the prompts from assigned texts and will often incorporate collaborative exchanges as a form of action-based critique.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
ART 5699 - Photography: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Advanced studio course related to photography. Topics vary each semester.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024
ART 5704 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Decolonizing Performance (4 Credits)
How do we decolonize our bodies, our practices and our education? This course interrogates the theory and practice of body-based performance in contemporary art through the lens of decolonization. How can we challenge and destabilize the established hierarchies and histories and traces of colonialism using art as a tool of empowerment, and revision of a conflicting past. The course invites you to think of performance as a practice that blurs the line between art, life and politics, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and direct action. Centering the work of BIPOC, and Latin-American artists as well as indigenous epistemologies in relation to process, place-based learning and making. Exploring the use of the body as an expressive medium and critical site of research and action.
ART 5705 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Sound (4 Credits)
This advanced class will continue the investigation of ways of using sound in the creation of an artwork. Methods of using sound in disciplines outside of art will shape our considerations. Historical approaches to sound art to contemporary experiments using sound will be examined in this studio course.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024
ART 5707 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Interaction (4 Credits)
How does interaction change the artwork and the experiencer? In the course models of interactivity specific to sound, performance, and media art will be explored. Historical to contemporary ways that artists have used the notion of interactivity will be examined alongside emergent practices shaped by fields outside of art.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025
ART 5799 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Special Topics (4 Credits)
Advanced studio course related to Media Arts Performance and Sound. Topics vary each semester.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024
ART 5804 - Black Sound and Visual Culture (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with PMA 5804
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the strategies that sound artists, composers, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers have employed to use Black sounds as a sign. We will explore intersections between sound and image throughout the African diaspora. Intersections in question include the place of sound art within different Black musical and visual traditions, Black music as a resource for painting and sculpture, the visual design of Black music projects, the Black soundscape and the built environment, acoustic ecology and mapping in Black communities, and African diasporic filmmaking as a sonic art form.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024 Learning Outcomes:
- Students will be able to articulate the arguments artists and cultural critics have made for and against the terms Black sound and Black music.
- Students will gain familiarity through exhibitions, screenings, and readings with the role Black sound and music have played in the visual arts and culture.
- Students will be able to identify some important concepts and techniques related to creative works made at the intersection of sound and image production throughout the African Diaspora.
- Students will have direct engagement with visual and sound artists whose work engages the material or idea of Black sound/music.
ART 6000 - Graduate Seminar: Contemporary Theory and Art (3 Credits)
Seminar exploring selected writings on current issues in the visual arts. Designed to introduce graduate students to several approaches to critical inquiry and analysis of contemporary artistic practice. Topics vary but may include related issues in areas such as critical theory, identity politics, institutional frames, sustainability, urbanization, and globalization.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Visual Arts students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
ART 6010 - Thesis Studio I (2 Credits)
Designed for students in the first summer session of their MFA experience. The open discussion and work structure of the class is oriented towards generation of thesis ideas, topic and structure development, and plans for future work on each student's MFA thesis project through individual and group work sessions and critiques.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024, Summer 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop the ability to refine and strengthen formal, technical and conceptual elements of creative work.
- In this course, students will develop new ideas and directions towards the evolution of the MFA thesis project.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to articulate ideas and intentions of creative work, and to situate it within relevant discourses and practices.
ART 6011 - Thesis Studio II (2-3 Credits)
Designed for students in the second summer session of their MFA experience. The open discussion and work structure of the class is oriented towards focusing and refining thesis ideas, structure and content, and planning second-year work on thesis projects through individual and group work sessions and critiques.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Summer 2024
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop the ability to refine and strengthen formal, technical and conceptual elements of creative work.
- In this course, students will develop new ideas and directions towards the evolution of the MFA thesis project.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to articulate ideas and intentions of creative work, and to situate it within relevant discourses and practices.
ART 6012 - Thesis Studio III (2-4 Credits)
Designed for students in the third summer session of their MFA experience. The structure of the class is particularly oriented towards final editing, resolution and publication/presentation of thesis projects through individual and group work sessions and critiques. Students will develop and implement a plan for publicizing, promoting, and publicly disseminating their project.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop the ability to refine and strengthen formal, technical and conceptual elements of creative work.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to professionally complete and disseminate creative work.
- In this course, students will develop the ability to articulate ideas and intentions of creative work, and to situate it within relevant discourses and practices.
ART 6092 - Independent Mentored Study in Image Text (5-6 Credits)
Semester-long independent creative work in consultation with faculty mentor. Critique and discussion of ongoing creative work is completed during the fall and spring semesters using video conferencing and electronic document exchange. Course plan will be crafted collaboratively by student and faculty mentor at the beginning of each semester to maximize both continued focus and new development in creative work.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: M.F.A. Image Text students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- In this course, students will develop an intensive studio practice based on creative experimentation and revision.
- In this course, students will develop a research practice to support the growth of your creative work.
- In this course, students will prepare for the further development of your studio practice through reflection, goal-setting and planning for future work.
ART 6100 - Professional Practice and Field Work in Contemporary Art (3 Credits)
This required graduate course will focus on developing each student's individual needs in preparation for a life-long artistic and professional practice. We will workshop artist statements, grant and residency proposals and hone writing skills with emphasis on both professional and creative modalities. In addition to one-on-one meetings and studio visits, the graduates will meet as a group to develop and cultivate our community with activities such as field trips to NYC to visit artist studios, galleries and museums; and other art destinations. We will write the press release for the show, establish a title and theme, work with the gallery on social media publicity and outreach, design a poster/flyer and all other aspects of curating/installing and publicizing an art exhibit. A final deliverable for this class is a group show in NYC.
Prerequisites: ART 7001.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
ART 6419 - Urban Justice Lab (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with SHUM 6819, ARCH 6319, ENGL 6919, PMA 6819, MUSIC 6819
Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. Topic: Sound, Music, Public Space.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: fellowship recipients, who receive a $1500 stipend.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
ART 7001 - Graduate Studio I (9 Credits)
Under faculty direction, students plan their own projects and select the media in which they work. All members of the faculty rotate through student studios to provide critiques and are available for individual consultation.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: first-year M.F.A. Visual Arts students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
ART 7002 - Graduate Studio II (9 Credits)
Under faculty direction, students plan their own projects and select the media in which they work. All members of the faculty rotate through student studios to provide critiques and are available for individual consultation.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: first-year M.F.A. Visual Arts students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
ART 8001 - Graduate Studio III (9 Credits)
Course instructor is the chair of student's Thesis Committee. Students are responsible, under faculty direction, for planning their own projects and selecting the media in which they work. All members of the faculty are available for individual consultation.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: second-year M.F.A. Visual Arts students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
ART 8002 - Graduate Studio IV (9 Credits)
Course instructor is the chair of student's Thesis Committee. Students are responsible, under faculty direction, for planning their own projects and selecting the media in which they work. All members of the faculty are available for individual consultation.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: second-year M.F.A. Visual Arts students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023