| FAAH Course Descriptions | ||
For a complete list, please see the GW Bulletin and the Schedule of Classes.
SPRING 2010 Fine Arts: FA 169 Special Topics: Painting (Portrait Painting) - Professor Tomlin This course will explore the human form through drawing, painting, and collage. Classic and modern techniques in portraiture will be introduced. Students will be encouraged to experiment with mixed media. FA 179 Special Topics: Photo Book - Professor Chao This class is for students who have a solid foundation in the technical aspects of black and white or color photography. Students in this course will produce a photography book using print-on-demand publishers. Components of this class include conception and research of topic for the book; shooting; and rigorous editing of photographs to create a strong, clear, and cohesive body of work. Once the body of work exists, students will sequence, design, and layout a book in a thoughtful and critical manner using software aided by print-on-demand publishers and/or Adobe InDesign. Art History: AH 159.10 Seminar: American Art & Architecture - Professor Rufino AH 250 Modern Art: “Engendering Modernism” - Professor Obler It is the contention of this class that gender is crucial to the formation and analysis of modernism. In order to assess that thesis, we will couple our readings in art history with theoretical texts that explore key issues in feminism as well as masculinity and queer studies. Artists under consideration may include Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and Lorna Simpson. Authors may include but are not limited to Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, Gerald Izenberg, Richard Meyer, Linda Nochlin, and Anne Wagner. Numerous special exhibitions will be on view in Washington, D.C. that will be relevant to our discussions, including O’Keeffe at the Phillips, Yves Klein at the Hirshhorn, and Yinka Shonibare at the National Museum of African Art. AH 256.11 American Art in 20th Century - Professor Goodyear This course will focus on American Art of the 1960s. This pivotal decade functions as a watershed in the history of modern and contemporary American art, marking a transition from modernism to postmodernism, the avant-garde to the neo-avant-garde, and the introduction of new categories of art-making such as conceptual art and earth art. In recent years, numerous studies of various aspects of the art of this period have been published. This seminar will focus this new scholarship investigating why the 1960s has been the subject of so much recent attention and the nature of the artistic, theoretical, and historical shifts it marks.
FALL 2009 Fine Arts Courses: FA 14 Introduction to Handbuilt Ceramics – Professor Ozdogan This course will introduce the student to working with clay as an art form and to exploring various techniques in handbuilding. Participating in reduction and oxidation firings and in clay and glaze-making activities is all part of this introductory course. Sketches or 3-dimensional models must be submitted to the professor for approval prior to construction, as part of the creative process. Students are encouraged to work in the studio outside of class hours to achieve maximum proficiency. This class is designed to help students develop techniques for drawing and observation. It is focused on the perception of edges, spatial relationships, lights and shadows, and composition. Students will also learn how to critically analyze their own work and the work of others. We will use charcoal, ink, pencil, and paint to render still life and figures using traditional and experimental approaches. FA 131 Ceramic Sculpture – Professor Ozdogan This course will foster development of an understanding of sculptural ceramic form that integrates quality and creativity. One focus will be to transfer conceptual ideas into forms that help expand the student’s view beyond traditional sculptural design. The goal should be to stretch clay to its limits. Imagination and sometimes fantasy should have free rein as techniques and materials are combined and styles with realistic, traditional, abstract, and surrealistic overtones are included. Students will make clay and may explore glaze formulation as well. Experimentation with those materials in various firing ranges may also be a possibility. All completion times are approximate and depend on size and detail involved in individual projects. FA 150 Drawing III – Professor Wright Advanced investigation of drawing as an organizing tool for thought, analysis, and personal imagery. Traditional and contemporary approaches to topics related to perceptual and conceptual concerns. **Prerequisite: FA 22 Drawing II ** FA 162 Painting: Contemporary Issues – Professor Hill Examples from contemporary art serve as starting points for discussion of the creative process. Postmodern strategies to rethink and challenge various hierarchies of subject, style and medium. FA 171 Advanced Digital Color Printing – Professor May Further development of color theory and the technical skills to make high-quality inkjet prints. Critiques and discussion of contemporary artistic practice. Prerequisite: FA 42. FA 179 Special Topics: Professional Practices – Professor Coble Professional Practices will focus on how, as an artist, to navigate the many challenges of the contemporary art world. This course consists of practical and philosophical information that will assist artists in surviving and prospering as professionals. Visits will be made to commercial galleries, non-profit art spaces and artist’s studios to have honest discussions and gain insight with gallerists, curators, critics, collectors and working artists. Visiting lecturers by professionals will provide guidance in grant writing; residency, fellowship and graduate school applications, artist tax law and other information that is crucial to supporting oneself through art. The goal of this class is to build the knowledge base and confidence to assist artists in taking control of the next step of their careers. FA 180 New Media: Digital Illustration – Professor Stephanic This course continues the development of a digital portfolio and refines individual style for those interested in the digital medium. The focus will be primarily on vector or object oriented graphics (Adobe Illustrator) and creative possibilities for this approach. Rather than offer a specific set of learning goals, each individual is asked to think about the experiences learned in FA71/FA193 or an equivalent level of using the computer as a visual art tool and consider a refinement direction. In this way, one may use their existing expertise and build a more focused visual portfolio. In other words, consider what kind of portfolio would be interesting to work on and further broader academic goals. Think of your interests and how a visual theme or idea could be turned into a semester project. We will then work on creating a research plan and structured approach to developing the skills to complete the portfolio. Blackboard will be used to post images for critique or refer to web addresses and manage dialog for this course. FA 801 Tangible Media: Seeing Green — Professor Rigg If seeing is believing, how do we make conclusions about and from images? Tangible Media - Seeing Green is a studio-based course that prioritizes the process of student art making. The course will introduce students to computer imaging software (Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver), locative media, and inexpensive digital recording devices to document and track information for projects. How do we interpret images and other forms of visual information to draw conclusions about meaning? Comprehension of the visible often requires extra-visual leaps – understandings that can only be prompted by knowledge outside the visual field. Since strategies of visual storytelling and display are connected to the cultural and political uses of information, how do we begin to see the context along with the image itself? For examples, we will concentrate on the usage of images and data representing ecological systems and environmental crisis. We will examine the contemporary visual rhetoric of going "green" and the ways in which these modes of expression both reveal and conceal the environmental impact of individuals, products, and systems. Throughout the course, we will look at the work of contemporary artists who turn these theories into practice. Art History Courses: AH 149 Seminar: Modern European Art and Architecture: Primitivism and Its Discontents – Professor Obler This course examines the construction of the “primitive” as an artistic practice and strategy of critique. European and American artists since the late nineteenth century have appropriated visual culture from the “non-Western” world as an act of resistance. What are the effects and implications of this strategy, which aims at subversion even as it consolidates the identity of non-Western culture as “other”? What is the relationship between the politics of colonialism and artistic practice? How do artists from the societies defined as “other” negotiate becoming the “primitive”? Can the category of the “primitive” be productively re-appropriated by “non-Western” artists? We will take advantage of area museums and special exhibitions, such as “Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens” upcoming at the Phillips and “Yinka Shonibare MBE” at the National Museum of African Art. AH 149 Seminar: Late Nineteenth-Century European Art – Professor Robinson This undergraduate seminar will focus on aspects of traditional and avant-garde painting in France during the second half of the nineteenth-century. AH 157. 80 – The American Cinema This upper-level course consists of film-viewing sessions and lectures that work together to illustrate the history of Hollywood filmmaking. Students will learn about the American cinema as a set of production practices, technical innovations, visual styles, and narrative tendencies. The course also explores cinema texts in relationship to their context. In other words, students will learn to situate film ratings systems, film technology, film genres, and film plots as products and producers of the historical moment in which they appeared. Course requirements include short papers, short-essay exams, in-class exercises, and regular attendance to lectures, screenings and discussion sections. Students must also register for a discussion section to satisfy the course requirements. Note: There is an additional course fee of $30. AH 159 Seminar: American Art and Architecture: American Art and Culture of the 1960s and 1970s – Professor Dumbadze Rather than a straight-forward history of photography as a separate medium, this seminar emphasizes its history in relation to painting and other “high art” forms in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore what its shifting status in relation to other media tells us, not only about photography, but about ways in which definitions of art are fluid and ever-changing. **This course has been cancelled.** AH 256 American Art in the 20th Century: Postmodernism and Its Legacies – Professor Dumbadze This course has been cancelled and is being replaced by AH 256 American Art in the 20th Century Seminar: Mural Painting in America – Professor Rufino This course explores wall painting in America primarily during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will investigate key mural cycles within the context of their supporting architecture. Moreover, this class will highlight the shift in subject and tone of wall painting over time as these works echo the country’s cultural and political evolution. Murals within the Capitol, the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Memorial will figure prominently in our study, and the class will include at least one fieldtrip. The work of artists such as Edwin Blashfield, Jules Guérin, John Singer Sargent and Diego Rivera will be addressed. AH 801 Dean's Seminar: The Buddhist Art of Asia Buddhism has had a profound effect on the cultures of Asia, not least on their arts. The seminar explores the history of Buddhist art as initially developed in India, and then follows its transmission through Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, and Central and East Asia. Students will work directly with artifacts at the Sackler and Freer Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution where some sessions are held. By analyzing the physical properties of these objects in the museum, and through reading, discussion, class presentation, and research, students will learn about the major periods of Buddhist art and the key styles, themes, and techniques of each culture. |
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Dept. of Fine Arts & Art History George Washington University 801 22nd St, NW Washington, DC 20052 202-994-6085 | 202-994-8657 fax art@gwu.edu |
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page editor | last updated 30 October 2009 |