Fine Arts (FNAR)
FNAR 0010 Drawing I
This course is designed to develop visual awareness and perceptual acuity through the process of drawing. Students learn to sharpen perceptual skills through observational drawing, and to explore the expressive potential of drawing. A variety of problems and media will be presented in order to familiarize students with various methods of working and ways of communicating ideas visually. Subject matter will include object study, still life, interior and exterior space, self-portrait and the figure. Different techniques and materials (charcoal, graphite, ink, collage) are explored in order to understand the relationship between means, material and concept. Critical thinking skills are developed through frequent class critiques and through the presentation of and research into historical and contemporary precedent in drawing.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2530
1 Course Unit
FNAR 0020 Contemporary Art Studio
This course offers an introduction to studio-based practices aimed at synthesizing the expansive potentialities of art through exposure to a diverse set of approaches, their histories, and contemporary applications. A wide range of multi-disciplinary projects will provide students with skills to conceptualize and visualize material investigations. Lectures, readings, films, visiting lectures, field trips, and critiques, will provide a historic and theoretical foundation for critical inquiry.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 0030 Space/Form
In this studio-based course, students are introduced to a wide range of approaches and techniques explore surface, space, and time (2D,3D,4D). Traditional sculptural materials and techniques will be investigated along with more ephemeral interventions in space such as sound, light, and projection. Through lectures, readings, and critiques, students will explore the history of installation and interactive sculptural work, discover new directions in contemporary art, and develop self-directed projects that interrogate historical, social, and psychological conditions of the built environment.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5002
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1010 Video I
In this studio based course, students are introduced to video production and postproduction as well as to selected historical and theoretical texts addressing the medium of video. Students will be taught basic camera operation, sound recording and lighting, as well as basic video and sound editing and exporting using various screening and installation formats. In addition to a range of short assignment-based exercises, students will be expected to complete three short projects over the course of the semester. Critiques of these projects are crucial to the course as students are expected to speak at length about the formal, technical, critical and historical dimensions of their works. Weekly readings in philosophy, critical theory, artist statements and literature are assinged. The course will also include weekly screenings of films and videos, introducing students to the history of video art as well as to other contemporary practices.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0610, VLST 2610
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1020 Photography Practices
This course is an introduction to the basic principles, strategies and processes of photographic practice. It is designed to broaden the student's aesthetic explorations and to help the student develop a visual language based on cross-disciplinary artistic practice. Through a series of projects and exercises students will be exposed to a range of camera formats, techniques and encouraged to experiment with the multiple modes and roles of photography - both analogue and digital. Attention will also be given to developing an understanding of critical aesthetic and historical issues in photography. Students will examine a range of historical and contemporary photowork as an essential part of understanding the possibilities of image making. This course is primarily for first-years and sophomores. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2600
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1030 Introduction to Photography
This course is an introduction to the basic processes and techniques of black & white photography. Students will learn how to expose and process 35mm film, SLR camera operation, darkroom procedures & printing, basic lighting and controlled applications. It begins with an emphasis on understanding and mastering technical procedures and evolves into an investigation of the creative and expressive possibilities of making images. This is a project-based course, where students will begin to develop their personal vision, their understanding of aesthetic issues and photographic history. Assignments, ideas and important examples of contemporary art will be presented via a series of slide lectures, critiques and discussion. No previous experience necessary. 35mm SLR cameras will be available throughout the semester for reservation and checkout from the photography equipment room.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2510
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1040 Digital Photography
This class offers an in-depth technical and conceptual foundation in digital imagery and the opportunity to explore the creative, expressive possibilities of photography. Students will become proficient with the basic use of the camera, techniques of digital capture, color management and color correction. They will also develop competency in scanning, retouching, printing and a variety of manipulation techniques in Photoshop. Through weekly lectures and critiques, students will become familiar with some of the most critical issues of representation, consider examples from photo history, analyze the impact of new technologies and social media. With an emphasis on structured shooting assignments, students are encouraged to experiment, expand their visual vocabulary while refining their technical skills. No previous experience is necessary. Although it is beneficial for students to have their own Digital SLR camera, registered students may reserve and checkout Digital SLR cameras and other high-end equipment from the department.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2650
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1050 Mixed Media Animation
Mixed Media Animation is a contemporary survey of stop-motion animation concepts and techniques. Students use digital SLR cameras, scanners and digital compositing software to produce works in hand-drawn animation, puppet and clay animation, sand animation, and multiplane collage animation. Screenings and discussions in the course introduce key historical examples of animation demonstrating how these techniques have been used in meaningful ways. Students then learn how to composite two or more of these methods with matte painting, computer animation or video.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 2890
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1060 Sculpture I
As an introduction to traditional and contemporary three-dimensional practice, this course is concerned with the concepts and methodologies surrounding three-dimensional art making in our time. Students experiment with a variety of modes of production, and develop some of the fundamental techniques used in sculpture. In addition to these investigations, assignments relative to the history and social impact of these practices are reinforced through readings and group discussion. Processes covered include use of the Fab Lab, wood construction, clay, paper, mixed media, and more.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2520
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1070 Intro to Clay
This course introduces clay as a sculptural medium through fundamental clay-building techniques, mold making, model making, and casting. Through experimentation with these methods, this course promotes an understanding of materials, processes, visual concepts and techniques for creating three-dimensional forms in space. In addition to using different water-based clays and plaster, other materials such as wax, plastiline, paper pulp, and cardboard will be explored. Students will explore the full range of clay s capabilities and its role in contemporary art through lectures, readings, demonstrations, and assignments that incorporate conceptual and technical issues.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1080 Figure Drawing I
Students work directly from the nude model and focus on its articulation through an understanding of anatomical structure and function. Students will investigate a broad variety of drawing techniques and materials. The model will be used as the sole element in a composition and as a contextualized element.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 0010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1090 Painting I
Painting I is an introduction to the methods and materials of oil painting. This course begins with an investigation of color and color relationships. The beginning of the semester will cover technical issues and develop the student's ability to create a convincing sense of form in space using mass, color, light and composition. The majority of work is from direct observation including object study, still life, landscape, interior and exterior space and the self portrait. Class problems advance sequentially with attention paid to perceptual clarity, the selection and development of imagery, the process of synthesis and translation, color, structure and composition, content and personal expression. Students will become familiar with contemporary and art historical precedent in order to familiarize them with the history of visual ideas and find appropriate solutions to their painting problems.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1100 Introduction to Printmaking
The course offers an introduction to several forms of printmaking including: intaglio, screen printing, relief, and monoprinting. Through in-class demonstrations students are introduced to various approaches to making and printing in each medium. The course enhances a student's capacity for developing images through two-dimensional design and conceptual processes. Technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2500
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1110 The Big Picture: Mural Arts in Philadelphia
The history and practice of the contemporary mural movement couples step by step analysis of the process of designing with painting a mural. In addition students will learn to see mural art as a tool for social change. This course combines theory with practice. Students will design and paint a large outdoor mural in West Philadelphia in collaboration with Philadelphia high school students and community groups. The class is co-taught by Jane Golden, director of the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, and Shira Walinsky, a mural arts painter and founder of Southeast by Southeast project, a community center for Burmese refugees in South Philadelphia.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: URBS 1110, VLST 3220
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1120 Bodies Bodies Bodies: An Introduction to Performance Art
Theater, Dance, Music, Opera, Film, Reality Television, Installation, Intervention, Social Encounters, Protests, Lectures, Seminars…what are the edges and borders of what we call “performance”? What, exactly, makes something “performance art” a “performance” or “performative”? How does an artist employ time, space, site, and audience to create a performance work? What do we mean when we talk about “the body”? In this course, we’ll delve into a survey and practice of making performance. This course is intended to introduce students of various disciplines to the central components of Performance art. Following a hybridized module, the class will present students with a cursory introduction to a history of performance art; its theoretical framings and critical inquiries and various approaches to making, through lecture, seminar, and in-class performance workshops. This introduction will invite students to make their own performance work using a variety of techniques and frameworks discovered through workshops, readings, and viewings of work by feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial artists and theorists. Through solo and collective exercises in movement, installation, speech, sound, drama, and choreography, we will learn the basic tools of making a performance composition that challenges the boundaries of traditional dance and theater (while also welcoming any traditional training at one’s disposal.) Throughout the semester, students will attend performances and screenings, guest artist lectures, performance workshops, and present a final performance project utilizing personal research, skills, and interests discovered through our weekly sessions.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5120
1 Course Unit
FNAR 1490 Performing Parables: Ragas and Sagas of the Sundarban
In this course writer Amitav Ghosh invites Penn students to engage his ongoing collaboration with the musician/performer Ali Sethi to stage his newest book Jungle Nama. Ghosh's book Jungle Nama employs dwipdipoyar verse form and the popular folk tale of Bon Bibi the guardian spirit of the Sundarban to address the eroding ecosystem of the Sundarban. In this course students will work in a short intensive collaborative process with the artists to realize a lyric and musical performance of Jungle Nama. The class employs both academic research and performance methodologies to guide students through histories of traditional Indian performance and folk takes and a thorough examination of Ghosh's source materials and influences (including studies of the Sundarban and its ecostystem). The course is co-taught with Director Brooke O'Harra. O'Harra, Ghosh and Sethi will lead students in a rigorous process of research, development and rehearsal, culminating in a public performance of a musical version of Jungle Nama. All levels and experience are welcome. Performance roles will be cast based on individual interests. In addition to performance roles, students will assume responsibility for other aspects of the process and production. In advance of registration, students are asked to audition and/or interview for the course depending upon initial interest. Actors, singers, dancers, musicians, artists and scholars are all encouraged to apply. Course specifics: The course will run until March 3 with an intensive 4-week rehearsal and development period that culminates in a live performance. Space is limited. Permission required.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2010 Documentary Video
Documentary Video is an intensive production course involving the exploration of concepts, techniques, concerns, and aesthetics of the short form documentary. Building on camera, sound, and editing skills acquired in Video I, students will produce a portfolio of short videos and one longer project over the course of the semester using advanced level camera and sound equipment. One short presentation on a genre, technique, maker, or contemporary concern selected by the student is required.
Fall
Also Offered As: CIMS 0630
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2020 Video II
Video II offers opportunities to further explore the role of cinematic narrative technique, non-narrative forms, digital video cinematography, editing, and screen aesthetics. Through a series of several video projects and a variety of technical exercises, students will refine their ability to articulate technically and conceptually complex creative projects in digital cinema. In addition, one presentation on a contemporary issue related to the application of cinematic storytelling and/or the cultural context of digital video is required.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0620
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2030 Cinema Production
This course focuses on the practices and theory of producing narrative based cinema. Members of the course will become the film crew and produce a short digital film. Workshops on producing, directing, lighting, camera, sound and editing will build skills necessary for the hands-on production shoots. Visiting lecturers will critically discuss the individual roles of production in the context of the history of film.
Fall
Also Offered As: CIMS 0650
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2040 Advanced Video Projects
This course is structured to create a focused environment and support for individual inquiries and projects. Students will present and discuss their work in one to one meetings with the instructor and in group critiques. Readings, screenings, and technical demonstrations will vary depending on students' past history as well as technical, theoretical, and aesthetic interests.
Not Offered Every Year
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2050 Image and Sound Editing
This course presents an in-depth look at the storytelling power of image and sound in both narrative and documentary motion pictures. Students apply a theoretical framework in ongoing workshops, exploring practical approaches to picture editing and sound design. Students edit scenes with a variety of aesthetic approaches, and create story-driven soundtracks with the use of sound FX, dialogue replacement, foleys, music and mixing. Students not only learn critical skills that expand creative possibilities, but also broaden their understanding of the critical relationship between image and sound.
Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0750
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2060 Advanced Lens Based Projects
Advanced Lens Based Projects (ALBP) is structured to create an open environment for students to develop a series of self-determined projects using any variety of image capture technologies. Mobile devices and DSLRs have blended the function of moving and still image capture while computers have become ubiquitous as instruments of display and dissemination. This has consequently led to the increasingly collapsed boundaries of artistic mediums. ALBP is a studio class where students will explore different modes of production and address the expanding field of exhibition strategies. Additionally the class will foster a transdisciplinary approach to critiquing work and emphasize the shared context of the works reception. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with dedicated studio time. Each student is required to complete 3 self-determined projects using still or moving image capture technologies. Grades will be determined through participation, completion of assignments and the students' formal and critical engagement with the technology. While the focus of this course is not technical, prior knowledge of camera functions and post-production techniques is expected
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010 OR FNAR 1020 OR FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2070 Performance/Camera: Performance and-with-through-for Cameras
This intermediate course will explore the wide and expansive territories of art-making that exist between live performance and mediated image making-both still and moving. For much of the 21st century, the mediums of performance, video and photography have been weaving in and out of contact. Performance is known and understood largely through its documentation: sometimes voluminous and sometimes little more than a single photograph. On the other side, video, film and photography each developed through widespread explorations that were deeply entwined with the "capturing" of bodies on film. Using photography, video and performance in equal parts, the course is a hands-on exploration of this capacious terrain. The course will be structured by a series of bi-weekly assignments that allow for individual and collective production. The course will also include a regular schedule of short readings and presentations/screenings of existing works.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010 AND FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2080 Performance Studio
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 0010 OR FNAR 1060 OR FNAR 1020 OR FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2090 Hand-Drawn Computer Animation
Using software tools designed for hand-drawn animation, students will develop animation skills applicable to all forms of animation. In this course students will learn to draw with a sense of urgency and purpose as they represent motion and drama in a series of frames. Through careful study of natural movements, precedents in the history of animation, and through the completion of a series of animation projects students will develop strategies for representing naturalistic movement, inventing meaningful transformations of form, and storytelling.
Not Offered Every Year
Prerequisite: DSGN 0010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2100 Computer Animation
Through a series of studio projects this course introduces techniques of 2D and 3D computer animation. Emphasis is placed on time-based design and storytelling through animation performance and montage. Students will develop new sensitivities to movement, composition, cinematography, editing, sound, color and lighting.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 2670
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2110 Digital Photography II
In this course students will continue to develop conceptual, technical, aesthetic and formal strategies in digital photography, expanding their artistic process while refining their critical approach to researched subject matter. The class will be driven initially by a series of assingments formulated to further expose students to broad possibilites related to the medium and then they will be guided towards the evolution of a personalized body of work that is culturally, theoretically and historically informed. We will be examining key issues surrounding the digital image in contemporary society, led through a combination of class lectures, readings, group discussions, film screenings, gallery visits and class critiquess. Students will further their knowledge of image control and manipulation, retouching and collage, advanced color management; become familiar with high-end camera and lighting equipment and develop professional printing skills. In addition to learning these advanced imaging practices, this course will also emphasize an investigation of critical thought surrounding contemporary visual culture and the role of digital media in the creation of art.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
Prerequisite: FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2120 Reconfiguring Portraiture
As methods of representation are constantly shifting, one thing is clear - the photographic portrait is not what is used to be. Exploring both traditional and contemporary methods of portraiture, this class will uncover and discuss the ways in which we perceive each other in imagery, both as individuals and as groups. Throughout the semester, we will consider how portraits deal with truth, physical absence, the gaze, cultural embodiment, voyeurism and the digital persona. This course will build on the combination of perception, technology, and practice. Throughout the semester, students will advance by learning lighting techniques and strategies of presentation - as these core skills will become tools in the execution of project concepts. In tandem with each project, students will encounter and discuss a wide array of photography and writings from the past to the present, in an effort to understand the meanings and psychological effects of freezing the human image in time.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2140 Photography and Fashion
Since the invention of photography, the fashion industry has been one of the cornerstones of creative expression, innovation and visionary provocation. Contemporary fashion photography has continued to attract a leading group of image-makers that continue the tradition of creating artwork that not only is being published in cutting edge magazines such as V, Another Magazine and Citizen K, but also are exhibiting their work in various galleries and museums around the world. This course is designed for students who are interested in creating contemporary fashion images through specific assignments that define the process: lighting in studio or location, working with fashion designers, stylists, models, hair/ make up artists, and the application of a variety of post production techniques, via Photoshop. The class will explore modern constructs that define the importance of branding, marketing, advertising and the relationship of fashion photography in contemporary art and culture today.
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2150 Photography and Fiction
Photography has historically been a medium of fact, but with the ubiquity of digital technology and the ever-increasing ease with which images can be manipulated, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish the authentic from the artificial. The conversation surrounding truth is pervasive in today’s contemporary culture. With the weaponization of fake news and propaganda, subliminal advertising, deep fake videos, and constructed identities on social media, we are living in a critical time. This course will encompass a broad range of meanings when it comes to fiction, from elaborately staging for the camera in the form of re-enactment and role-play to using digital technology to construct new meanings & realities. This class will examine and trace the history of photographic fiction, paying special attention to the complex negotiations between the decisive moment, the constructed tableau, and the digitally altered image. There will be a combination of class lectures, studio projects, assigned readings, visiting artists, film screenings, field trips, and class critiques.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2160 Counter the Land: Photography and the Landscape
Starting with the representation oflandscape in painting in the early 1800s, the course will then move through Pictorialism and the Modernist movement in photography. Revisiting the later half of the 20th century, we will begin to consider the shifting practices of landscape and the ways it has been photographically depicted up to the present. Collaborating with the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, students will begin their photographic exploration with the work of Andrea Wyeth and the landscape of the Brandywine Valley. As we consider Wyeth, the imges of James Welling will aslo be introduced. Credited for pioneering new forms of representation in photography in the 1970s, Welling also revisited the work of Wyeth from 2010-2015, and committed to a fresh (and challenging) look at tradition. Working with imagery and text, this class will also touch on conceptual art, the New Topographics, and postmodernism. Through these various concentrations, students will consider and counter the traditions that they are already familiar with, while creating work based on issues of the landscape today. Questions about meaning, politics, social critique, land rights, technology and methods of presentaion will be encouraged and explored throughout the course.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2170 Dispersive Lends
This studio course will explore the nexus between photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and the moving image. The course is informed by the printed image, as students will explore how photography can encourage thinking in other mediums, in addition to how other mediums can influence the making of photography. When does an abstract painting appear more like a photograph? How can a photograph suggest ways to make a video? Can a sculpture exist as a photograph? A variety of assignments will expose students to interdisciplinary approaches addressing these questions and more. Class projects will be supported by regular slide lectures, group critiques, and readings examining modern and contemporary artists and practices.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040 OR FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2180 Photography Studio Abroad
This Traveling Studio is offered every other spring term to upper level photography & related media students. It is a cross-cultural visual investigation, exploring the contradictions and significance of the chosen city. This course incorporates multi-disciplinary research in preparation for the trip; exploring various fields of knowledge production such as art, history, social sciences, markets and governance. Class discussion, readings and individual research will be focused towards the development of each student's photo/media project, which will be realized while abroad. After returning to Philadelphia, students will develop and refine their work; the remaining classes will emphasize critique, editing, printing and presentation options. The final projects will be included in a group exhibition at the end of the semester. Admission to the course is on a competitive basis.
Spring
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5034
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2200 Drawing Investigations
Drawing is a fundamental means of visualization and a hub for thinking, constructing, and engaging in a wide variety of creative activities and problemsolving. This studio class explores drawing in both its traditional and contemporary forms. The projects are designed to help students in all disciplines find ways express and clarify their ideas through the process of drawing. The semester begins with the refinement of perceptual skills acquired in Drawing I, while encouraging experimentation through the introduction of color, abstract agendas, conceptual problem solving, and collaborative exercises, as well as new materials, techniques and large format drawings. Particular attention is given to ways to conduct visual research in the development of personal imagery. Assignments are thematic or conceptually based with ample opportunity for individual approaches to media, subject, scale and process. The goal is to strengthen facility, develop clarity in intent and expand expression. Attention is paid to the development of perceptual sensitivity, methods of imagage construction, and the processes of synthesis and transformation in order tocommunicate ideas through visual means. Recommended for students in all areas.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 0010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2220 Painting II
Painting II presents an ongoing exploration of the techniques, problems and poetics of painting, the nuances of the painting language, and the development of a personal direction. A wide variety of problems will address such issues as color, composition, and the development of imagery, process, and content. Students are expected to improve in technical handling of paints and move towards developing personal modes of seeing, interpreting, and thinking for themselves. This course introduces different topics, strategies and individual challenges each semester, so it may be repeated with advanced course numbers.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1090
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2240 Painting Studio
Painting Studio IV focuses on continuing the student's exploration of techniques, problems, and poetics of painting, the nuances of the painting language, and the development of a personal direction. While students may choose to work on assigned projects (either in consultation with the instructoror following the projects that the Painting II/III students may be involved in), the emphasis is on the investigation of the student's own sensibility. Students will be expected to engage in ongoing critical analysis of their own practices and assumptions.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 0010 AND FNAR 2230
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2250 Interdisciplinary Studio: Sites of Convergence and Hybridity
This course takes an experimental multimedia approach to investigating some of the boundaries in contemporary art making practices. Painting, photography, video, design and sculpture intersect, overlap, and converge in complicated ways. Projects will be designed to explore hybrid forms, collage, space/ installation, and color through a variety of strategic and conceptual proposals as students work towards unique ways of expanding their own work. Weekly readings, critiques, and presentations will be integrated with studio projects. This studio/seminar is appropriate for students at all levels and from all areas of Fine Arts and Design.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 0010 OR FNAR 1060 OR FNAR 1020 OR FNAR 231 OR DSGN 0010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2270 Printmaking: Etching
The class will challenge the possibilities of experimental drawing and ways of creating incisions and textures using copper plates as the matrix, which then will be printed on paper and other materials. The class offers full technical and historical description of each individual process: Dry Point, Etching, Hard ground, Soft Ground, Aquatint, Shine Cole', Spit-Biting, Sugar Lift, Color Printing and Viscosity printing.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2280 Printmaking: Screen Printing
This course is an introduction to technical skills and investigative processes in screen printing and relief and examines methods for combining digital technology with traditional print media. The course introduces students to several contemporary applications of silkscreen and relief printmaking including techniques in multi-color printing, photo-based silkscreening, digital printing, woodcut, linocut, and letterpress. Demonstrations include photo and image manipulation, color separating and output techniques, hand carving and printing, as well as drawing and collage. Both traditional and experimental approaches are explored and encouraged and technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2290 Printmaking & Publications: Intro to Independent Publishing and Artists' Publications
This course introduces students to independent publishing and artists' publications through print methods in letterpress, Risograph, and Xerox. The class will focus on the self-published artists' zine/book as an affordable, accessible, and easily reproducible format for exploring ideas, disseminating artists' work, and collaborating across disciplines. Students will learn a range of skills, including techniques in both mechanized and hand-pulled forms of printed media (Risograph, copy machine, Vandercook letterpress); short- run editions and binding; design and layout; pre-press and print production; and the web as it relates to and supports independent and democratic modes of distribution. Students will learn about and become acquainted with some of the most significant independent publishers working today and throughout history. Students will leave class having completed three individual projects: a 16-page booklet/zine; a carefully considered online publication, and a final collaborative book designed, developed and published as a class. The course commences with a field trip to New York City's Printed Matter, one of the oldest and most important nonprofit facilities dedicated to the promotion of artists' books, where students will be encouraged to submit a publication by semester's end.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2310 Advanced Sculpture: Installation & Interventions
In this course students will create sculptural installations and spatial interventions that explore site specificity and architectural environments. A range of traditional sculptural materials and techniques will be investigated along with more ephemeral interventions in space such as sound, light, and projection. Through lectures, readings, and critiques, students will explore the history of installation and interactive sculptural work and develop self-directed projects that interrogate historical, social, and psychological conditions of the built environment.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5047
Prerequisite: FNAR 1060
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2320 Queer Imaginings
Queer is a fluid, unfixed and undefinable space offering endless utopian possibilities & potentials concerning gender, sexuality, personal autonomy and agency. Queer Imaginings is a forum for the reimagining of Queer representation/s. This course provides a safe space to mine, critique and analyze Queer imagery, both historical & contemporary. We will explore the ways in which Queerness is approached, represented & manipulated in pop culture, politics, society and the media. Students enrolled in this studio/seminar course will partake in discussions and research pertaining to Queer images and their intersections with race, trans/non-binary-equity, feminism, disability & class structure. These complex subjects will inspire respectful debate throughout the course, and most importantly, generate robust discussion about the work students create. Prompted through select readings and visual presentations, students will be guided to research, analyze and create artworks, which are inspired by various topics related to Queerness. A special emphasis will be placed upon issues arising around visibility, erasure & inclusivity. This forum offers a space to reexamine, research and propose new representations of Queerness. This is primarily a lens-based course with expansive possibilities (interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary).
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2330 Experimental Clay
In this course students will examine and explore the sculptural foundations of clay in the world of contemporary art and design, by experimenting with its sculptural materiality, as a means to develop ideas in large-scale and unconventional ways. Through investigative and conceptually driven projects, students will use clay and other non-traditional materials to make modular structures that incorporate advanced mold-making, casting, and advanced building techniques to develop their own artistic voice through the expansive medium of clay.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 2410 if night is a weed and day grows less
If Night Is A Weed And Day Grows Less The title of this class posits a shift in balance: of the natural order, of the built environment, of the body politic, of perception. The result is a creeping entropy that can either be embraced or redirected. Taking a morphological approach to image making students can use any variety of televisual image capture technologies. From analog to digital, satellite imagery to scanner. Time arrested or accelerated. Night for day and weeds for gardens, the work produced should ask us to slow down and reassess the objectives of form, language, image and place, to create new prototypes for engagement and new modes of understanding our environment and perhaps even to reinvent the conventions of landscape as a genre. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. Each student is required to complete a visual essay that addresses these themes using image capture technologies.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5410
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3010 Nonhuman Photography
Our culture is increasingly made up of nonhuman actors. Facial recognition algorithms spend more hours "seeing" in a day than humans; drones equipped with visual sensors conduct our warfare; voice chat bots call businesses and make appointments for us. Meanwhile, humans conduct labor that we view as the work of bots: posting disinformation for political gain, or mass-producing children's YouTube videos for ad revenue. As objects begin to see and think, how can we understand the role of human agency and the possibilities (or lack thereof) for artistic expression in this space? What does the future of art look like when more photographs are taken as surveillance than by individuals, or when important cultural producers are nonhuman intelligences? In Nonhuman Photography, we will attempt to interrogate these ideas from an artist's perspective, approaching nonhuman agents and the various components that comprise them both as tools for studio work and as generative entities in their own right. Over the course of the semester we will read and discuss these issues extensively, while engaging in studio projects in a variety of media. While the course bears the title "photography", we will find that many of these tools will be non-photographic or para-photographic, and as a result many of our studio projects will be interdisciplinary. This course takes its name from Joanna Zylinska's Nonhuman Photography, parts of which we will examine over the course of the semester.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010 OR FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3020 Machine for Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image
Architecture's relationship with cinema was established with the very first motion picture. In Sortie de l'usine Lumiere de Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumiere we see a didactic presentation of film titles as workers from the Lumiere brother's factory stream forth from its interior at days end. In many ways the context of the film is its subject as well. The title of the class plays on Le Corbusier's maxim that architecture is machine for living and perhaps cinema is simply a machine for helping us understand the vast construct of our built environment. A device, which allows us to imagine even greater follies or more importantly to think critically about architecture's relationship with and impact on society. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. Students will produce their own film and we will look at films produced by a range of practioners: From architects speculating on the nature of and use of public space and urban development to documentarians researching the pathologies of neo-liberalism and its effect on the privatization of space. We will also look at the work of artists who engage with the poetics of space and who unpack the conflicted legacies of the built environment.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3030 A Virus in the Culture: Social Critique in Media Arts
In order to change the world, we must first learn how to infect it. A Virus in the Culture is a studio class that examines and generates various forms of media resistance to dominant hegemonic systems of power and control. Using filmmaking, publication design and interactive media we'll think through and develop responses to some of the most pressing issues facing us today. We'll look at historical models from the agitprop design work of Gee Vaucher for Anarcho-punk band Crass to Chris Marker's film Le Fond de L'Air Est Rouge, a radical analysis of global social and political turmoil in the late 60s and early 70s. We'll also look at experimental contemporary design firms like Metahaven who question the role of designers and filmmakers today - Bypassing the power dynamics of clients and briefs they took it upon themselves to create a graphic identity for WikiLeaks. Each example broadens the definition and possibilities of practice to create a more porous engagement with audiences and users while informing the practice of social critique today. Considering a diverse range of topics from education policy, to the rights of environmental refugees, we'll use the class to workshop a singular comprehensive project that targets researches and responds to a specific contested position. The outcome of which will be a class produced short film, publication and website that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of our subject. This class is co-taught by David Hartt, an artist and filmmaker along with graphic designer, Mark Owens. Reading, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. While the focus of this course is not technical, prior knowledge of design programs, camera functions, and post-production techniques is expected.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3040 On Thoughts Occasioned By
The Essay Film is an important tradition within the various genres that constitute the field of Film and Video Art. Through the element of time it differentiates itself from its literary and photographic antecedents. It borrows selectively from both narrative fiction and documentary - highly subjective and occasionally poetic but without perhaps the burden of truth. The Essay Film is an attempt to dimensionalize our experience of the world and our place in it. It represents an argument, a meditation, a critical engagement with a place, a time or a subject. This is a combination seminar/studio course. Through readings, screenings and discussion students will gain an historical perspective on the genre. The core assignment is for each student to complete a short film (20 minutes max.) in the tradition of the Essay Film.
Also Offered As: ENGL 2570
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3050 Critical Issues in Art
Perspectives on Critical Issues aims to engage students in an ongoing and informed study of both historical and contemporary issues in a spirit of curiosity and critique. We will investigate how these concepts can clarify and complicate our creative practice and our understanding of the contemporary art world. This seminar will explore the shifts in artistic production, theory and criticism and topics will range from traditional investigations of aesthetics, Modernism, Post-Modernism and contemporary themes. Through discussions of assigned readings, class presentations, films, lectures, and field trips, this seminar will help establish a critical and theoretical foundation where your own beliefs and doubts about art and culture will be called into question and will provoke an ongoing inquiry into how you understand art, you own creative process, and the relationship of art and artists to society and creative culture.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3060 The Chinese Body and Spatial Consumption in Chinatown
This is a primarily an art and planning course that centers on the representation of the oriental, specifically the Chinese, in both its historical and present contexts.The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning. This course will study the often fraught negotiation between representation and planning. The hyper-urbanization of China over the past several decades has radically altered traditional conceptions of public space in China. Mass migration from rural to urban areas has meant very high population densities in Chinese cities. Traditional courtyards surrounded by housing and other modestly scaled buildings are rapidly disappearing, incongruent with the demands of heated property development Moreover, Chinese cities have comparatively little public green space per resident compared to equivalents in the West. Zoning in Chinese cities is also much more varied for any given area than what one would find in cities such as New York, Paris, and London. Intensifying density of urban areas precludes the construction of large public squares. Furthermore, large public squares tend to be either intensively congested and overcrowded or underused due to their oversight by government that render such spaces somewhat opprobrious in terms of use. Historically, the urban courtyards of temples, native place associations, and provincial guilds served as public spaces of gathering. They were also sites of festivals and the conducting of neighbourhood and civic business. These spaces have become increasingly privatized or commodified with entrance fees. The air-conditioned concourses of enclosed shopping malls or busy outdoor market streets have become de facto public spaces in China where collective window shopping or promenading is the primary activity rather than bodily repose as one might find in a public space in a large Western city. The seminar/studio will investigate the meaning of the term public in the constitution of Chinese space, audience and critical voice through firstly the enclave of Chinatown and secondly through examples from China. The course will look into the changing conceptualization of public space in Chinatown as it has declined in its traditional form and become reinvented in the form of high-end shopping centered districts. This flux has its roots in post 1979 China as well as the post 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to China. As such, the course will examine the situation of rapid urbanization in China and the concomitant relationship to new Chinese (and Asian) districts in the North American urban and suburban landscape ie Vancouver, Toronto, Arlington (Virginia), Oakland, Los Angeles valley and Queens (Flushing), New York. In what ways can artists and designers respond to and challenge these conceptualizations of the old and the new within the context of urban change? What of the changing formations of the Chinese subject through the experiences of embodiment? How is public space produced through an ethnically bracketed bodily presence. Findings will be translated by the student as tools for design and public art imaginings This course will include a week s trip to San Francisco to study how intense growth in the city has all but usurped old Chinatown while new and more vibrant Chinese centers have emerged in multiple other districts within the city and the suburbs.
Also Offered As: ASAM 3130, ENGL 2275
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3070 Tiananmen Square: A Case Study for Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture
This course takes as its subject the systems of representation and design that have historically and presently operate in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. There have been several incarnations of Tiananmen Square since its original form in 1651. During Imperial times and through the period of foreign legations, the square was once surrounded by walls and gates, creating a city within a city. With the advent of the Republic of China established on January 1, 1912, much of the enclosures were removed, opening up for public use previously restricted imperial areas. After the Communist Revolution in 1949, planning was afoot to enlarge the square. With its enlargement completed in 1958, the square expanded its footprint by four-fold, making it one of the largest public squares in the world. The enlarged and remodeled square coincided with the completion of the massive Monument to the People's Heroes. In 1976, a large mausoleum containing the preserved body of Mao Zedong was built near the site of the former Gate of China, further increasing the size of the square. In the 1990s, the building of the National Grand Theatre and expansion of the National Museum on grounds contiguous to the square necessitated further alterations to both the Eastern and Western skirts of the square. In recent years, there have been a widening debate regarding the transformation of the concrete heavy and by and large featureless square into a green space. Today, Tiananmen Square holds sacrosanct status to the Communist revolution of 1949, designed more for military parades and massive public rallies than public space repose. In a city that has few green spaces, such a verdant transformation in the heart of the Chinese capital would signal a radical symbolic deviation to China's development-first guiding principles. The square fronts Tiananmen Gate and the Forbidden City and is situated at the intersection of the historical east-west and north- south axes. Chang'An Avenue, important for military processions, separates the square from Tiananmen Gate and is considered the most important thoroughfare in the Capital and the path of the east west number one subway line. The entirety of the Tiananmen Square area is marked by ideology and political prominence, often confusingly. Tiananmen Tower, functions as a conflation of monumental facade with political embodiment. This course will focus on imagined interventions through public art and landscape design within Tiananmen Square and its contiguous areas. It is a studio practice course with a significant seminar component that will include lectures and readings relating to issues of public space and urban design in contemporary China. The course will also study the development of contemporary art in China. The tragic events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 represented a turning point in terms of a generation of Western exiled Chinese artists and curators including Hou Hanru, Chen Zhen, Xu Min, Huang Yong Ping and Yan Pei Ming among many others. The class will study the strategies deployed by these so- called First Generation of Chinese artists. Making use of their double identity as traditionally taught Chinese artist residing in the West, their art offered a pointed critique of both China and the West. The course will include a trip to Beijing.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3080 Across Forms: Art and Writing
What if a poem spoke from inside a photograph? What if a sculpture unfurled a political manifesto? What if a story wasn't just like a dance, but was a dance-or a key component of a video, drawing, performance, or painting? In this course, artists and writers will develop new works that integrate the forms, materials, and concerns of both art and writing. Many artists employ writing in their practices, but may not look at the texts they create as writing. And many writers have practices that go beyond the page and deserve attention as art. This course will employ critique and workshop, pedagogic methodologies from art and writing respectively, to support and interrogate cross- pollination between writing and art practices. Additionally, the course will will examine a field of artists and writers who are working with intersections between art and writing to create dynamic new ways of seeing, reading, and experiencing.
Fall
Also Offered As: ENGL 3504
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5056
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3090 Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities. We will engage the work of creative practitioners who are mapping new relationships between art and social justice and directly impacting individual and communal well-being. In so doing, the course seeks to challenge traditional constructions of public health, which often isolate individual histories from their social life and their relation to families, communities, and geographies. Readings will build upon disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social policy. Requirements include weekly readings, class participation, and a collaborative final project. The course will meet in the Health Ecologies Lab at Slought Foundation, an arts organization on campus.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3100 Paris Modern: Spiral City
Paris has been shaped by a mixture of organic development, which is still today perceptible in the "snail" pattern of its arrondissements whose numbers, from 1 to 20, coil around a central island several times so as to exemplify a "spiral city," and of the violent cuts, interruptions and sudden transformations that again and again forced it to catch up with modern times, the most visible of which was Baron Haussmann's destruction of medieval sections of the city to make room for huge boulevards. Thus Parisian modernism has always consisted in a negotiation between the old and the new, and a specific meaning of modernity allegorized for Louis Aragon, the Surrealists and Walter Benjamin consisted in old-fashioned arcades built in the middle of the 19th century and obsolete by the time they turned into icons of Paris. The aim of the class will be to provide conceptual and pragmatic (visual, experiential) links between a number of texts, theories and films deploying various concepts of the modern in Paris, with a guided tour of the main places discussed. The course that Professors Jean Michel Rabate (English) and Ken Lum (Fine Arts) will lead studies Paris as a work of science-fiction where its many futures are embedded in its many pasts, where discontinuity is a continuous process and where the curving line of the snail's shell is a line of ceaseless curling resulting in a perennial oscillation where an outside converts into an inside and an inside then converts to an outside. The course will travel to Paris over spring break to get an in-depth look at the topics discussed in class.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 2110
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3110 Public Art and Issues of Spatial Production
The French social philosopher Michel de Certeau upset the common understanding of the relationship between space and place by elevating space as practice place. By this, he meant that place is but a set of geo-physical particularities that has no dynamic meaning unless activated through social engagement so that space is produced. Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression. Historical markers play a somewhat different role by calling attention to lost or negative histories, albeit most often vetted through the language of tourism factoids. This course will examine the discursive issues at play in respect to art and markers, particularly for Philadelphia. Additionally, important public art works from around the world will be examined. The course will also include the occasional visit of several key works downtown in which the question of what can and cannot said will be pondered.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3120 Photographic Thinking
This course will explore the vitality and range of photography as a discursive practice by analyzing the way images are structured and deployed in contemporary art and wider media culture. Students will be introduced to the key issues surrounding photography now- led through these questions by lectures, readings, group discussion and project-based work. A series of photo-assignments challenge the students to integrate critical thought with practice, exploring a range of formal strategies and thematic frameworks that affect the meaning of their images. Students should have a strong interest in philosophy and art histories (especially the history of photography.) They should be motivated to work independently & experiment creatively. There are no prerequisites for this course. It is intended for all different levels of technical experience, but the minimum requirements are a digital camera, a basic familiarity with Photoshop and access to a computer with imaging software.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3130 Mystics & Visionaries: Arts and Other Ways of Knowing
As a pioneer of abstraction in the early 1900's, Hilma Af Klint channeled a complex and highly original body of abstract symbolic work in secrecy. Using the upcoming Hilma Af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim as a focus and departure point, this course will explore the ways in which artists have accessed alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and embodying non-visible realities as a source for their work. Accessing spiritual realms has been the subject of early European Modernisms investigations into Theosophy and Anthroposophy, as well as the primary intention of Tibetan Thangkas and Indian Tantra paintings. Postmodernism's crisis of belief and skepticism generated a cultural situation wherein the subject of spirituality was marginalized, ridiculed as anti- intellectual, and in disgrace. The Hilma Af Klint exhibition and surge of interest in her work signifies a new moment, where questions about consciousness and the nature of reality are being addressed with renewed vigor. How do we create space in a technology driven world for experiences that attempt to align the viewer/maker with the contemplative realm, heightened states of consciousness, or transcendence? We will examine a wide field of artists in an attempt to understand the possibilities of the "spiritual" in art and contemporary culture. This seminar will engage in readings, lectures, discussions, projects, and field trips. This course is appropriate for both grad and undergrad, art majors and non-majors alike.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3140 Civic Studio
Civic Studio is an engaged research praxis that delves in the significant theories, methodologies, and practices of public and socially-engaged artwork. Students draw from arts- and place-based modes of inquiry toward collaborative projects with fellow classmates, artists, and organizations in Philadelphia and beyond, while pursuing semester-long individual research. Each semester, students work with and as embedded practitioners in exhibitions, installations, and other artistic platforms throughout the city. In turn, through readings, site visits, and site-specific work, students gain creative and critical capacity for producing their own final projects about a particular street, intersection, or site in the city . Through Civic Studio students are able to reflect upon and practice public work with artistic, scholarly, and civic aims.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3150 Monument Lab: Praxis Approaches to Socially-Engaged Public Art
What makes an exceptional socially-engaged public artwork or project? For those who practice in the field, the question invites careful consideration of aesthetics, process, participation, staging, and interpretation. Across the better part of the last decade, this line of inquiry has fueled the work of Monument Lab, a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. With deep roots and close ties to the Department of Fine Arts's Center for Public Art and Space, and methods interanimating contemporary art and pedagogy, Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. The Monument Lab course in Fine Arts explores the theoretical study and practical applications of public art. The course operates as a socially-engaged "civic studio" to engage case studies, debate key issues in the field, meet with artists and practitioners, conduct site and studio visits, and practice direct methods for producing individual and collaborative public projects. Focusing on the intersection of theory and practice, the praxis course highlights engaged methods piloted by Monument Lab in citywide exhibitions and special projects, especially to focus on themes and models for participation, public engagement, co-creation, curation, temporary installation, and socially engaged art-making. Each student will embark on a semester-long independent project, as well as participate in a group initiative centered on a current Monument Lab project in Philadelphia to gain experience in the field of socially-engaged public art.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3160 Is This Really Happening? Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons
This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo. Scholars working across Performance Studies and Black Studies importantly expanded critical discourse around performance to address the entanglement of the medium with physical, psychic, spatial and temporal inhabitations of violence and power. Generating copious genealogies of embodied resistance, this scholarship instigates a complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective on intersections between art and life, performance and politics. The class hosts a series of public lectures, presentations and performances by visual artists, choreographers, theater artists, composers/musicians, performers, curators and activists engaged with the social and political moment. Presentations will be open to the public with students in the course developing in-depth research into the work of each visiting artist/performer/presenter to engage the larger context of each visitor's scholarship and/or practice through readings, discussion and in-class presentations. This course is open to all interested students. No prior requisties or experience with performance or the performing arts is necessary.
Also Offered As: ENGL 3652, GSWS 0860
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3180 Advanced Projects in Animation
This course will focus on developing and producing projects that utilize advanced approaches to 2D and 3D computer animation. We will engage emerging techniques of visualization such as data-driven animation, algorithmic animation, working in hybrid forms of stop-motion, hand-drawn and 3D computer animation, working with dynamic physical simulations, rigging animated characters, or structures. The meeting pattern of the course will enable members to complete ambitious independent or group based animation projects and to share the methods that they develop along the way.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3181 The History of American Animation
This course will look at American animation as an art form, a technology and an industry. We will explore the ways in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions shape the development of animation and in turn, how animation impacts viewers. Topics will include trends in animation and their relation to contemporary popular culture, issues of art versus commerce in the creation of cartoons, the intersection of animation and politics, and shifts in style and technique throughout the years. We will look at the personalities in animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the rise in animation's popularity, and current-day applications of animated imagery. Case studies will include Pixar, Walt Disney, UPA, television cartoons, stop motion animation, and the movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3870, CIMS 3200
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3182 The History Computer Animation
This course will look at computer animation as an art form, a series of technological innovations and an industry. We will explore the way in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions have shaped the development of computer animation. Topics will include the impact of early motion graphics experiments in the sixties, the contributions of university- and corporation-funded research, commercial production, and the rise of Pixar. We will consider the companies and personalities in computer animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the contributions to computer animation from visionaries around the world, and current day applications of animated imagery. Throughout the course, we will screen important works from the canon of computer animation, including the earliest computer-animated shorts, scenes from Beauty and the Beast, the first Pixar shorts, Toy Story, Final Fantasy and works done internationally to forward the art and the industry.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3871, CIMS 3201, ENGL 0591
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3184 The Animation Of Disney
No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3873, CIMS 3203, ENGL 0593
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3185 History Children's TV
This course will survey the history of children’s television from the invention of television through the present, with an emphasis on series development and production, artistry, and the colorful personalities who built this industry. We’ll consider important figures including Fred Rogers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Joan Ganz Cooney, Jim Henson and Walt Disney. We will discuss the history of animated cartoons that were made specifically for television, Saturday morning production, the rise of Japanese cartoons from the 1960s through Pokemon, and the growth of children’s cable channels in the 90s, as well as other landmark moments. We’ll also assess the impact of streaming platforms on television and the future of children’s media.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3874, CIMS 3204, ENGL 0594
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3250 MATTERS: Connecting Arts + Design to Materials, and Materials to Labor + Land
How does matter transform into material, and back again? What hidden labor, sites, social and ecological costs and processes go into the production of a “blank” canvas and other “raw” materials? And why-- for artists, designers, architects, preservationists, creative educators, builders, and anyone working with materials-- do these realities matter? This course connects arts and design learners to considerations, sites, and cycles around production and disposal of the defining materials of their creative fields (ex. paper, wood, glass, pigment, "the internet"), laying groundwork for creative practice rooted in social and ecological awareness, repair and care. A hybrid research seminar, field exploration, and studio investigation, the structure of this course alternates between reading/response/research, field trips and guest visitors (including a partnership affiliation with RAIR Philly), and time for responsive “making” and material experimentation/synthesis. In this course, students will collaboratively define key terms and concerns around material sustainability, discard studies, land and labor relations vis-a-vis creative work. Students will experience local sites of material extraction, production and disposal (through approx 5 field trips taking place during class time). Students will formulate individual or group questions around a specific material, leading to a final independent project, and class exhibition. This course will engage students in forming a material ethics to guide future creative work.
Also Offered As: DSGN 3250
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3300 Public Art and Issues of Spatial Production
The French social philosopher Michel de Certeau upset the common understanding of the relationship between space and place by elevating space as practice place. By this, he meant that place is but a set of geo-physical particularities that has no dynamic meaning unless activated through social engagement so that space is produced. Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression. Historical markers play a somewhat different role by calling attention to lost or negative histories, albeit most often vetted through the language of tourism factoids. This course will examine the discursive issues at play in respect to art and markers, particularly for Philadelphia. Additionally, important public art works from around the world will be examined. The course will also include the occasional visit of several key works downtown in which the question of what can and cannot said will be pondered.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3517 Plague Lab: Writing through Infection and Affliction
How do we write through a plague? In this creative writing class we will begin with the question of how plagues make and disrupt meaning. In addition to canonical examples, we’ll explore off-center, anti-colonial, and non-Western literary and popular culture works. Students will then produce across a number of genres including poetry, fiction, memoir, zines, double-blind studies, sculpture, installation, performance, or found object scavenging. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 3517, THAR 1117
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices
This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniues that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe e Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. e semester will culminate in students creating their own short lm content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 3664, CIMS 3664
1 Course Unit
FNAR 3770 Black Speculative Futures
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar's exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3770, ANTH 3770
1 Course Unit
FNAR 4020 Fine Arts Senior Seminar Project (Fall)
This rigorous pair of courses, one offered in the Fall and one offered in the Spring semester, are designed as the capstone of the Fine Arts major and are required for all graduating fine arts seniors. They can only be taken in the senior year. Students work in individual studio spaces provided by the department and then meet with faculty for seminar, critique, and professional practice exercises. Through individual and group critiques, students begin to conceptualize thier final thesis exhibition or project. The senior seminar allows students to create lasting professional relationships with the fine arts faculty and visiting lecturers. The fall semester culminates in a group exhibition of senior student work paired with final semester critiques.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 4030 Fine Arts Senior Seminar Project (Spring)
The Spring semester seminar culminates in a senior thesis exhibition for each graduating student. These exhibitions have traditionally been held as a small group exhibition featuring a few students in one group, or as a larger end of semester exhibition with each student installing a series of works. The format of the exhibition will be determined during the fall semester by the senior faculty. The process of preparing, installing, and promoting the thesis exhibition is covered in detail throughout the semester. Students will work in their on-campus studio spaces to produce dynamic, thoughtful and well-crafted work that will serve as their final portfolio. They will present their portfolio of work during a final critique before graduation.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 4100 Urban Communities and the Arts
Urban Communities and the Arts concerns itself with Arts, Music and Activism in Philadelphia. We investigate the social, economic and cultural fabric from which activism in the arts arises. To do so, we will investigate the histories and artistic reactions to oppression in Philadelphia by drawing on specific examples from various sections of the city and through the media of music, visual art, theater, and dance. The long history of systemic and individual oppression in the US manifests itself in different ways in various urban neighborhoods in Philly and artists of various genres and inclinations participate in activism in many different ways. Examples of artistic and musical responses to the various forms of oppression will be offered and class participants will be asked to bring their own examples to share and analyze. By visiting significant arts practitioners and organizations that provide access to arts education and justice work, participants will have a hands-on experience to unpack the dynamics of artistic production in city life. In addition to art as an outlet for exposing oppression, we will also consider the ways that art and music become markers of the uniqueness of a neighborhood or city, which further complicates the idea of art as a tool for activism. Participants in Urban Communities and the Arts will unpack the role of music and art in defining city or neighborhood cultures by considering a few key sectors that reveal the ways in which cities fail to provide equal access to resources or participate in outright discrimination. At the same time, cities continue to cultivate creative spaces and socio-economic opportunities for economic gain and social understanding through art and music. It is the contradictions that this course will concern itself with and out of our study we will invite course participants to respond creatively. Participants will create either an original work of art, music or intellectual response like a visually interesting research poster as part of a final art/music show. Ultimately students will be asked to reflect back on the role of art in social and political activism to better understand the successes and failures of such movements as they come to define the ethos of city life and its limits.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: URBS 4100
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5003 Contemporary Art Studio
This course offers an introduction to studio-based practices aimed at synthesizing the expansive potentialities of art through exposure to a diverse set of approaches, their histories, and contemporary applications. A wide range of multi-disciplinary projects will provide students with skills to conceptualize and visualize material investigations. Lectures, readings, films, visiting lectures, field trips, and critiques, will provide a historic and theoretical foundation for critical inquiry.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5004 Video I
In this studio based course, students are introduced to video production and postproduction as well as to selected historical and theoretical texts addressing the medium of video. Students will be taught basic camera operation, sound recording and lighting, as well as basic video and sound editing and exporting using various screening and installation formats. In addition to a range of short assignment-based exercises, students will be expected to complete three short projects over the course of the semester. Critiques of these projects are crucial to the course as students are expected to speak at length about the formal, technical, critical and historical dimensions of their works. Weekly readings in philosophy, critical theory, artist statements and literature are assinged. The course will also include weekly screenings of films and videos, introducing students to the history of video art as well as to other contemporary practices.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5007 Digital Photography
This class offers an in-depth technical and conceptual foundation in digital imagery and the opportunity to explore the creative, expressive possibilities of photography. Students will become proficient with the basic use of the camera, techniques of digital capture, color management and color correction. They will also develop competency in scanning, retouching, printing and a variety of manipulation techniques in Photoshop. Through weekly lectures and critiques, students will become familiar with some of the most critical issues of representation, consider examples from photo history, analyze the impact of new technologies and social media. With an emphasis on structured shooting assignments, students are encouraged to experiment, expand their visual vocabulary while refining their technical skills. No previous experience is necessary. Although it is beneficial for students to have their own Digital SLR camera, registered students may reserve and checkout Digital SLR cameras and other high-end equipment from the department.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5008 Mixed Media Animation
Mixed Media Animation is a contemporary survey of stop-motion animation concepts and techniques. Students use digital SLR cameras, scanners and digital compositing software to produce works in hand-drawn animation, puppet and clay animation, sand animation, and multiplane collage animation. Screenings and discussions in the course introduce key historical examples of animation demonstrating how these techniques have been used in meaningful ways. Students then learn how to composite two or more of these methods with matte painting, computer animation or video.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5010 Graduate Studio I
First year studio for MFA students' core pursuit of self-directed interdisciplinary problems that contribute to one or more of the visual arts disciplines.
Fall
1-2 Course Units
FNAR 5011 Intro to Clay
This course introduces clay as a sculptural medium through fundamental clay-building techniques, mold making, model making, and casting. Through experimentation with these methods, this course promotes an understanding of materials, processes, visual concepts and techniques for creating three-dimensional forms in space. In addition to using different water-based clays and plaster, other materials such as wax, plastiline, paper pulp, and cardboard will be explored. Students will explore the full range of clay s capabilities and its role in contemporary art through lectures, readings, demonstrations, and assignments that incorporate conceptual and technical issues.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5012 Figure Drawing I
Students work directly from the nude model and focus on its articulation through an understanding of anatomical structure and function. Students will investigate a broad variety of drawing techniques and materials. The model will be used as the sole element in a composition and as a contextualized element.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5013 Painting I
Painting I is an introduction to the methods and materials of oil painting. This course begins with an investigation of color and color relationships. The beginning of the semester will cover technical issues and develop the student's ability to create a convincing sense of form in space using mass, color, light and composition. The majority of work is from direct observation including object study, still life, landscape, interior and exterior space and the self portrait. Class problems advance sequentially with attention paid to perceptual clarity, the selection and development of imagery, the process of synthesis and translation, color, structure and composition, content and personal expression. Students will become familiar with contemporary and art historical precedent in order to familiarize them with the history of visual ideas and find appropriate solutions to their painting problems.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5014 Introduction to Printmaking
The course offers an introduction to several forms of printmaking including: intaglio, screen printing, relief, and monoprinting. Through in-class demonstrations students are introduced to various approaches to making and printing in each medium. The course enhances a student's capacity for developing images through two-dimensional design and conceptual processes. Technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5015 Documentary Video
Documentary Video is an intensive production course involving the exploration of concepts, techniques, concerns, and aesthetics of the short form documentary. Building on camera, sound, and editing skills acquired in Video I, students will produce a portfolio of short videos and one longer project over the course of the semester using advanced level camera and sound equipment. One short presentation on a genre, technique, maker, or contemporary concern selected by the student is required.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5016 Video II
Video II offers opportunities to further explore the role of cinematic narrative technique, non-narrative forms, digital video cinematography, editing, and screen aesthetics. Through a series of several video projects and a variety of technical exercises, students will refine their ability to articulate technically and conceptually complex creative projects in digital cinema. In addition, one presentation on a contemporary issue related to the application of cinematic storytelling and/or the cultural context of digital video is required.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5017 Cinema Production
This course focuses on the practices and theory of producing narrative based cinema. Members of the course will become the film crew and produce a short digital film. Workshops on producing, directing, lighting, camera, sound and editing will build skills necessary for the hands-on production shoots. Visiting lecturers will critically discuss the individual roles of production in the context of the history of film.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5018 Advanced Video Projects
This course is structured to create a focused environment and support for individual inquiries and projects. Students will present and discuss their work in one on one meetings with the instructor and in group critiques. Readings, screenings, and technical demonstrations will vary depending on students' past history as well as technical, theoretical, and aesthetic interests.
Not Offered Every Year
Prerequisite: FNAR 5004
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5020 Graduate Studio II
Second year studio for MFA students' core pursuit of self-directed interdisciplinary problems that contribute to one or more of the visual art disciplines.
Spring
1-2 Course Units
FNAR 5021 Advanced Lens Based Projects
Advanced Lens Based Projects (ALBP) is structured to create an open environmentfor students to develop a series of self-determined projects using any variety of image capture technologies. Mobile devices and DSLRs have blended the function of moving and still image capture while computers have become ubiquitous as instruments of display and dissemination. This has consequently led to the increasingly collapsed boundaries of artistic mediums. ALBP is a studio class where students will explore different modes of production and address the expanding field of exhibition strategies. Additionally, the class will foster a transdisciplinary approach to critiquing work and emphasize the shared context of the works reception. Readings, screenings, discussions, and critiques make up the curriculum along with dedicated studio time. Each student is required to complete three self- determined projects using still or moving image capture technologies. Grades will be determined through participation, completion of assignments, and the students' formal and critical engagement with the technology. While the focus of this course is not technical, prior knowledge of camera functions and post- production techniques is expected.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1010 OR FNAR 1020 OR FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 1040
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5022 Performance/Camera: Performance and-with-through-for Cameras
This intermediate course will explore the wide and expansive territories of art-making that exist between live performance and mediated image making-both still and moving. For much of the 21st century, the mediums of performance, video and photography have been weaving in and out of contact. Performance is known and understood largely through its documentation: sometimes voluminous and sometimes little more than a single photograph. On the other side, video, film and photography each developed through widespread explorations that were deeply entwined with the "capturing" of bodies on film. Using photography, video and performance in equal parts, the course is a hands-on exploration of this capacious terrain. The course will be structured by a series of bi-weekly assignments that allow for individual and collective production. The course will also include a regular schedule of short readings and presentations/screenings of existing works.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 6610 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5023 Performance Studio
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230 OR FNAR 5450 OR FNAR 6400 OR FNAR 6610
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5024 Hand-Drawn Computer Animation
Using software tools designed for hand-drawn animation, students will develop animation skills applicable to all forms of animation. In this course students will learn to draw with a sense of urgency and purpose as they represent motion and drama in a series of frames. Through careful study of natural movements, precedents in the history of animation, and through the completion of a series of animation projects students will develop strategies for representing naturalistic movement, inventing meaningful transformations of form, and storytelling.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5025 Computer Animation
Through a series of studio projects this course introduces techniques of 2D and 3D computer animation. Emphasis is placed on time-based design and storytelling through animation performance and montage. Students will develop new sensitivities to movement, composition, cinematography, editing, sound, color and lighting.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5026 Digital Photography II
In this course students will continue to develop conceptual, technical, aesthetic and formal strategies in digital photography, expanding their artistic process while refining their critical approach to researched subject matter. The class will be driven initially by a series of assingments formulated to further expose students to broad possibilites related to the medium and then they will be guided towards the evolution of a personalized body of work that is culturally, theoretically and historically informed. We will be examining key issues surrounding the digital image in contemporary society, led through a combination of class lectures, readings, group discussions, film screenings, gallery visits and class critiquess. Students will further their knowledge of image control and manipulation, retouching and collage, advanced color management; become familiar with high-end camera and lighting equipment and develop professional printing skills. In addition to learning these advanced imaging practices, this course will also emphasize an investigation of critical thought surrounding contemporary visual culture and the role of digital media in the creation of art.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5027 Reconfiguring Portraiture
As methods of representation are constantly shifting, one thing is clear - the photographic portrait is not what is used to be. Exploring both traditional and contemporary methods of portraiture, this class will uncover and discuss the ways in which we perceive each other in imagery, both as individuals and as groups. Throughout the semester, we will consider how portraits deal with truth, physical absence, the gaze, cultural embodiment, voyeurism and the digital persona. This course will build on the combination of perception, technology, and practice. Throughout the semester, students will advance by learning lighting techniques and strategies of presentation - as these core skills will become tools in the execution of project concepts. In tandem with each project, students will encounter and discuss a wide array of photography and writings from the past to the present, in an effort to understand the meanings and psychological effects of freezing the human image in time
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5710 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5029 Photography & Fashion
Since the invention of photography, the fashion industry has been one of the cornerstones of creative expression, innovation and visionary provocation. Contemporary fashion photography has continued to attract a leading group of image-makers that continue the tradition of creating artwork that not only is being published in cutting edge magazines such as V, Another Magazine and Citizen K, but also are exhibiting their work in various galleries and museums around the world. This course is designed for students who are interested in creating contemporary fashion images through specific assignments that define the process: lighting in studio or location, working with fashion designers, stylists, models, hair/ make up artists, and the application of a variety of post production techniques, via Photoshop. The class will explore modern constructs that define the importance of branding, marketing, advertising and the relationship of fashion photography in contemporary art and culture today.
Prerequisite: FNAR 5710 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5030 Sachs Research: Imaginary Modernisms
Over the course of the 2017-2018 school year, but officially as Spring 2018, credited course, I am inviting a group of 6-8 MFA students to participate as a group in a project focused on research, dialogue and the essential "possibilities" available to any artist to participate in the constant rewriting and redefining of art history. Students will participate in a body of research and readings leading to my upcoming participation in Rice University's Campbell Lecture Series in March 2018 and an associated publication with the University of Chicago Press. The lectures are divided into three distinct parts over three nights, all of which focus on alternate approaches to modernism. Part I investigates the "Literary" theory of architecture by Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart. Part II is concerned with the painting practices of Hilma af Klint and Blinky Palermo. And Part III discusses the music of Sun Ra and Pauline Oliveros. Students participating in Imaginary Modernisms will meet and work with me in a series of scheduled and structured activities. beginning with a visit to Philadelphia in November for personal studio visits with each of the 6-8 students, not as a critique but to get to know you and your work a bit. Participation includes three trips to New York,each for two days. These 2-day trips will each involve one day at my studio in Brooklyn, to discuss the readings and research, as well as to observe the development of ongoing sculptural artworks being created in my studio, and a second day of self-guided visits to exhibitions and performances that I will suggest, with an optional meeting together for lunch or dinner. Readings for these meetings will be sent to you in advance of trip. Participating students should be prepared to read various texts along with me for the 5 month project duration. This is an essential part of the project and this should be a pleasurable process, so those do not have time to add a medium amount of reading to their schedules, followed by group discussion, should probably not apply. The only other requirement will be preparing for an exchange with undergraduate students at Rice University in March. For our trip to Houston in March, there will be three nights of lectures, one participatory performance, one exhibition opening reception, plus visits and interaction with curators at the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Core Program (an important option for MFA students post graduation.)
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5031 Photograhy and Fiction
In spite of photography's traditional relationship with fact, the medium has been a vehicle for fiction since the very beginning. Fiction and photography encompass a broad range of meanings,from elaborately staging and performing for the camera, to manipulations using digital technology such as Photoshop to construct the work. This class will examine and trace the history of manipulated photography while paying special attention to the complex negotiations between the decisive moment, the constructed tableau, and the digitally manipulated image. There will be a combination of class lectures, studio projects, assigned readings, visiting artists, film screenings, field trips, and class critiques.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 1030 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5032 Counter the Land: Photography and the Landscape
Starting with the representaion of landscape in painting in the early 1800s, the course will then move through Pictorialsim and the Modernist movement in photography. Revisiting the later half of the 20th century, we will begin to consider the shifting practices of landscape and the ways it has been photographically depicted up to the present. Collaborating with the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, students will begin their photographic exploration with the work of Andrea Wyeth and the landscape of the Brandywine Valley. As we consider Wyeth, the imges of James Welling will aslo be introduced. Credited for pioneering new forms of representation in photography in the 1970s, Welling also revisited the work of Wyeth from 2010-2015, and committed to a fresh (and challenging) look at tradition. Working with imagery and text, this class will also touch on conceptual art, the New Topographics, and postmodernism. Through these various concentrations, students will consider and counter the traditions that they are already familiar with, while creating work based on issues of the landscape today. Questions about meaning, politics, social critique, land rights, technology and methods of presentaion will be encouraged and explored throughout the course.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 5710 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5033 Dispersive Lens
This studio course will explore the nexus between photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and the moving image. The course is informed by the printed image, as students will explore how photography can encourage thinking in other mediums, in addition to how other mediums can influence the making of photography. When does an abstract painting appear more like a photograph? How can a photograph suggest ways to make a video? Can a sculpture exist as a photograph? A variety of assignments will expose students to interdisciplinary approaches addressing these questions and more. Class projects will be supported by regular slide lectures, group critiques, and readings examining modern and contemporary artists and practices.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5710 OR FNAR 6400 OR FNAR 6610
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5034 Photography Studio Abroad
This Traveling Studio is offered every other spring term to upper level photography & related media students. It is a cross-cultural visual investigation, exploring the contradictions and significance of the chosen city. This course incorporates multi-disciplinary research in preparation for the trip; exploring various fields of knowledge production such as art, history, social sciences, markets and governance. Class discussion, readings and individual research will be focused towards the development of each student's photo/media project, which will be realized while abroad. After returning to Philadelphia, students will develop and refine their work; the remaining classes will emphasize critique, editing, printing and presentation options. The final projects will be included in a group exhibition at the end of the semester. Admission to the course is on a competitive basis.
Spring, even numbered years only
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 2180
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5035 The Body and Photography
The last few decades have introduced dramatic changes in the way we interact with each other, the way we communicate, the way we date, watch porn, etc. Ethical concerns have arisen with scientific advances such as stem cell research, fertility drugs, Botox, cloning and erectile dysfunction. This studio course will investigate the myriad ways in which the corporeal is addressed and manipulated in contemporary art, science, religion, pop culture and media. Students will develop photographic projects related to updated questions concerning gender, sexuality and social issues. Lectures, readings and class discussion will focus and inform their individual work.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5036 Drawing Investigations
Drawing is a fundamental means of visualization and a hub for thinking, constructing, and engaging in a wide variety of creative activities and problemsolving. This studio class explores drawing in both its traditional and contemporary forms. The projects are designed to help students in all disciplines find ways express and clarify their ideas through the process of drawing. The semester begins with the refinement of perceptual skills acquired in Drawing I, while encouraging experimentation through the introduction of color, abstract agendas, conceptual problem solving, and collaborative exercises, as well as new materials, techniques and large format drawings. Particular attention is given to ways to conduct visual research in the development of personal imagery. Assignments are thematic or conceptually based with ample opportunity for individual approaches to media, subject, scale and process. The goal is to stregnthen facility, develop clarity in intent and expand expression. Attention is paid to the development of perceptual sensitivity, methods of imagage construction, and the processes of synthesis and transformation in order tocommunicate ideas through visual means. Recommended for students in all areas.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5038 Painting II
Painting II presents an ongoing exploration of the techniques, problems and poetics of painting, the nuances of the painting language, and the development of a personal direction. A wide variety of problems will address such issues as color, composition, and the development of imagery, process, and content. Students are expected to improve in technical handling of paints and move towards developing personal modes of seeing, interpreting, and thinking for themselves. This course introduces different topics, strategies and individual challenges each semester, so it may be repeated with advanced course numbers.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5310
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5040 Painting Studio
Painting Studio IV focuses on continuing the student's exploration of techniques, problems, and poetics of painting, the nuances of the painting language, and the development of a personal direction. While students may choose to work on assigned projects (either in consultation with the instructoror following the projects that the Painting II/III students may be involved in), the emphasis is on the investigation of the student's own sensibility. Students will be expected to engage in ongoing critical analysis of their own practices and assumptions.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230 AND FNAR 5330
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5041 Interdisciplinary Studio: Sites of Convergence and Hybridity
This course takes an experimental multimedia approach to investigating some of the boundaries in contemporary art making practices. Painting, photography, video, design and sculpture intersect, overlap, and converge in complicated ways. Projects will be designed to explore hybrid forms, collage, space/ installation, and color through a variety of strategic and conceptual proposals as students work towards unique ways of expanding their own work. Weekly readings, critiques, and presentations will be integrated with studio projects. This studio/seminar is appropriate for students at all levels and from all areas of Fine Arts and Design.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5230 OR FNAR 5450 OR FNAR 6400 OR FNAR 5310 OR FNAR 6360
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5043 Printmaking: Etching
The class will challenge the possibilities of experimental drawing and ways of creating incisions and textures using copper plates as the matrix, which then will be printed on paper and other materials. The class offers full technical and historical description of each individual process: Dry Point, Etching, Hard ground, Soft Ground, Aquatint, Shine Cole', Spit-Biting, Sugar Lift, Color Printing and Viscosity printing.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5044 Printmaking: Screen Printing
This course is an introduction to technical skills and investigative processes in screen printing and relief and examines methods for combining digital technology with traditional print media. The course introduces students to several contemporary applications of silkscreen and relief printmaking including techniques in multi-color printing, photo-based silkscreening, digital printing, woodcut, linocut, and letterpress. Demonstrations include photo and image manipulation, color separating and output techniques, hand carving and printing, as well as drawing and collage. Both traditional and experimental approaches are explored and encouraged and technical and conceptual skills are developed through discussions and critiques.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5045 Printmaking & Publications: Intro to Independent Publishing and Artists' Publications
This course introduces students to independent publishing and artists' publications through print methods in letterpress, Risograph, and Xerox. The class will focus on the self-published artists' zine/book as an affordable, accessible, and easily reproducible format for exploring ideas, disseminating artists' work, and collaborating across disciplines. Students will learn a range of skills, including techniques in both mechanized and hand-pulled forms of printed media (Risograph, copy machine, Vandercook letterpress); short- run editions and binding; design and layout; pre-press and print production; and the web as it relates to and supports independent and democratic modes of distribution. Students will learn about and become acquainted with some of the most significant independent publishers working today and throughout history. Students will leave class having completed three individual projects: a 16-page booklet/zine; a carefully considered online publication, and a final collaborative book designed, developed and published as a class. The course commences with a field trip to New York City's Printed Matter, one of the oldest and most important nonprofit facilities dedicated to the promotion of artists' books, where students will be encouraged to submit a publication by semester's end.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5047 Advanced Sculpture: Installation & Intervention
In this course students will create sculptural installations and spatial interventions that explore site specificity and architectural environments. A range of traditional sculptural materials and techniques will be investigated along with more ephemeral interventions in space such as sound, light, and projection. Through lectures, readings, and critiques, students will explore the history of installation and interactive sculptural work and develop self-directed projects that interrogate historical, social, and psychological conditions of the built environment.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 2310
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5048 Nonhuman Photography
Our culture is increasingly made up of nonhuman actors. Facial recognition algorithms spend more hours "seeing" in a day than humans; drones equipped with visual sensors conduct our warfare; voice chat bots call businesses and make appointments for us. Meanwhile, humans conduct labor that we view as the work of bots: posting disinformation for political gain, or mass-producing children's YouTube videos for ad revenue. As objects begin to see and think, how can we understand the role of human agency and the possibilities (or lack thereof) for artistic expression in this space? What does the future of art look like when more photographs are taken as surveillance than by individuals, or when important cultural producers are nonhuman intelligences? In Nonhuman Photography, we will attempt to interrogate these ideas from an artist's perspective, approaching nonhuman agents and the various components that comprise them both as tools for studio work and as generative entities in their own right. Over the course of the semester we will read and discuss these issues extensively, while engaging in studio projects in a variety of media. While the course bears the title "photography", we will find that many of these tools will be non-photographic or para-photographic, and as a result many of our studio projects will be interdisciplinary. This course takes its name from Joanna Zylinska's Nonhuman Photographty, parts of which we will examine over the cousre of the semster.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 6610 OR FNAR 5710 OR FNAR 6400
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5049 Machine for Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image
Architecture's relationship with cinema was established with the very first motion picture. In Sortie de l'usine Lumiere de Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumiere we see a didactic presentation of film titles as workers from the Lumiere brother's factory stream forth from its interior at days end. In many ways the context of the film is its subject as well. The title of the class plays on Le Corbusier's maxim that architecture is machine for living and perhaps cinema is simply a machine for helping us understand the vast construct of our built environment. A device, which allows us to imagine even greater follies or more importantly to think critically about architecture's relationship with and impact on society. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. Students will produce their own film and we will look at films produced by a range of practioners: From architects speculating on the nature of and use of public space and urban development to documentarians researching the pathologies of neo-liberalism and its effect on the privatization of space. We will also look at the work of artists who engage with the poetics of space and who unpack the conflicted legacies of the built environment.
Spring
Prerequisite: FNAR 5004
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5050 A Virus in the Culture: Social Critique in Media Arts
In order to change the world, we must first learn how to infect it. A Virus in the Culture is a studio class that examines and generates various forms of media resistance to dominant hegemonic systems of power and control. Using filmmaking, publication design and interactive media we'll think through and develop responses to some of the most pressing issues facing us today. We'll look at historical models from the agitprop design work of Gee Vaucher for Anarcho-punk band Crass to Chris Marker's film Le Fond de L'Air Est Rouge, a radical analysis of global social and political turmoil in the late 60s and early 70s. We'll also look at experimental contemporary design firms like Metahaven who question the role of designers and filmmakers today - Bypassing the power dynamics of clients and briefs they took it upon themselves to create a graphic identity for WikiLeaks. Each example broadens the definition and possibilities of practice to create a more porous engagement with audiences and users while informing the practice of social critique today. Considering a diverse range of topics from education policy, to the rights of environmental refugees, we'll use the class to workshop a singular comprehensive project that targets researches and responds to a specific contested position. The outcome of which will be a class produced short film, publication and website that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of our subject. This class is co-taught by David Hartt, an artist and filmmaker along with graphic designer, Mark Owens. Reading, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. While the focus of this course is not technical, prior knowledge of design programs, camera functions, and post-production techniques is expected.
Fall
Prerequisite: FNAR 6610
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5054 The Chinese Body and Spatial Consumption in Chinatown
This course looks at representations of the Chinese (and Asian body) since the Limehouse district in East London and the advent of Chinese contract laborers to the Americas in the 19th century. The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning, literature and later in cinema. Chinatowns are ultimately a product of racism. They were created as a political and social support system for newly arrived Chinese immigrants. While Chinese laborers arrived into the United States in 1840 and in significant numbers into Canada about 1860, Chinese contract workers were encouraged to immigrate to the Americas as an inexpensive source of labor, especially after the end of the American Civil War. Industrial leaders in America, Canada and elsewhere in the Americas (Mexico, Cuba, Peru, etc) saw the arrival of Chinese workers as a victory for commercial interests. However, the celebration was short-lived, as anti-Chinese sentiment quickly transformed into anti-Chinese hysteria. Rather than attacking the vested interests that exploit foreign labor as embodied by the Chinese worker, racist unions with the cooperation of civic leaders and the police deemed it safer to burn Chinatowns than capitalist property. Deeply under-studied to this day is the number of mass murders of Chinese workers in the 19th century by anti-Chinese thugs. This seminar will focus in on how the body of the Chinese (and Asian) was imagined and reimagined multiple times from the middle of the 19th century to today.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5055 Tiananmen Square: A Case Study for Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture
This course takes as its subject the systems of representation and design that have historically and presently operate in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. There have been several incarnations of Tiananmen Square since its original form in 1651. During Imperial times and through the period of foreign legations, the square was once surrounded by walls and gates, creating a city within a city. With the advent of the Republic of China established on January 1, 1912, much of the enclosures were removed, opening up for public use previously restricted imperial areas. After the Communist Revolution in 1949, planning was afoot to enlarge the square. With its enlargement completed in 1958, the square expanded its footprint by four-fold, making it one of the largest public squares in the world. The enlarged and remodeled square coincided with the completion of the massive Monument to the People's Heroes. In 1976, a large mausoleum containing the preserved body of Mao Zedong was built near the site of the former Gate of China, further increasing the size of the square. In the 1990s, the building of the National Grand Theatre and expansion of the National Museum on grounds contiguous to the square necessitated further alterations to both the Eastern and Western skirts of the square. In recent years, there have been a widening debate regarding the transformation of the concrete heavy and by and large featureless square into a green space. Today, Tiananmen Square holds sacrosanct status to the Communist revolution of 1949, designed more for military parades and massive public rallies than public space repose. In a city that has few green spaces, such a verdant transformation in the heart of the Chinese capital would signal a radical symbolic deviation to China's development-first guiding principles. The square fronts Tiananmen Gate and the Forbidden City and is situated at the intersection of the historical east-west and north- south axes. Chang'An Avenue, important for military processions, separates the square from Tiananmen Gate and is considered the most important thoroughfare in the Capital and the path of the east west number one subway line. The entirety of the Tiananmen Square area is marked by ideology and political prominence, often confusingly. Tiananmen Tower, functions as a conflation of monumental facade with political embodiment. This course will focus on imagined interventions through public art and landscape design within Tiananmen Square and its contiguous areas. It is a studio practice course with a significant seminar component that will include lectures and readings relating to issues of public space and urban design in contemporary China. The course will also study the development of contemporary art in China. The tragic events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 represented a turning point in terms of a generation of Western exiled Chinese artists and curators including Hou Hanru, Chen Zhen, Xu Min, Huang Yong Ping and Yan Pei Ming among many others. The class will study the strategies deployed by these so- called First Generation of Chinese artists. Making use of their double identity as traditionally taught Chinese artist residing in the West, their art offered a pointed critique of both China and the West. The course will include a trip to Beijing.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5056 Across Forms: Art and Writing
What if a poem spoke from inside a photograph? What if a sculpture unfurled a political manifesto? What if a story wasn't just like a dance, but was a dance-or a key component of a video, drawing, performance, or painting? In this course, artists and writers will develop new works that integrate the forms, materials, and concerns of both art and writing. Many artists employ writing in their practices, but may not look at the texts they create as writing. And many writers have practices that go beyond the page and deserve attention as art. This course will employ critique and workshop, pedagogic methodologies from art and writing respectively, to support and interrogate cross- pollination between writing and art practices. Additionally, the course will will examine a field of artists and writers who are working with intersections between art and writing to create dynamic new ways of seeing, reading, and experiencing.
Fall
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 3080
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5057 Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities. We will engage the work of creative practitioners who are mapping new relationships between art and social justice and directly impacting individual and communal well-being. In so doing, the course seeks to challenge traditional constructions of public health, which often isolate individual histories from their social life and their relation to families, communities, and geographies. Readings will build upon disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social policy. Requirements include weekly readings, class participation, and a collaborative final project. The course will meet in the Health Ecologies Lab at Slought Foundation, an arts organization on campus.
Spring
Also Offered As: SWRK 7170
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 3090
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5058 Paris Modern: Spiral City
Paris has been shaped by a mixture of organic development, which is still today perceptible in the "snail" pattern of its arrondissements whose numbers, from 1 to 20, coil around a central island several times so as to exemplify a "spiral city," and of the violent cuts, interruptions and sudden transformations that again and again forced it to catch up with modern times, the most visible of which was Baron Haussmann's destruction of medieval sections of the city to make room for huge boulevards. Thus Parisian modernism has always consisted in a negotiation between the old and the new, and a specific meaning of modernity allegorized for Louis Aragon, the Surrealists and Walter Benjamin consisted in old-fashioned arcades built in the middle of the 19th century and obsolete by the time they turned into icons of Paris. The aim of the class will be to provide conceptual and pragmatic (visual, experiential) links between a number of texts, theories and films deploying various concepts of the modern in Paris, with a guided tour of the main places discussed. The course that Professors Jean Michel Rabate (English) and Ken Lum (Fine Arts) will lead studies Paris as a work of science-fiction where its many futures are embedded in its many pasts, where discontinuity is a continuous process and where the curving line of the snail's shell is a line of ceaseless curling resulting in a perennial oscillation where an outside converts into an inside and an inside then converts to an outside. The course will travel to Paris over spring break to get an in-depth look at the topics discussed in class.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5059 Public Art and Issues of Spatial Production
The French social philosopher Michel de Certeau upset the common understanding of the relationship between space and place by elevating space as practice place. By this, he meant that place is but a set of geo-physical particularities that has no dynamic meaning unless activated through social engagement so that space is produced. Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression. Historical markers play a somewhat different role by calling attention to lost or negative histories, albeit most often vetted through the language of tourism factoids. This course will examine the discursive issues at play in respect to art and markers, particularly for Philadelphia. Additionally, important public art works from around the world will be examined. The course will also include the occasional visit of several key works downtown in which the question of what can and cannot said will be pondered.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5061 Mystics & Visionaries: Arts and Other Ways of Knowing
As a pioneer of abstraction in the early 1900's, Hilma Af Klint channeled a complex and highly original body of abstract symbolic work in secrecy. Using the upcoming Hilma Af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim as a focus and departure point, this course will explore the ways in which artists have accessed alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and embodying non-visible realities as a source for their work. Accessing spiritual realms has been the subject of early European Modernisms investigations into Theosophy and Anthroposophy, as well as the primary intention of Tibetan Thangkas and Indian Tantra paintings. Postmodernism's crisis of belief and skepticism generated a cultural situation wherein the subject of spirituality was marginalized, ridiculed as anti- intellectual, and in disgrace. The Hilma Af Klint exhibition and surge of interest in her work signifies a new moment, where questions about consciousness and the nature of reality are being addressed with renewed vigor. How do we create space in a technology driven world for experiences that attempt to align the viewer/maker with the contemplative realm, heightened states of consciousness, or transcendence? We will examine a wide field of artists in an attempt to understand the possibilities of the "spiritual" in art and contemporary culture. This seminar will engage in readings, lectures, discussions, projects, and field trips. This course is appropriate for both grad and undergrad, art majors and non-majors alike.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5062 Civic Studio
Civic Studio is an engaged research course that explores significant theories, methods, and practices of public and socially-engaged artwork. Students draw from arts- and place-based modes of inquiry toward collaborative projects with fellow classmates, artists, and organizations in Philadelphia and beyond, while pursuing semester-long individual projects that build on their own independent interests and pursuits. Each semester, students work with and as embedded practicioners in exhibtions, installations, research projects, and other artistic platforms throughout the city. In turn, through readings, site visits, and site-specific work, students gain creative and critical capaticy for producing their own final projects. Through Civic Studio students are able to reflect upon and practice public work with artistic, scholarly, and civic aims.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5063 Monument Lab: Praxis Approaches to Socially-Engaged Public Art
What makes an exceptional socially-engaged public artwork or project? For those who practice in the field, the question invites careful consideration of aesthetics, process, participation, staging, and interpretation. Across the better part of the last decade, this line of inquiry has fueled the work of Monument Lab, a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. With deep roots and close ties to the Department of Fine Arts's Center for Public Art and Space, and methods interanimating contemporary art and pedagogy, Monument Lab works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. The Monument Lab course in Fine Arts explores the theoretical study and practical applications of public art. The course operates as a socially-engaged "civic studio" to engage case studies, debate key issues in the field, meet with artists and practitioners, conduct site and studio visits, and practice direct methods for producing individual and collaborative public projects. Focusing on the intersection of theory and practice, the praxis course highlights engaged methods piloted by Monument Lab in citywide exhibitions and special projects, especially to focus on themes and models for participation, public engagement, co-creation, curation, temporary installation, and socially engaged art-making. Each student will embark on a semester-long independent project, as well as participate in a group initiative centered on a current Monument Lab project in Philadelphia to gain experience in the field of socially-engaged public art.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5064 Is This Really Happening? Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons
This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo. Scholars working across Performance Studies and Black Studies importantly expanded critical discourse around performance to address the entanglement of the medium with physical, psychic, spatial and temporal inhabitations of violence and power. Generating copious genealogies of embodied resistance, this scholarship instigates a complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective on intersections between art and life, performance and politics. The class hosts a series of public lectures, presentations and performances by visual artists, choreographers, theater artists, composers/musicians, performers, curators and activists engaged with the social and political moment. Presentations will be open to the public with students in the course developing in-depth research into the work of each visiting artist/performer/presenter to engage the larger context of each visitor's scholarship and/or practice through readings, discussion and in-class presentations. This course is open to all interested students. No prior prerequisties or experience with performance or the performing arts is necessary.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5065 Queer Imaginings
Queer is a fluid, unfixed and undefinable space offering endless utopian possibilities & potentials concerning gender, sexuality, personal autonomy and agency. Queer Imaginings is a forum for the reimagining of Queer representation/s. This course provides a safe space to mine, critique and analyze Queer imagery, both historical & contemporary. We will explore the ways in which Queerness is approached, represented & manipulated in pop culture, politics, society and the media. Students enrolled in this studio/seminar course will partake in discussions and research pertaining to Queer images and their intersections with race, trans/non-binary-equity, feminism, disability & class structure. These complex subjects will inspire respectful debate throughout the course, and most importantly, generate robust discussion about the work students create. Prompted through select readings and visual presentations, students will be guided to research, analyze and create artworks, which are inspired by various topics related to Queerness. A special emphasis will be placed upon issues arising around visibility, erasure & inclusivity. This forum offers a space to reexamine, research and propose new representations of Queerness. This is primarily a lens-based course with expansive possibilities (interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary)
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5066 Advanced Projects in Animation
This course will focus on developing and producing projects that utilize advanced approaches to 2D and 3D computer animation. We will engage emerging techniques of visualization such as data-driven animation, algorithmic animation, working in hybrid forms of stop-motion, hand-drawn and 3D computer animation, working with dynamic physical simulations, rigging animated characters, or structures. The meeting pattern of the course will enable members to complete ambitious independent or group based animation projects and share the methods that they develop along the way.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5067 Experimental Clay
In this course students will examine and explore the sculptural foundations of clay in the world of contemporary art and design, by experimenting with its sculptural materiality, as a means to develop ideas in large-scale and unconventional ways. Through investigative and conceptually driven projects, students will use clay and other non-traditional materials to make modular structures that incorporate advanced mold-making, casting, and advanced building techniques to develop their own artistic voice through the expansive medium of clay.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5068 Film Sound: History, Aesthetics and Subversion
Sound and Image as experienced in the cinema, are not divisible. One perception influences the other, and transforms it. While a preexisting harmony between these two senses may exist, its conventions are subject to manipulation and the whims of subversion. Film Sound tracks the technological and aesthetic history of sound for film including psychoacoustics, dialogue, music, sound fx and audio's gradual and triumphant march towards fidelity, stereo and surround sound. This lecture course, through an historical and pedagogical romp loaded with examples throughout film history and visits by lauded audio professionals from the film world, seeks to instruct students to engage in the process of sound perception, gaining an appreciation for the art of sound as it relates to the varied phenomenological dimensions of that unique audio-visual encounter we call movies.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5120 Bodies Bodies Bodies: An Introduction to Performance Art
Theater, Dance, Music, Opera, Film, Reality Television, Installation, Intervention, Social Encounters, Protests, Lectures, Seminars…what are the edges and borders of what we call “performance”? What, exactly, makes something “performance art” a “performance” or “performative”? How does an artist employ time, space, site, and audience to create a performance work? What do we mean when we talk about “the body”? In this course, we’ll delve into a survey and practice of making performance. This course is intended to introduce students of various disciplines to the central components of performance art. Following a hybridized module, the class will present students with a cursory introduction to a history of performance art; its theoretical framings and critical inquiries and various approaches to making, through lecture, seminar, and in-class performance workshops. This introduction will invite students to make their own performance work using a variety of techniques and frameworks discovered through workshops, readings, and viewings of work by feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial artists and theorists. Through solo and collective exercises in movement, installation, speech, sound, drama, and choreography, we will learn the basic tools of making a performance composition that challenges the boundaries of traditional dance and theater (while also welcoming any traditional training at one’s disposal.) Throughout the semester, students will attend performances and screenings, guest artist lectures, performance workshops, and present a final performance project utilizing personal research, skills, and interests discovered through our weekly sessions.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 1120
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5180 Paris Modern: Spiral City
Paris has been shaped by a mixture of organic development, which is still today perceptible in the "snail" pattern of its arrondissements whose numbers, from 1 to 20, coil around a central island several times so as to exemplify a "spiral city," and of the violent cuts, interruptions and sudden transformations that again and again forced it to catch up with modern times, the most visible of which was Baron Haussmann's destruction of medieval sections of the city to make room for huge boulevards. Thus Parisian modernism has always consisted in a negotiation between the old and the new, and a specific meaning of modernity allegorized for Louis Aragon, the Surrealists and Walter Benjamin consisted in old-fashioned arcades built in the middle of the 19th century and obsolete by the time they turned into icons of Paris. The aim of the class will be to provide conceptual and pragmatic (visual, experiential) links between a number of texts, theories and films deploying various concepts of the modern in Paris, with a guided tour of the main places discussed. The course that Professors Jean Michel Rabate (English) and Ken Lum (Fine Arts) will lead studies Paris as a work of science-fiction where its many futures are embedded in its many pasts, where discontinuity is a continuous process and where the curving line of the snail's shell is a line of ceaseless curling resulting in a perennial oscillation where an outside converts into an inside and an inside then converts to an outside. The course will travel to Paris over spring break to get an in-depth look at the topics discussed in class.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5410 if night is a weed and day grows less
If Night Is A Weed And Day Grows Less The title of this class posits a shift in balance: of the natural order, of the built environment, of the body politic, of perception. The result is a creeping entropy that can either be embraced or redirected. Taking a morphological approach to image making students can use any variety of televisual image capture technologies. From analog to digital, satellite imagery to scanner. Time arrested or accelerated. Night for day and weeds for gardens, the work produced should ask us to slow down and reassess the objectives of form, language, image and place, to create new prototypes for engagement and new modes of understanding our environment and perhaps even to reinvent the conventions of landscape as a genre. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. Each student is required to complete a visual essay that addresses these themes using image capture technologies.
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 2410
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5750 Graduate Drawing Seminar
This seminar examines the essential nature drawing has in an artist's process. Direct visual perception, self-referential mark making, the viability of space and understanding it, and drawing from one's own work are some of the drawing experiences encountered in the course. There are regular critiques and discussions based on the work and readings.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5760 Critical Issues Seminar
This seminar investigates issues concerning visual artists. Part one begins with Plato and Kant and progresses through a history of ideas in art, exploring the questions which concern artists today, including Modernism, post-modernism, abstraction and representation, appropriation, context, art and politics, identity, and the artist's relationship to these subjects. Part two of the course will focus on current texts in contemporary art, the current dialogue(s), and issues specific to our time and place as artists. The seminar engages contemporary issues in a spirit of curiosity and critique, and relates them to our studio practice.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5940 Graduate Photography Seminar
This seminar will examine contemporary issues in photography from the point of view of the practicing artist. Students will meet with visiting critics during the semester, the course will also include student presentations, weekly discussions and group critiques, visits to artists' studios and gallery and museum exhibitions. Texts for the seminar will be drawn from contemporary critical theory in art, philosophy, history and popular culture. Required for all graduate photographers.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 5980 Grad Sculpture Seminar
Sculpture instructor (to be announced) will lead this studio course based on improvisational approaches to developing individually made sculptural works, as well as works that are made in collaboration with others. As in Music or Theater, these works involve the collaboration of others, yet they are equally initiated by small thoughts, and carry those thoughts into a more public and interactive format of installation.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 6010 Graduate Studio III
Second year studio for MFA students' core pursuit of self-directed interdisciplinary problems that contribute to one or more of the visual arts disciplines.
Fall
1-2 Course Units
FNAR 6020 Graduate Studio IV
Second year studio for MFA students' core pursuit of self-directed interdisciplinary problems that contribute to one or more of the visual art disciplines.
Spring
1-2 Course Units
FNAR 6050 Contemporary Art Seminar
This course focuses on contemporary art. Open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5960
1 Course Unit
FNAR 6110 Don't Forget: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Memory in the Contemporary City
What role do history and memory play in processes of community building? Do they promote solidarity, inflame division, or both? What are the relationships between a city's built environment, commemorative landscape, and the circumstances that stimulate, or hinder, the growth of community? In this seminar students will tackle these questions in an effort to uncover some of the ways in which public space, memory, and community intersect. Through a series of case studies and texts we will examine the controversies, challenges, and community impact of commemorative projects in cities both in the U.S. and abroad. Each week we will focus on one city/region, theme, or commemorative project, and students will study design strategies, processes of development and construction, and theoretical concerns surrounding the role of memory and history in the public space. Drawing on discourse from art, architecture, urbanism, history, and preservation studies, this course brings these fields together in an effort to understand how communities can be strengthened through an engagement with, and examination of the past. For the final project, students will research a commemorative dilemma in a city of their choice, engaging with real-life debates and procedural processes to develop a more inclusive alternative to the status quo.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 6400 Teaching Artist Practicum
Teaching Artist Practicum supports artists engaging in education work, through the development of liberatory, expansive and justice-oriented teaching outlooks and approaches. Students in this course will gain context around forms of arts education through the lens of critical pedagogy. This course supports current/upcoming classroom experiences of participants (TA-ships and teaching appointments), and helps students prepare for teaching opportunities. This course will include readings/responses, creative and practical exercises, collaborative experiences, presentations, and a final project. This course is geared towards graduate students who are artists/cultural producers looking to teach in higher education, adult, community and young-adult (teen) learning, and alternative venues. Undergraduates may enroll with permission of the instructor.
1 Course Unit
FNAR 6664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices
This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniues that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe e Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. e semester will culminate in students creating their own short lm content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 6664, CIMS 6664
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3664
1 Course Unit
FNAR 6690 Graduate Video Studio
Through a series of studio projects, this course focuses on the conceptualization and production of time-based works of art. A seminar component of the course reviews contemporary examples of media based art and film. A studio component of the course introduces production techniques including lighting, cinematography, audio, editing, mastering projects, and installing audio-visual works in site-specific locations or gallery spaces.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7010 Graduate Critique I
This course is designed to introduce students to different pedagogical methodologies relating to the critical examination of works of art as well as to assist students in terms of speaking about their own work. Graduate critique provides a democratic and interactive forum for the voicing of opinion in an informed context. 1st year MFA students only.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7020 Graduate Critique II
Graduate Critique is designed to introduce students to different pedagogical methodogies relating to the citical examination of works of art as well as to assist students in terns of speaking about their own work. This course provides a democratic and interactive forum for the voicing of opinion in an informed context. This course is required for MFA students in the 2nd semester of the program.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7030 Graduate Critique III
This course is designed to introduce students to different pedagogical methodologies relating to the critical examination of works of art as well as to assist students in terms of speaking about their own work. Graduate critique provides a democratic and interactive forum for the voicing of opinion in an informed context. 2nd year MFA students only.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7040 Graduate Critique IV
Graduate Critique is designed to introduce students to different pedagogical methodologies relating to the critical examination of works of art as well as to assist students in terms of speaking about their own work. This course provides a democratic and interactive forum for the voicing of opinion in an informed context. This course is required for MFA students in the fourth semester of the program.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7120 Visual Epistemologies for Creative Practices
In this joint seminar between Architecture and Fine Arts, we investigate the alternative modes of diagrammatic thinking that are influencing art and design disciplines. The course provides a historical perspective on the evolution of visual epistemologies from late 1950s and reviews its current state from the lens of contemporary representation theory, computation, fabrication and information technologies. The goal is to gain both theoretical and hands-on experience with the contemporary diagramming techniques in order to advance both designs and the thinking behind them.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 7200 Topics in Representation
In these advanced representation courses the work extends to new ways of documenting and seeing landscape. These courses are open to all interested School of Design students who have previous drawing experience or have taken foundation studios. Recent topics have been: Traces and Inscriptions (spring 2013), instructors: Anuradha Mathur, Matthew Neff; Landscape Representation (fall annually),instructors: Valerio Morabito; Landscape Drawing (spring annually), instructor: Laurie Olin; Landscape Drawing (spring 2008), instructors: David Gouverneur, Trevor Lee; Shifting Landscapes: A Workshop in Representation (spring 2005, 2004), instructor: Anuradha Mathur; and The Agile Pencil and Its Constructs (spring 2004) instructor: Mei Wu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 8010 Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
Critical Issues in Contemporary Arts is a graduate level seminar course for fine arts majors and graduate students. Offering two to three sections each semester, standing faculty will rotate topics based around critical issues in contemporary art including Defense Against the Dark Arts and Perspectives in Art: A Nomadic Approach. Please see the PennMFA website for specific section descriptions. Enrollment may be granted to undergraduate fine art students with the persmission of the professor.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 8020 Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
Critical Issues in Contemporary Arts II is a graduate level seminar course for fine arts graduate students in their second semester. Offering two to three topic based sections each semester, standing faculty will rotate topics based about critical issues in contemporary art. Previously offered sections include Defense Against the Dark Ages and Perspectives in Art: A Nomadic Approach. Please see the PennMFA website for specific descriptions each semester. Enrollment may be granted to undergraduate fine arts students with permission of the professor.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 8030 Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
Critical Issues in Contemporary Arts is a graduate level seminar course for fine arts majors and graduate students. Offering two to three sections each semester, standing faculty will rotate topics based around critical issues in contemporary art including Defense Against the Dark Arts and Perspectives in Art: A Nomadic Approach. Please see the PennMFA website for specific section descriptions. Enrollment may be granted to undergraduate fine art students with the persmission of the professor.
Fall
1 Course Unit
FNAR 8040 Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
Critical Issues in Contemporary Arts IV is a gradate level seminar for fine arts graduate students in their fourth semester. Offering two to three topic based sections each semester, standing faculty will rotate topics based around ciritcal issues in contemporary art. Previously offered sections include Defense Against the Dark Ages and Perspectives in Art: A Nomadic Approach. Please see the PennMFA website for specific section descriptions each semester. Enrollment may be granted to undergraduate fine art students with permission of the professor.
Spring
1 Course Unit
FNAR 9999 Independent Study
Graduate Fine Arts independent study course for students pursuing advanced, specialized, indecently-driven course work. This course must be taught by a full-time faculty member.
0.5-2 Course Units