ART 326 - Materials, Materiality, Meaning

3 Credit(s) | Lecture |
Course can be counted for credit once

Description:
In this course, students will examine the technical processes employed when using paints and pigments, marbles, metals, and wood, in conjunction with the meanings attached to those materials and processes. We will investigate how notions of natural philosophy, religion, matter, technical work and labor, the creative act, and the artistic mediums–painting and sculpture in particular–informed the self-fashioning of artists and their identity. This “material turn” has been important–and successful–for how it opens the field to multiple issues and areas of study likely to remain consequential for the foreseeable future, among which: gender and sexuality (materials, and matter itself, often have been gendered); distinctions or hierarchies of class and labor (as mechanical labor, the visual arts were held in low esteem historically); notions of local, national, or ethnic identities (mediums and materials, even on a mineralogical basis, took on connotations of place-hood). The primary goals of the course are to broaden students’ understanding of artistic mediums and their development through history, and to deepen their own thinking about the intertwined mental and material processes of art-making. The course would be offered on a regular basis.

Course Attribute(s):
Distribution Area: The Arts

040738:1