Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to First-Year Students.

Major Requirement | BFA, BArch, MArch (3yr)

The goal of Independent Drawing Projects is for students to develop a distinct, carefully conceived, and self-directed body of works through a process of investigation, critical assessment and production. Through a rigorous studio practice, students are expected to identify and develop their own conceptual interests and material approaches. Individual and group critiques support, facilitate, and intensify this process. While drawing concentrators will be given priority, interested students outside of the concentration and beyond the sophomore level may take this course. For the drawing concentrator, the work created for the Independent Drawing Project serves as the culmination of the Drawing Concentration program.

Elective

This course will focus awareness on the intertwined connections between the drawing BODY, ACTION and MARK. In this course, we will move our bodies in directed and experiential ways, sensitizing our bodies and minds to the possibilities of drawing as an embodied action. Embodied drawing practice focuses on drawing as a physical act, inviting awareness of the sensation and intelligence of the drawing body as a catalyst for practice. Through experimentation with embodied movement, action and making, students will experience their own drawing process as meaningful engagement with action. Studio experimentation and research will investigate the formal possibilities of ACTION as movement in time and space, then move to a critical consideration of ACTION in context and as methodology that can both contain and generate meaning. Course methodologies may include: process-focused practice; mindful investigation of movement; individual and collaborative studio experimentation and performance of drawing. Areas of study may include: motion visualization; algorithmic and choreographic approaches to action-based generative composition; body and technology; artistic action as meaningful methodology in social and cultural context.

This course will comprise of in-class studio exercises, slide/video presentations, critiques, short readings and discussions. Through these diverse modes of learning, students will have the opportunity to engage with foregrounding concepts and direct experiences of an embodied approach to drawing practice, focusing on the experience and potential outcomes of drawing as action in context. Students will also engage in independent research to be shared with the class, broadening the array of work we critically engage with. Independent studio research will be ongoing throughout the course, and will culminate in self-directed Midterm and Final Projects.

Elective