The course investigates play and collaboration as an integral component of the ideation and object-making processes and facilitates a range of radical, interdisciplinary approaches to artmaking. The course illuminates the structures, politics and principles of tabletop games, imaginative play and sports and explores games theoretically as mythology and metaphor for life and art-making, discussing a range of integral ideas such as aspiration, perseverance, practice, spectacle, individualism, teamwork, opposition, success, failure, vulnerability, obsession and desire. Students will play collaboratively and independently while making crucial inquiries into the profound meaning of games and play as tool, meaning and metaphor.
The class, currently led by Painting faculty Meena Hasan and Kelley-Ann Lindo, provides a model for a long-term program offering across departments. Intended to be collaboratively taught between at least two faculty members, the course’s open theoretical framework has the potential to expand into multiple mediums and methodologies and across student years from undergraduate to graduate to create a dynamic and evolving seminar that will work to heighten students’ awareness of concerns in contemporary and historic art practices as well as their own studio practice.
The course will be structured around three group critiques, frequent class discussions, individual meetings, presentations and in-class and out-of-class work both individual and collaborative. The first part of the course explores play and collaboration alongside introductory lectures. Mid-semester consists of research presentations and initial explorations that culminate in a final project designed by each student with the support of the class. The invited Visiting Artist(s) discuss how play and games function in their own practices, as material and method, and there will be at least one field trip during the second part of the semester to an exhibition, performance and/or competitive event.
Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00
Elective
