This project-oriented course will challenge you to think and create in ways that entwine visual culture with the natural sciences and Indigenous values. As a movement or practice, sci-art has two common objectives: 1) to increase the communicative capacity of science through artistic media, and 2) to explore new dimensions of the human capacity for learning and teaching about our shared world. However, this course's version of sci-art takes a Land-based approach to learning, which is guided by an awareness of the obligations we have to all things, and in turn, the acknowledgement that these obligations are guided by respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. We will begin by putting "two-eyed seeing" into practice at the NatureLab, and by examining and evaluating existing sci-art projects and exhibitions. Then we will start creating our own original Land- and science-based art, each project with a unique theme drawn from the local world around us, and each in a different medium.

Elective

This course takes a deep dive into the ordinary objects (high heels, stickers, mushrooms, whale songs, waste, water bottles, ...) that we share our lives with but often take for granted. We will analyze these objects and the stories told about them to gain new insights into a reality populated with weird and fascinating things. Through our analyses, we may begin to see our world (and probably, ourselves) in entirely new ways that challenge presupposed distinctions between nature and culture, and animate and inanimate. First, we will consider Indigenous and object-oriented theories of existence as antidotes to the idealistic philosophies that dominate contemporary American thought and practice. Next, we will dive into a series of articles and short books and analyze them within the framework of what an “object lesson” should or could be, before composing your own object lesson on a magical, inspiring, mundane, or (seemingly) insignificant object of your choice.

Elective

This course examines the historical phenomenon of the Grand Tour, a cultural pilgrimage through Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that often culminated in a visit to Italy. By the 1700s, Italy had become a magnet for wealthy Northern Europeans who hoped to be “improved” and entertained by the peninsula’s warm climate, artistic riches, and countless other attractions. Many of these tourists were accompanied by painters, sculptors, and architects, who were drawn to Italy by the educational and economic opportunities on offer there. Some of these artists attended Italy’s well-respected art academies, while others developed lucrative careers as art dealers and guides. All of these developments had important consequences for the history of taste and the emergence of an international art market, while exposure to foreign peoples, places, and objects shaped the cultural perceptions of both travellers and their hosts in numerous ways. By considering a variety of artworks and texts, in class and at local museums and libraries, this course shows how the Grand Tour helped shape the world that we live in today.

Elective

Public programs in art museums are designed to spark conversation, curiosity, and connection. What was once the limited realm of educational lectures from experts in the field has evolved into a dynamic, diverse practice spanning a range of modes of engagement. Programs amplify the perspectives of artists, writers, thinkers, community leaders and changemakers, and explore art, our lives, and the critical issues of our time. From quiet, intimate gatherings looking closely at a single work of art to listening parties, performances, readings, conversations, hands-on workshops and more, public programs can be designed to incite wonder, spark curiosity, deepen understanding, pose critique, share new perspectives or relax, unwind, and have fun. What makes a great program and why? How do you engage different audiences and develop an inclusive and equitable approach? How do you create meaningful experiences and lasting impressions?

In this course, students will be introduced to the art of engagement. Drawing on case studies, readings, and lectures by guest speakers in the field, students will be immersed in the methods, objectives, history, and theory of public engagement. Throughout the semester, students will develop their skills through workshops, exercises, and interactive discussions, examining questions of care, relevance, responsiveness, equity, access, innovation, imagination, and fun in public engagement—from the Brooklyn Museum’s community-centered First Saturdays, the Whitney Museum’s artist programs, the Met’s contemplative Observant Eye, MoMA’s Create Ability and Art inSight Access Programs, to the RISD Museum’s own signature Ways of Looking. Students will also be introduced to collaborative methods of co-creating programs with artists and communities, and strategies for designing mutually beneficial programs. This course is designed for students to think deeply about activating and sharing different aspects of their work with different audiences, exploring creative process, concepts, context, and inspiration. 

Students will also have the option of researching and working with contemporary and historic objects from the RISD Museum collection. This course will also introduce students to the history and theory of public programs in the art museum and areas of growth, innovation and new directions in the field. Students will learn about different audiences, and strategies and modes of engagement with opportunities to learn firsthand through field trips and workshops.

Elective

This course is a combination of theoretical inquiry into care and self-care as creative and intellectual methodology and a practical laboratory in which students can reflect on and cultivate the practices that support their work and integrity of well-being.  Audre Lorde's famous words - caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare - carry fraught meaning in a moment wherein callousness and a lack of empathy seem to dictate political and social discourse. The theoretical aim of this class is to unpack the notion of caring, often constructed as an individual concern and practice which makes it vulnerable to neoliberal co-option, and its expression on a spectrum from Lorde's radical self-preservation to the empathetic relationship building necessary to maintain (often marginalized) communities. The practical aspects of this course encourage students to consider the different infrastructures that work to encourage self-care and mutual care, and to locate tools that support their artistic and scholarly practices. We will examine the notions of surviving, coping, and thriving, pointing not only to case studies in the literature, but examining how these themes appear in our personal experience. This class has an Academic Enrichment budget to enable an experiential module and as such, no more than 20 students can be accommodated. The waitlist will be strictly followed.

Elective

The Trojan War is one of the most influential stories in the history of Western culture. After a brief examination of the archaeological evidence for such an event, this course will focus on the art and literature inspired by the Trojan War from Ancient Greece through modern times. Readings will include selections from Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and take into account return stories such as the Odyssey. Art with Trojan iconography will be explored from ancient vase-paintings and sculptures through Renaissance and Baroque depictions, up to a contemporary graphic novelization and a brief discussion of films on the subject. Major themes include the interaction of art and literature, and the mutability of an established narrative at the hands of subsequent creators.

Elective

The course will examine how female painters, photographers, performance artists and film directors use their bodies and elements of their biographies to build their art upon. We will read interviews with them and analyses of their work, watch documentary films, study self-portraits in painting and photography. We will try to define the special attraction and therapeutic role autobiographic art has for women. Among the artists discussed will be: Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold, Marina Abramovic, Shirin Neshat, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Maya Deren, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Agnes Varda, and Francesca Woodman. Students will do weekly readings; write weekly papers, as well as a final paper about a chosen artist. Active participation in class discussions is required.

Elective

Chocolate started as a spicy, red-colored, Mesoamerican beverage and morphed into the sweet version created by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries until mechanization and industrialization launched it in the form of edible bars in the 19th century. This course examines this history through the lens of the visual and material culture of chocolate from the 16th to the 21st centuries. We will discuss the elite's taste for exotic goods in pre-industrial times, the impact of colonialism and global trading networks, Europeans' craving for sugar, drinking rituals, and issues of race. We will work on critically assessing images and objects, deconstructing, for example, the image of chocolate in past or current commercials or reflecting on the erasure of labor in artistic representations. We will trace associations of pleasure, eroticism, the female gender, and racialization while looking at the space and the equipment designed for the performance of chocolate consumption in different cultures. This course also has a strong sensory and ethical dimension. Students will make, from scratch and by hand, the kind of chocolate found in pre-industrial times, processing beans into a cacao paste to be whisked into hot water or milk. To this embodied experience of harsh labor, a tasting session will teach students how to distinguish low- from high-quality chocolate bars. Finally, students will communicate with professional companies to learn about responsible development in the chocolate world today.

Elective

Few practices are more central to art school education than critique. Yet in recent years, critique
itself has become the target of a growing critique. Critique, its detractors argue, seeks only to
discredit, to reveal what others fail to see, to prove its adversaries wrong. Yet is this really what
defines critique? Has critique, in Bruno Latour’s famous phrase, indeed run out of steam? Is our
present moment “post-critical”? Foregrounding these questions, this course will examine both the
changing landscape of twentieth-century critique (Frankfurt School critical theory, anticolonial
critique, poststructuralism, feminist and queer theoretical critique) and twenty-first-century
challenges to and reinventions of critique (post-critique, critical race theory, post-Autonomist
Marxism). As we proceed, we will consider the debates that unfold in this context in relation to
different aesthetic practices—visual art, film, new media, architecture—with the aim both of
reconceptualizing critique and of understanding its role in contemporary culture. In turn, we will
attempt to develop a theoretical and historical framework through which members of the class,
whatever their distinct concerns or projects, can think through and reassess their own activities in
relation to the question of critique and of what constitutes critical cultural production today.

Elective

This course has two primary goals: cultivating an in-depth, hands-on knowledge of a topic in indigenous art history and developing a diverse set of writing tools for documenting lived experience. First, this course will explore the history, anthropology, and overall context of the development of traditional indigenous American textile production methods. Our examination of these textiles will involve critical readings of key texts, lectures and discussions. However, above all, we will be employing a hands-on approach to reproduce the process involved in making these textiles. Focusing on the specific example of Navajo blanket and rug weaving, together we will create our own woven tapestries, replicating traditional methods from cleaning wool straight off the sheep, to dyeing with natural dyes, to building and weaving on our own traditional-style Navajo tapestry looms. The second goal of this course is to explore a variety of approaches toward documenting through writing students' own experiences in the field - ranging from more creative and artistic approaches to more formal or technical descriptions. The intention is to expose students to a variety of writing methods that may come in handy in their professional careers, be they artists' statements or grant applications. To this end, students will be keeping a semester-long field journal detailing their hands-on experiences in this course, culminating in the production of a final presentation of their work.

Elective

As a field of study, material culture explores how we make things and how things, in turn, make us. This class examines the material culture of late consumer capitalism, focusing on how objects organize experience in everyday life. We will investigate the practices through which things-from food and clothing to smart phones-become meaningful, as we tackle political and ethical questions related to the design, manufacture, use and disposal of material goods. The class will introduce students to a range of scholarship on material culture from several disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, sociology, art and architectural history, and cultural studies.

Elective

As a stimulus to the imagination, method of investigation, or as a basic means of communication, drawing is a fundamental process of human thought. This class will examine various kinds of drawings from the history of art and visual culture moving chronologically from the medieval to the post-modern. Our studies will have a hands-on approach, meeting behind the scenes in the collections of the RISD Museum. Working from objects directly will be supplemented by readings and writing assignments as well as active classroom discussion. This seminar is recommended for THAD concentrators and students especially interested in drawing.

Elective

As a stimulus to the imagination, method of investigation, or as a basic means of communication, drawing is a fundamental process of human thought. This class will examine various kinds of drawings from the history of art and visual culture moving chronologically from the medieval to the post-modern. Our studies will have a hands-on approach, meeting behind the scenes in the collections of the RISD Museum. Working from objects directly will be supplemented by readings and writing assignments as well as active classroom discussion. This seminar is recommended for THAD concentrators and students especially interested in drawing.

Elective

This course will examine the visual culture pertinent to Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries in turn-of-the-century Vienna. We shall look at the modernist art of Austrian painters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as the minor arts of illustration, photography, scientific imaging, and film in light of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas. Classes will be devoted to topics such as avant-garde postcard design, ethnographic photography, and scientific images including x-rays and surgical films. The silent erotic "Saturn" films that were screened in Vienna from 1904-1910 will also be considered. Requirements include mid-term and final exams, two essays, and interest in the subject (no past experience needed).

Elective

This course will examine scientific and technical applications developed by Western artists and visual theorists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Concentrating on pictorial traditions, the course will address what artists, authors and artist/engineers have referred to as scientific, technical, mechanical, and purely mental solutions to optical, proportional and quantitative visual problems. General themes will be perspective, form, color, and mechanical devices, and will include discussions on intellectual training, notebooks, treatises, and collecting. The course will examine artists such as Masaccio, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, D|rer, Serlio, Carlo Urbino, Cigoli, Rubens, Vel`zquez, Saenredam, Vermeer, Poussin, Andrea Pozzo, Canaletto, Phillip Otto Runge,Turner, Delacroix, Monet, and Seurat.

Elective

This course will focus on the cultural and artistic activities which came into being as a result of contacts between the civilizations of Europe and Asia (China in particular). Among the topics explored will be: the ancient world, the Silk Route and Buddhism, the nomads of Eurasia as agents of cultural exchange, early European travelers to China (Marco Polo), the Jesuits at the court of the Chinese emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and finally the Western colonial experience.

This is a co-requisite course. Student must also register for THAD H604 - Art and Religion on the Silk Road - Part B. 

Elective

The Bronze Age saw the development of several advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean basin. Perhaps the best-known among these is the civilization of Pharaonic Egypt. This course will focus on the art and architecture of Egypt and their neighbors to the north: the Aegean civilizations known as Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean. While art historical study of these cultures will be emphasized, evidence for trade and other cultural interchange between them will also be discussed. The course will cover such topics as the Pyramids of Giza, the Tomb of Tutankhamun, and the Palace of Knossos.

Elective

This corequisite course (Art and Religion on the Silk Road - Part B) is a required supplement to Art and Religion on the Silk Road - Part A. The course is designed as an additional workshop consisting of museum and library visits and hands on work on materials in those collections which relate to the topics explored in Part A. Readings will assigned ahead of these visits to gain an understanding of the material seen. Written responses to the readings and the visits are due weekly. In addition, to the RISD Museum collections (Asian Art, Costume and Textiles, Decorative Arts, Classical Antiquities) and the Fleet Library special collections, we will tentatively visit the John Carter Brown Library, the Hay Library and the Haffereffer Museum at Brown University. Provided funds will be available, we may visit the Boston Museum of Fine arts, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem MA, and the Harvard Art Museum.

This is a co-requisite course. Student must also register for THAD H504 - Art and Religion on the Silk Road - Part A.

Elective

This course will introduce the arts of China through the lens of native and imported religious and philosophical traditions, exploring different approaches to representation and belief. After an introduction to the anthropological study of religion, we will cover four main periods: the pre-historic (Paleolithic - Neolithic), the early dynastic (ca. 2000 - 221 BCE), the imperial (221 BCE - 1911), and the modern-contemporary (post 1911). We will focus on elite and folk approaches to representation and belief with an emphasis on mythology and symbolism. Topics to be explored include: the dragon and the phoenix as symbols, the Han search for immortality, Buddhist cave temples, Taoist landscape painting, the Confucian scholar tradition, ritual garments, the influence of European culture and Christianity, and Communist personality cult.

Elective

Registration by application only. Application is restricted to concentrators in The Theory & History of Art & Design. A call for applications will be sent to all THAD concentrators.

Elective