This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

With widespread emphasis on the written word in a globalized Western society, it becomes easy to forget that writing is a relatively anomalous human practice. In Art Before Time, our focus will be on the visual, tactile, and kinetic practices of the deep past, and the epistemological methods (and their limitations) that we Moderns use to decipher and interpret the ancient traces left long before there were written records to document them. We will employ and scrutinize ethnographic analogy as a method for understanding the lifeways of our distant ancestors in the Pleistocene, while using experimental archaeology to form shared experiences that engage in the most persistent artistic traditions of our species. In so doing, we explore the changing place of human activity in ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere, the origins and varieties of symbolic thought, and the fluctuating roles of art and architecture in spiritual ecologies throughout a vast span of time.

Elective

With widespread emphasis on the written word in a globalized Western society, it becomes easy to forget that writing is a relatively anomalous human practice. In Art Before Time, our focus will be on the visual, tactile, and kinetic practices of the deep past, and the epistemological methods (and their limitations) that we Moderns use to decipher and interpret the ancient traces left long before there were written records to document them. We will employ and scrutinize ethnographic analogy as a method for understanding the lifeways of our distant ancestors in the Pleistocene, while using experimental archaeology to form shared experiences that engage in the most persistent artistic traditions of our species. In so doing, we explore the changing place of human activity in ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere, the origins and varieties of symbolic thought, and the fluctuating roles of art and architecture in spiritual ecologies throughout a vast span of time.

Elective

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