Humanities and the Expressive Arts I: Theme - Installing Memory

This introductory studio art class will teach students the fundamentals of installation art in service of materializing remembered places, practices, and situations repressed by political conditions, social amnesia, or violence. Rooted in exploring this particular concern for themselves and the situations they care about, students will learn diverse installation art practices with an emphasis on using found and used materials derived from everyday spaces. Installation art constructs or alters space to produce meaning. Installation art can uniquely bring together many skills and passions, including writing, storytelling, architecture, illustration, sound art, research, videography, social activism, and performance. Tapping into and radicalizing their own everyday skills and habits, while also extending what they believe they are able to construct themselves, students will learn how to develop installation art that works through questions, experiences, and forms of memory by employing gradual artistic research processes, such as meditation, research, sketching, writing, wandering, collecting materials, manipulating objects, studying spaces, developing proposals, and collaborating with others. Each week we will engage with and discuss the ideas, life, and one installation work of a contemporary artist, including Soviet exile artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska, Canadian Anishinaabekwe artist Rebecca Belmore, African American artist Fred Wilson, whose new permanent installations on campus we will study in person, and several others. Each of these artists will present us with a practical model by which we can learn through imitation, analysis, and experimentation. By the quarter's conclusion, students will complete three installation sketches, write responses to three of the installations we study that most resonate with them, and construct one full installation.