Humanities and Expressive Arts I: Installing Memory

This introductory arts seminar will teach students how to create and analyze art installations that serve to materialize remembered places, practices, and situations repressed by political conditions, social amnesia, and systemic violence. Rooted in exploring this particular concern for themselves and the histories they care about, students will learn a set of installation art practices with an emphasis on being resourceful by manipulating 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, sculpture, illustration, sound art, research, videography, social-political activism, education, and performance. Tapping into and radicalizing their own everyday, cultural, and inherited skills and habits, while also extending what they believe they can 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, reading, sketching, writing, wandering, visiting, collecting materials, manipulating objects, studying spaces, developing proposals, and collaborating with others.

In addition to holding installation workshops and peer critiques, each week we will engage with and discuss the work of one or several contemporary artists including Aida Šehović, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Mona Hatoum, Petrit Halilai, Kitt Peacock, Zoë Leonard, and Fred Wilson. Such materials and experiences will present us with a practical model by which we can learn through imitation, analysis, and experimentation.

By the quarter's end, students will complete two installations and write two short texts responding to the artworks, politics, and theory we’ve studied.