Core: Humanities and the Expressive Arts I

Modality - Remote, Blended

Theme: Installing Memory Against Erasure

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 repression, social amnesia, or outright erasure by violent means. Rooted in exploring this particular concern for themselves and the situations they care about, students will learn the fundamentals of diverse installation art practices with an emphasis on using found or cheap materials in everyday spaces. Installation art constructs or substantially alters pre-existing spaces for inhabitation and study through the arrangement of diverse visual and auditory materials. Installation art can uniquely bring together many skills and passions, including writing, storytelling, architecture, graphic design, illustration, painting, sound art, research, social activism, and performance. Tapping into and radicalizing their own everyday skills and habits, students will learn how to develop large-scale installation art works through gradual processes, such as meditation, research, sketching, writing, wandering, collecting materials, developing proposals, and collaborating with others. Each week we will engage with and discuss the ideas, life, and projects of one specific contemporary artist, including Soviet exile artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the Kosovar Albanian artist Petrit Halilaj, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, African American artist Fred Wilson, Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska, Canadian Anishinaabekwe artist Rebecca Belmore, and several others. The Palestinian artist and composer Dirar Kalash will visit us to give a special workshop on constructing sound installations and his experience making work under censorship, disinvestment, and corruption. All the artists we study will present us with practical models by which we can learn through imitation and example. By the quarter's conclusion, students will complete one full installation proposal with a portfolio of research and other preparatory materials as well as visual documentation, depending on the nature of the installation, of the work's construction in part or full.