Arts Workshops
Drawing and Painting
K40.1405 4 CR TR 1:30-4:30 Bert Katz
This workshop is designed to provide both beginning and advanced students with studio experience in drawing and paining. A variety of media will be used, including acrylic paint. The problem of visual conversion will be addressed as will the distinction between “what is seen and what is known” (Picasso). In addition, by way of critiques, discussions and gallery visits, the student will explore the problem of visual “form” and aesthetic judgment.
The Urban Environment: Design, Planning, and Public Services
K40.1620 4 CR MW 5:30-8:30 Donna Goodman
This workshop introduces the basic issues of planning and designing modern urban environments. It explores the physical systems of cities, such as transportation, land use, technology, and infrastructure. Using New York as a prototype, it also explores planning concepts, such as the grid, radial systems, organization of public and private space, historical preservation, landscape, and art. Social and environmental issues are also discussed, and important new concepts for developing green cities. Students create several projects; a slide or photographic essay on the urban landscape; a sketchbook, analyzing a neighborhood or park in maps and diagrams; and an architectural design for a roof terrace, restaurant, or park structure in drawings or models. Readings include Mumford, Jacobs, Kostof, Le Corbusier, Koolhaus, and others. Students should have access to drawing tools and a camera.
Digital Art and Media
K40.1625 4 CR MW 5:30-8:30 Sanders
Digital media and new methods of visual communication affect how we work, play, see our environment and ourselves. With digital media we can build images and edit graphics easily and effectively. Painting and imaging programs form flexible and powerful tools for constructing imagery that lead to new ways of creating work, new design criteria, and new aesthetics. When computer imaging is combined with interactivity, and distribution such as CD, DVD, and the Internet, the result is interactive multimedia. This project based studio course, designed for beginning to intermediate students, explores ways of constructing images and interactivity. In the computer lab, we focus on methods of creating digital media and art, including painting programs, digital image editing, authoring interactivity and time-based work. Critiques of individual student work, readings, and discussion will examine the evolving formal criteria, aesthetics and social implications of this work. Readings include selections from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook. We will visit exhibits of digital work, on-line and at New York City's art spaces.
Magazine Dreams: Conceiving, Designing, and Producing a Twenty-first Century Publication
K40.1660 4 CR TR 1:30-4:30 Lise Friedman
Magazines are a tantalizing mix of tradition and the new—exquisitely tuned reflections of where we are at a given moment (and frequently harbingers of what’s yet to occur) expressed through a mode of communication that took root in the eighteenth century. It’s this balance of convention and innovation that guarantees their endurance. And to use the example of “New York Magazine,” celebrating its fortieth anniversary, testament to an unwavering commitment to top-notch journalism, a consistent, focused mission, and design that telegraphs the immediacy of its content. The survival, indeed the astonishing proliferation of magazines over the past few decades in particular is evidence of their power. They are readily accessible, portable, and at their best create a sense of intimacy with the reader, qualities that hold particular appeal for college-age students, the segment of the population most likely to affect their evolution. In this arts workshop students will work together at an accelerated pace to conceive and produce a printed publication in six weeks. The goal will be the creation of an in-class magazine that reflects the students' interests and exposes them to the process such an endeavor entails. The first part of the workshop will be devoted to brainstorming and roughing out themes and design and editorial ideas, the second to their execution, and the final to the actual production and printing of the publication itself.