Matt Morris

This drawing studio serves as a broad introduction to historical and contemporary drawing practices. This course presents drawing as an organizer of thought, experience, and image. Students will investigate a full range of drawing materials and supports. Lectures and exercises introduce various concepts of drawing, possibly including illusionistic form and space, gesture and expressive mark-making, or collage and found imagery, depending on the instructor?s emphasis. Designed to accommodate many skill levels, students can explore various creative strategies through technical drawing exercises, material explorations, and individual projects. Structured classroom critiques will bring drawing concepts into personal student work.

In this course, you will be provided with practical and analytic tools with which to engage in an art world that extends globally and is deeply enmeshed in digital platforms. Each artist's relationship to this field is produced through our personal desires, hopes, assumptions, and ideas of success: articulating this highly individual profile will serve as our starting place. From there, we will consider the ways paintings and other art objects become data that is circulated, analyzed, and commodified. Through an examination of the networks- cultural, social, and economic- that characterize the present-day fields of art, we will develop strategies for building professional relationships, self-promotion, and presenting your work in public settings. Approaches to websites, artwork documentation, writing (bios, CVs, artist statements, modes of art criticism), business cards, budgeting, packing and shipping artwork, and studio upkeep will be covered in the form of class lectures and discussions, supplemented with homework assignments. The outcomes of this course are manifold: artists will make informed, researched decisions about the ways they want to participate in the world, while also learning basic skillsets as best practices for a sustainable, long-term career.

The purpose of this course is to provide an informal critique situation where students from various disciplines meet once a week to present and discuss their work. The faculty leader facilitates the discussion, which is designed to help students articulate a critique of their own work as well as the work of other students.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.