Arnold Kemp

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.

This studio explores specific problems in each student's area of concentration and interest. Students are expected to command familiarity with problems of color, composition, and basic materials.

This course looks at the range of concerns that inform and shape the making as well as the reception of paintings in a contemporary context. As a class, we will read, discuss and debate a range of historical and contemporary texts by artists, art historians, cultural theorists and critics on the continuing role and impact of painting as an art form, market force, and culture shaper, along with readings addressing the ability of art --and of painting in particular-- to effect political, ethical, and psychic change on both an individual and a broader social and cultural level.

Thematic topics, readings and screenings will vary but are typically chosen in reference to specific VAP or Departmental artist lectures offered during the semester of the course. Readings/topics may relate to one or more of the following: disability theory and the relationship of art to self-care; the relationship of visibility politics to current impulses in painting; the relationship of art to work, labor and leisure; the case of 'zombie formalism' and market effects on painting trends; the role of autobiography in art making and painting practices in particular.

Mandatory individual studio critiques of 45-60 minutes each; weekly written outlines/quick bullet-point responses to one or more class readings; mandatory attendance to VAP lectures and other lectures if scheduled at same time as seminar class; final paper consisting of a critical review of a painting exhibition currently on view in Chicago.

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.