Scholars Courses for Continuing Students

Courses for Continuing Students: 2018-2019 Academic Year

These courses should be taken by Scholars after they complete their first two semesters at SAIC, including their English, Research Studio, and Art History Survey Requirements.

Fall 2018

ARTHI 3211-001: World on Fire: 1968/Now Pt. 1

Faculty: Delinda Collier
Department: Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00—4:00 p.m.

Scholars MUST register for section 001 of this course in order to receive Scholars credit. Scholars may take both the Fall and Spring sections of this specific Art History course—each will provide one Scholars course completion credit.

A half century on, this class examines the intersection of art, design, and politics in 1968, the mythic year of global upheaval. Nearly simultaneously, signal events erupted on multiple continents: ‘May 1968’ in France, the Tet Offensive, the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, riots at the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong’s ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside’ movement. The course draws connections to recent events and to what we might broadly call ‘the contemporary.’

The class is team-taught by four members of the art history faculty in order to draw on their individual areas of expertise, and has units that focus on the art, design, and history of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Innovative in its structure, the class begins each meeting with a shared presentation for all students that is followed by small seminars led by the teaching faculty. The class can be taken as either a fall or spring stand-alone course or as a single year-long intensive study, since the teaching faculty and course material vary by semester. Standard art history learning goals, course objectives, and assessment practices apply.

ARTHI 3900: Junior Proseminar: History and Theories of Drawing

Faculty: Margaret MacNamhide
Department: Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Counts toward Art History/Academic Spine credit.

This course introduces students to the unique place drawing occupies in western art. Line and color are found together in illuminated manuscripts, fresco, and oil on canvas, but the Italian Renaissance elevated line above color because drawing was seen to give form to thought itself. At the same time, the hand's immediate touch seems to linger more palpably in drawing than in any other kind of visual expression, offering purely visual delight to maker and viewer alike. Our course turns on this contrast: between drawing as a mental idea's perfect correlate and the sketch aesthetic's enduring appeal. We examine also those art-school institutions (the life-class; perspectival drawing) and ask why their relevance waned in the twentieth century. Weekly visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and two specialized sessions in its Department of Prints and Drawings ensure that study of differing traditions combines with close observation of individual works. Students leave the course with a well-researched written assignment forged by a number of different stages (individual meetings; drafts and re-drafting; a class workshop), preceding submission. Open to BAAH students and SAIC Scholars.

HUMANITIES 3131-001: The History of Poetic Forms

Faculty: Leila Wilson
Department: Liberal Arts/Humanities
Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

In this course we explore how some of the best poets through the centuries have invented, mastered, stretched, challenged, rejected, and reinvented poetic forms. We investigate origins of the haiku, ghazal, sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, blues poem, sestina, ballad, prose poem, concrete poem, and a few other original forms, and we question how modern and contemporary examples both honor and deny the traditions these forms have aroused. Our intentions for this course are not merely to revere formal structures and marvel at how poets have succeeded in meeting verse requirements. More significantly, our aim is to tease open the workings of really good poems to see if we might understand how they mean and perhaps even why they affect us. 'Form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content,' the poet Charles Wright tells us. If this is true, and if poetic form still holds some of the sweat of its makers, then in looking hard at form we have a chance of uncovering what has mattered-and perhaps still matters-most in human experience.

PHOTO 4010-001: Future is Now: The Anthropocene

Faculty: Andy Yang/Jeremy Bolen
Department: N/A; interdisciplinary Studio Symposium
Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.—4:00 p.m.

• This Study Symposium course awards 6 credits: 3 towards Natural Science/Liberal Arts AND 3 towards Studio Elective
• Scholars will receive Scholars credit for all Studio Symposium courses offered in 2018-19, but these courses will be also be open to interested non-Scholars and are available on a ‘first-come, first-serve’ basis for all students
• A Studio Symposium course counts as TWO Scholars courses taken

The Anthropocene is a proposal that we are in a 'new geological age of humankind,' in which our species' is the prime force of transformation on the planet whose actions will be legible in rocks for millions of years to come. World-changing in the most literal sense, the implications of the Anthropocene hypothesis are profound but also very uncertain, calling into question the role the arts, design, and the natural sciences can play as critical and creative agents. This transdisciplinary 'studio seminar' will be an experiment in these new forms of understanding and integrate three credits in Liberal Arts with three credits in studio art.

VCS 2001-002: Issues in Visual Critical Studies: Scholars Program

Faculty: Kristi McGuire
Department: Visual and Critical Studies
Day/Time: Thursday, 1:00–4:00 p.m.

Counts toward Art History credit; Scholars MUST register for section 002 of this course in order to receive Scholars credit.

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the "critical" in "visual and critical studies." For the past ten years, it has been referred to as "a primer for the art world." It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider "texts" from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution. Note: this section is open to students in the SAIC Scholars Program only.

Spring 2019

ARTHI 2900-001: Writing Art History

Faculty: Annie Bourneuf
Department: Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Day/Time: Monday, 1:00—4:00 p.m.

Counts toward Art History/Academic Spine credit.

The aim of this intensive course is to learn how to write art history. To this end, we will study the study of art, taking a look under the hood of the discipline of art history. We will examine how scholars build compelling arguments about art, how they pose questions, and how they discover answers to them. We will not only study statements by scholars reflecting on their own methods, but also exemplars of analysis, which we will in turn take apart to figure out how to do such analysis ourselves. Since, in art history, such questioning and such analysis is inseparable from writing, we will work on essential skills of academic writing, such as posing generative questions, making persuasive and well-structured arguments, finding and using sources, crafting clear prose, and reflecting on one's own approach and assumptions. This course is required for the BA in Art History and is also open to SAIC Scholars.

ARTHI 3211-002: World on Fire: 1968/Now

Faculty: Jenny Lee
Department: Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00—4:00 p.m.

Scholars MUST register for section 002 of this course in order to receive Scholars credit. Scholars may take both the Fall and Spring sections of this specific Art History course—each will provide one Scholars course completion credit.

A half century on, this class examines the intersection of art, design, and politics in 1968, the mythic year of global upheaval. Nearly simultaneously, signal events erupted on multiple continents: ‘May 1968’ in France, the Tet Offensive, the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, riots at the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong’s ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside’ movement. The course draws connections to recent events and to what we might broadly call ‘the contemporary.’

The class is team-taught by four members of the art history faculty in order to draw on their individual areas of expertise, and has units that focus on the art, design, and history of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Innovative in its structure, the class begins each meeting with a shared presentation for all students that is followed by small seminars led by the teaching faculty. The class can be taken as either a fall or spring stand-alone course or as a single year-long intensive study, since the teaching faculty and course material vary by semester. Standard art history learning goals, course objectives, and assessment practices apply.

CAPSTONE 4900-020: Beyond Critique: Language and Interpretation

Faculty: Michelle Grabner
Department: N/A; interdisciplinary Senior Capstone
Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Counts toward Studio Elective/Academic Spine credit.

This course will address alternative positions and modes of interpretation. It will examine the institutionalized authority of suspicious and symptomatic analysis of art work while offering up compelling arguments for a more inclusive range of affective styles and modes of post-critical interpretation. The Limits of Critique and Beyond Critique will be guiding texts in examining this important turn within the field of critical analysis. Interpretive analysis in this course will be applied to the exercises of assigning language to art work. This course will also examine how the study of interpretation and the tenets of post-critique can inform making, display, and distribution.

CAPSTONE 4900-060: Fast Time/Slow Time: Creative Practice in a World Without Art

Faculty: Judith Brotman and Jeremy Biles
Department: N/A; interdisciplinary Senior Capstone/Studio Symposium
Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00 a.m.—4:00 p.m.

• This Study Symposium course awards 6 credits: 3 towards Humanities/Liberal Arts AND 3 towards Studio Elective/Academic Spine
• Scholars will receive Scholars credit for all Studio Symposium courses offered in 2018-19, but these courses will be also be open to interested non-Scholars and are available on a ‘first-come, first-serve’ basis for all students
• A Studio Symposium course counts as TWO Scholars courses taken

In this Capstone class, students will develop a focused/independent body of work and will be asked to participate in a range of self-selected activities that support work/working process. Some activities will relate directly to studio practice; others will focus on life outside the studio. Critique groups and research are potential examples of the former; meditation, walking, or yoga are examples of the latter. In support of both kinds of activities, students will read and respond (in writing and in discussion) to a variety of literary readings as well as texts drawn from art theory and criticism, religious studies, and psychology. Emphasis will be placed on texts that foster a synthesis of theory and practice, particularly through attention to habit, attention/awareness, labor, and discipline. Required projects include an in-process and final critique of studio work and a formal presentation describing/discussing impact of selected activities on working process. This is a six-credit Studio Symposium course that meets once per week for six hours, and students fulfill three studio credits and three Liberal Arts credit.

NATSCI 3007-001: Knowing Nature

Faculty: Andy Yang
Department: Liberal Arts/Natural Science
Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

While most science courses are situated within a single scientific discipline, Knowing Nature asks big questions about the nature of science overall, as a method of knowing and as a cultural practice. We will map out models, experiments, and observations on which the current scientific worldview is based, using contemporary controversies to critically consider whether science creates objective knowledge. Working with case studies ranging from the physical to biological sciences, students will also build skills in reasoning with data, working with graphs, and navigating statistical claims. For those with interest in engaging scientific principles, methods, or content in their creative work, this course will provide a solid foundation.

PROFPRAC 3900-151: Work Experience: What’s My Job?

Faculty: Michael Ryan
Department: Arts Administration and Policy
Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00—4:00 p.m.

Counts toward Studio Elective/Academic Spine credit.

In this course, students will analyze and report on art world and cultural ecologies and explore professional work opportunities. Through a series of guided visits, students will encounter individual professionals in their daily work-life environments. Sites include professional art and design studios, municipal arts departments, non-profit organizations, foundations, museums, private collections and commercial galleries. Students will have the opportunity to propose areas for inclusion. The course will lead to an expanded understanding of professional opportunities and the tools to pursue them.

SOCSCI 3548-001: Reading Media

Faculty: Peter Haratonik
Department: Liberal Arts/Social Science
Day/Time: Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

How are messages created to sway public opinion, instill desires for products, or motivate the masses? This course is an investigation of how media communicate messages and how we interpret them. From political propaganda to advertisements, television news to infomercials, we examine a process of critically 'reading' the many messages that bombard us on a daily basis. Through readings, class discussions, presentations and writing assignments we come to grip with what critic Stuart Ewen has called a world of 'all-consuming images.' Readings include works by Plato, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Noam Chomsky, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, and Henry Jenkins.

SOPHSEM 2900-012: Repertoire

Faculty: Rachel Niffenegger
Department: N/A; interdisciplinary Sophomore Seminar
Day/Time: Thursday, 6:00—9:00 p.m.

Counts toward Studio Elective/Academic Spine credit.

What are the concerns that drive one’s creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? Sophomore Seminar offers interdisciplinary strategies for the evaluation and communication of students’ individual practice as artists, designers, and/or scholars. Through essential readings, studio projects, and writing, students will generate narratives about how and why they make art.

This Sophomore Seminar section is relevant to SAIC Scholars working across all media who are questioning and developing how meaning and material intersect in their work. We will focus on inventorying the entire stock of techniques and concepts explored in our work at SAIC until this point. Through critique and discussion we will iterate within our established repertoires with our sights set on developing studio practices that allow for both focus and innovation.