Sarah Bastress

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

This is a class to help you tackle two of the main problems that students face while in school, but more importantly that graduates face once they leave it: 1) How do we make work when our time and money is limited? And 2) how do we make and discuss work about ¿difficult¿ topics?

To phrase it more cheaply: This is a class for prudes, perverts, cheapskates, your mom, fairies, bulld@ggers, prissies, sissies, scumbags, dirtbags, sleazebags, and people who like the smell of underbellies.

This class will learn from people, artists, and movements who have made a lot with a little. We will have a particular focus on strategies marginalized communities use to come together, make art and/or rebel, as well as question what it means ethically to learn from those strategies both when we are a part of those communities but especially when we are outside of them. This class will revel in naughtiness, filth, and debauchery. This class will also study if, how, and when shock value is effective or hurtful or both. Often, the work we look at will be explicit, with care taken to talk about our needs and boundaries. This class will help us engage with different strategies to discuss and make work with complicated content. We will make as much work as possible, including zines, art books, films, puppets, a drawing every day, a competitive art-show competition a la the food network, go on a ¿roadtrip,¿ build our own personal grottoes, and put on our own group show.

This class will be quantity over quality and more about the journey than the destination. We will throw as much as we can at the wall and see what sticks. It will have weekly readings or video viewings because those things are FREE and lots of field trips (to the The Leather Archives, the Center for Native Futures, and Tweet/Big Chicks for example).

Artists we will look at will include: Vaginal Davis, John Waters, Guy Fieri, Lee Godie, Laura Aguilar, Simon Rodia, Bill Traylor, Samuel R. Delany, Marlon Riggs, Elisa Harkins, Zoe Leonard, Ana Mendieta, Jim Henson, Henry Darger, Howard Finster, Loy Bowlin, Horace Pippin, David Wojnarowicz, Gregg Bordowitz, Faith Ringgold, Natalie Diaz, Ada Limon, Sun Ra, Joy Harjo, John Cage, Yoko Ono, CAConrad, Nan Goldin, Robert Gober, Robin Hustle, Jenn Smith, Dynasty Handbags, AfriCobra, ACTUP and Gran Fury, fierce pussy, Guerilla Girls, Dark Noise Collective