Undergraduate Overview

This course is an introduction to the materials, methods, and concepts of sculpture. We will investigate making in relation to material, time and space. We will consider aspects of sculpture such as meaning, scale, process, social engagement, ephemera and site; and explore the formal properties and expressive potential of materials including mold making and casting, wood, metal and experimental media. We will combine the use of materials and methods with ideas that reflect the history of contemporary sculpture. Demonstrations and authorizations will provide students with experience and technical proficiency in sculptural production while readings and slide lectures venture into the critical discourses of sculpture.

This course is an introduction to the materials, methods, and concepts of sculpture. We will investigate making in relation to material, time and space. We will consider aspects of sculpture such as meaning, scale, process, social engagement, ephemera and site; and explore the formal properties and expressive potential of materials including mold making and casting, wood, metal and experimental media. We will combine the use of materials and methods with ideas that reflect the history of contemporary sculpture. Demonstrations and authorizations will provide students with experience and technical proficiency in sculptural production while readings and slide lectures venture into the critical discourses of sculpture.

This course is an introduction to the materials, methods, and concepts of sculpture. We will investigate making in relation to material, time and space. We will consider aspects of sculpture such as meaning, scale, process, social engagement, ephemera and site; and explore the formal properties and expressive potential of materials including mold making and casting, wood, metal and experimental media. We will combine the use of materials and methods with ideas that reflect the history of contemporary sculpture. Demonstrations and authorizations will provide students with experience and technical proficiency in sculptural production while readings and slide lectures venture into the critical discourses of sculpture.

This course builds upon the fundamentals of mold making and casting as a means to replicate, transcribe, and gather material information from the world we inhabit. You will be introduced to a broad range of mold making and casting materials and processes, including multi-part plaster molds and plaster casting, silicone and latex rubbers for molding and casting, ceramic shell and lost wax, alginate and life casting, 3D printed molds, slip casting, plastics, and various organic materials. We will use these materials and processes to investigate and record the surfaces and volumes of objects, bodies, sites, and environments, and translate them into sculptural form. Drawing from a rich history of mold making and casting practices, we will consider how traditional processes, time-tested conventions, and innovative experimentation can inform contemporary sculptural practice while facilitating the production of new work. Through hands-on experimentation, we will examine how mold making can generate meaning, reveal information, and open new possibilities for sculptural inquiry.

Patternmaking is at the heart of metalworking, woodworking, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines. Why? Because so many materials are available in sheet form. Students in this course will investigate a range of processes by which flat sheet materials like paper, wood, metal, fabric, vinyl, and plastic can be used to make volumetric, three-dimensional forms. Patternmaking for Sculpture will teach the student digital and analogue methods of designing, cutting, and assembling 3D work. Practical strategies as well as contemporary industrial use and the history of patternmaking will be explored to give each student a range of options for making their own work, whether it be art or design.

This course introduces the aesthetic, technical, and historical aspects of the casting process as it relates to sculpture. Students learn basic skills in waxworking, investment applications, furnace and kiln operation, metal finishing and chasing, and patination. Lost wax and ceramic shell will be the primary techniques utilized for pattern generation and molding in this course. Students develop these skills through a series of studies that culminate in a final project.

What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? Sophomore Seminar offers strategies for students to explore, reflect upon, and connect common themes and interests in the development of an emerging creative practice that will serve as the basis of their ongoing studies at SAIC and beyond. Students will examine historical and contemporary influences and contextualize their work in relation to the diverse art-worlds of the 21st Century. Readings, screenings, and field trips will vary each semester. Presentations by visiting artists and guest speakers will provide the opportunity for students to hear unique perspectives on sustaining a creative practice. One-on-one meetings with faculty will provide students with individualized mentorship throughout the semester. During interdisciplinary critiques, students will explore a variety of formats and tools to analyze work and provide peer feedback. The class mid-term project asks students to imagine a plan for their creative life and devise a self-directed course of study for their time at school. The course concludes with an assignment asking students to develop and document a project or body of work demonstrating how the interplay of ideas, technical skills, and formal concerns evolve through iteration, experimentation and revision.

Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll.

This course is a structural and poststructural investigation of sculptural site activation. The students explore the theory and practice of how work gets contextualized and redefined through its placement within a larger social, political, and economic sphere of meaning. Students investigate options and determinants operative in both indoor and outdoor sites, installations, and environments. Although the focus of the class is contemporary, topics of discussion range from Rodin's Burghers of Calais to the public projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko. An indoor space is available for student use and cooperative interaction is encouraged. Prerequisite: intermediate level work in any media or consent of instructor.

Performing Objects is an expansive, interdisciplinary studio course that merges elements of Performance Art, Ritual, Theater, Installation Art, Body Art, Social Practice, and Sculpture. Grounded in object-making, this course invites students to explore the performative potential of their creations through physical interaction and live engagement. We will develop installations that invite audience participation, extend our work beyond the classroom into public spaces, and experiment with new ways to activate objects through performance. Emphasis will be placed on crafting dynamic relationships between performer and audience using material, movement, sound, text, spectacle, scale, and environment.

The figure in contemporary art has long been debated, but just as painting never died as forecasted so, too, the figure. It has morphed, become cyber, stayed representational, been found in the world and fashioned of any medium, while dissolving the line between it and abstraction, making it permeable and evocative. In this course students will be challenged to redefine the boundaries of traditional sculptural representation using the figure as a catalyst for evoking a range of content. We will consider human and animal bodies broadly, as cultural, historical, and constantly changing entities. Through an examination of diverse approaches related to figurative sculpture, students will be encouraged to engage with a variety of sculptural processes and media (such as assemblage, mold making, modeling, carving, welding, mixed media, fund object) to configure forms, as well as and conceptual frameworks in order to articulate personal and social narratives, and cultural critiques.
Addressing a range of cultures and historical periods, our inquiry will focus on: To what ends has the figure been employed (portraiture, faith, identity, gesture, embodiment, fragment, ritual, allegory, affect)? How does a work refer to without fully representing the figure? Why has it been an enduring subject/form? What are challenges and opportunities does it offer us today? Our inquiry will be guided by readings (Gordon Hall, Elizabeth Grosz, Katarzyna Trzeciak, Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed, and others) and viewing/museum visits of such artists as Jaime Isenstein, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Simone Fattal, Sarah Peters, Hew Locke, Rachel Harrison, Nicole Eisenman, Anna Mendieta, Yinka Shonibare, Simone Leigh, Kiki Smith, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Wangechi Mutu, Louise Bourgeois, Thomas Houseago, Kimsooja, David Altmejd, Lee Bul and Cajsa von Zeipel.
Course work includes assignments, readings and in class activities that support the development of three finished projects for critique.

This course is designed for students who have prior moldmaking and casting experience. Students investigate in-depth project development, implementing and articulating ideas through class discussions and proposals. This course also aims to offer a deeper understanding of the social, historical, and aesthetic implications of replication. Such subjects as the instability and significance of object/material relationships, and the complex and expansive nature between the authentic, the surrogate, and the copy are explored.

The history and techniques of bending and shaping wood are explored, from the stage coach wheel to the sculptures of Martin Puryear, from the cambered truss to the violin. Projects include a variety of practices such as laminate bending, form fashioning, steam bending, and vacuum pressing.

Writing Sculpture: Building Language exists where the material dimension of language meets the literary potential of objects. The words that shape artworks can augment, deform, rescale, and align them with narratives that radically shift their performance. Conversely, language can gain weight and be stretched, folded, carved, fractured and rebuilt to echo rather than explicate sculptures. How can poems and exhibitions structurally inform each other? How can creative writing help us understand what our work wants to be? Through the lens of embodied cognition, the hypothesis that thinking is a physical act anchored to our sensory-motor experiences and interactions with our environment, we will leverage the powerful collusion between words, actions, and objects. We will explore forms of writing, object-making, performance and installation that open sculpture to the wilds of narrative imagination.

Metalworks is a let's-get-to-basics class for working with steel. Join the class to learn basic metal fabrication, including: cutting, forming, forging, welding and finishing. This class will guide you as you build your projects in steel. You'll learn about structural systems and histories relevant to art and design with an emphasis on techniques and methodologies relevant to metalwork. You will integrate your learning to produce a set of finished works using historic and contemporary technologies. If it's metal, It's here. Designing, Fabricating, Forging, Finishing. Make it in metal.

This studio course explores the interconnected nature of our physical and digital realities and their implications as technical, physical, and conceptual tools for understanding and presenting spatial ideas. This course teaches students to integrate the digital and the analog through process demonstrations including 3D modeling, 3D scanning, digital visualization, 3D printing, CNC output, mold making, pattern making, as well as metal and wood fabrication. This course covers planar and spatial construction methodologies.

This course engages themes of identity and place in sculpture and presents the idea that these concepts are expressed uniquely via this hybrid process. However, students in this course are free to choose the content of their own work. Practical application of technical demonstrations build on lectures and discussions considering works by Tauba Auerbach, Macarthur Freeman, The Long Now Foundation, Charles Ray, Spurse, Rokudenashiko (Megumi Igarashi), Amanda Williams, and Wim Delvoye among others. Students will work individually to create 3 artworks to be presented in a final critique. Students will share these artworks in-process in 2 or 3 informal critiques. Each student will also complete a short written research project.

Advances in metallurgy and foundry practices provided the spark for the Industrial Revolution that transformed the world. In this intermediate level metal casting course, students explore how technological developments, material innovations, principles of mass production and distribution, and the mechanization of work have influenced the shape of contemporary social, economic, and political structures. While emphasis is placed on foundry techniques in this course, a variety of industrial materials and processes are explored including computer scanning, data manipulation and rapid-prototyping technologies. Students learn to access industrial services via the internet and off-campus field trips.

This advanced, interdisciplinary course provides a generative space for developing and understanding creative projects through the discourse of the field of Sculpture. Students in this course come together from various departments to enrich the content of their work through critique and conversation with Sculpture faculty and other advanced level students from across the school. Weekly readings inform the development of self-directed creative projects which form the basis for discussion and may form the basis for a thesis body of work.

Around the globe and across disciplines, people are employing regenerative practices to address climate change, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity, the fracturing of community bonds, and social injustices. Reasserting our connections to ecological and social systems is vital to address these key issues and essential for our personal well-being. Regenerative practices support and restore local ecosystems, contribute to local climate resiliency, and fortify community ties. Through object-making, collaboration, and performance, this course will explore the relationship between the principles of regenerative thinking and contemporary art practices as we develop our own critical framework. We will be collectively innovating and together will be guided by actions, lectures, and readings. Our work will be informed by a broad range of visiting artists, ecologists, anthropologists, and interdisciplinary practitioners to present lectures and guided workshops. Our visitors supplement course content to present practices and philosophies that can help us consider our relationship to each other, the world around us, and to the past and future.

This course provides a forum for in depth critiques and exploration of students' individual directions within the context of sculptural practice. Both technical and conceptual input will be given on a tutorial basis. Group discussions, readings, slide/video presentations, field trips and visiting lecturers may augment this class. Enrolled students will be assigned a studio space in the Columbus building. A maximum of 15 students will be admitted per semester. IMPORTANT: This course requires instructor consent. Please do not email the instructor directly. Instead, fill out the form found at this link, https://tinyurl.com/yjpm32ww, to submit your portfolio and application before the deadline.

This course provides a forum for in depth critiques and exploration of students' individual directions within the context of sculptural practice. Both technical and conceptual input will be given on a tutorial basis. Group discussions, readings, slide/video presentations, field trips and visiting lecturers may augment this class. Enrolled students will be assigned a studio space in the Columbus building. A maximum of 15 students will be admitted per semester. IMPORTANT: This course requires instructor consent. Please do not email the instructor directly. Instead, fill out the form found at this link, https://tinyurl.com/yjpm32ww, to submit your portfolio and application before the deadline.

Advanced students pursue individual casting projects while continuing to develop and refine casting skills. Alternative investment techniques are explored. Emphasis is placed on individual experimentation and development.

Design for Nonhuman Kinds is a course series that asks students to think 'outside the human,' by decentering human perception and subjectivity in favor of animal knowledge and experience. Design for Nonhuman Kinds challenges students to design and build forms that enrich the lives of animals in captivity by engaging their behaviors, cognitive thought processes and perceptions. In an era of climate collapse, mass extinction and a greater recognition of the ways humans and non-human beings co-constitute one another, we are beginning to recognize the limitations of anthropocentric thinking and making. This interdisciplinary course encourages design inclusivity and speculative thinking. Students will work with scientists, sanctuary staff, as well as contemporary theorists to study animal subjectivity and the relationship between design inclusivity for disabled persons and animals. Students will work in teams to design and build appropriate forms for animal enrichment. Courses included extensive collaboration with The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee in which students designed and built prototypes for African and Asian elephants, and collaboration with the Center for the Great Apes in Florida in which students design and build prototypes for orangutans and chimpanzees. Future courses will introduce various plant and animal species.

COURSE GOALS:
The investigation is experimental, in that it addresses design inclusivity and thinking outside of the human; interdisciplinary, as it will draw from the histories and practices of both disciplines relying on speculative and even metaphoric thinking alongside concrete design and build strategies; and practical, as we will be working with an existing organization allowing students the opportunity to work in a partnership capacity outside of the school. This course asks students to think in a `non-anthropo-normative¿ manner, a challenge posited by very contemporary theoretical frameworks (the nonhuman turn, the animal turn, disability studies) that have had a strong influence on art and design. Yet, as the process involves responding to a specific scenario and making objects whose material properties are responsive to the scenario, students will have an opportunity to grow familiar with complex materials and forms. This is a critical maker's course.
Please contact the instructor for details on joining the class.

This interdisciplinary studio seminar based in the Sculpture department is designed for graduate students from across the institution who are interested in exploring the tools, processes and theories that guide and support advanced sculptural works.

This course begins with an overview of the facilities and processes that the Sculpture Department provides. Processes include woodworking, metalworking, mold making and digital processes. The aim of the course is to allow students to safely and competently use sculptural processes in their individual studio and research practices. After four weeks of introduction, authorization and training, the course allows students to design and execute independent projects. This work is supported with theory, research, advising, planning, production and critical discussions.
Readings and lectures will touch on the history and practice of Sculpture. Students will engage with the history of Sculpture and analysis of how contemporary artists use sculptural processes in the production of works in related fields, including performance, installation and more.
Students will produce a series of work samples to establish competency within the studio processes covered. After that, they will imagine, design and complete a body of work suitable to their own individual research and studio goals that will be presented in a critique at the end of the session.

This seminar focuses on developing a shared language for interdisciplinary critique, and on understanding one's own work better through fine-tuning how you look and talk about each other's. We will proceed with the assumption that all artworks are by nature collectively authored in that they emerge from, and contribute to, the ongoing conversation of art. This is an interdisciplinary seminar consisting of studio visits informed by selected readings and discussions, short writing assignments, and one longer piece of writing related to your work. This class aims to help you deepen your relationship to your work, and to develop an ease with, and appetite for, theoretical discourse and critical dialogue to help sustain your practice in the long-term.

Future Practice seminar presents philosophies and practicalities to hone student discipline both in the studio and in the administration of their practice as resilient strategies for a life-long, artistic career. This seminar advances the work of 2nd year sculpture graduate students by critiquing the student¿s entire portfolio ¿ reflecting on past and current work as a means of identifying multiple, narrative arcs and pathways to generate inquiries and ideas for new work. This course aims towards a complexity of practice with that will allow artists to enter and navigate the art world with a diversified portfolio and practice. Students will claim themselves as experts of independent research topics conducted to inform their work and be able to theorize cultural conditions that will determine future practice. Students will present their propositions for practice in a monthly, school-wide colloquia, called Sculpture Dialogues where students present their work along with a visiting artist/practitioner and reflect how sculpture¿s criteria is challenged by the determination and exercise of young sculptors today.

4-5 Readings due during the first 5 classes with lectures, screenings, and public artist talk presentations. Student will review works in three group critiques: portfolio analysis, project proposal, and artist presentation

1. [Systems: Historical Present] Susan Buck Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October Volume 62, 1992. Part
2. [Systems: History] Silvio Larusso, What design Can¿t Do
3. [Sites: Public Practice] Alexander Nagle, Medieval to Modern
4. [Systems: Environment] Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History

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.

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.

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.

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.