Curriculum & Courses

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.

Musicking is an analytical methodology developed by musicologist Christopher Small which redefines music as a verb and a performance of social relations wherein producer and audience reciprocally participate. This course uses this approach as a starting point towards broader definitions of participatory culture and investigations of other sensorial media that intersect or compliment musical participation. We examine music's unique position in 'Visual' Studies, fluidly situated between so-called 'high' and 'low' artforms, between pop-culture and creative practice.

This course provides an introduction to social theories of visual communication and to methods of critiquing, producing, and displaying visual representations of cultural phenomena. Drawing primarily from anthropology and ethnographic research, students will explore the significance of visual images to represent and document identity, behavior, and everyday life. This includes examining how even ways of viewing - sight - are shaped, and also vary by and within, culture. Influences from film, photography, and graphic design provide examples of how the social sciences may incorporate these technologies from other disciplines, into behavioral analysis and to understand culture. However, the consequences of visual content creation and circulation (unintended or otherwise), features heavily in the course topics such as: travel photography, photojournalism, social media, and digital activism.

Course readings and ethnographic films focus on documentary developments spanning the 20th century - from the silent picture era, scientific cinema, and cinema verite - to internet media like virtual reality, gifs, screenshots, and Tik Toks. In reviewing this learning content, students will conduct comparative analysis of still, moving, and digital images while also creating their own visual content in the process. Learning activities include in-class breakout groups and students presentations, as well as independent work involving ethnographic drawing, a photo essay, film critique paper, and meme ethnography research project.

Curating today is a dynamic, many-facetted activity with open boundaries: artists, writers, historians, editors, event-, festival- and symposium organizers generate projects, configure actors and move objects across platforms. This course will trace pathways through the many options contemporary art worlds hold. It will explore curatorial rationales, outcomes and support materials by parsing examples through images, readings and site visits. Students are encouraged to develop curatorial prototypes. Both playful experimentation and the framing of more formal proposals will be supported.

This course will focus on socially engaged art practices through which participants are encouraged to be directly involved in the creative process. The seminar will explore project planning, strategies of engagement, participatory methodologies and the development of resources designed to facilitate working in collaborative situations with social groups, communities and publics. Participatory art considers approaches to art making which engage publics in generative processes that allow participants to become co-authors as well as observers of the work. At its core, participatory art requires that the artist makes space for co-creation by removing themselves from the work or receding enough so as to become an equal partner and participant in the project. In this seminar we will explore ideas of authorship, authority, agency and interaction as themes central to generative collaborations between artist, audience and environment.

This three hour seminar is a professional practice class which examines what it means to have a productive, critical practice. Students not only refine their own identity as generative artist-scholar-citizen but also learn to represent that practice professionally with CVs, portfolios, project proposals, artist statements, and scholarly abstracts. Students also work collaboratively on exhibition projects to experience how different creative roles such as artists, curators, writers, and venue directors interact in the art world.

This course aims to critically examine the affects of race and representation of others. Students will interpret nineteenth-century and early 20th-century material and non-material culture from anti-slavery and pro-slavery sources, including biblical literature, slave narratives, print media, music, visual art, and ephemera. The course considers moral motivations for recognition, empathy, assistance, and liberation of others in an era of sentimentalism. Students will interrogate modern ideas in helping relationships as they learn to 1.) explore the role of cultural materials in preserving trauma or the history of violence; 2.) discuss the role of cultural imagery in the production of charity and empathy; and 3.) ask contemporary questions about the role of desire in feeling responsibility and doing good. Throughout the course, students will be required to travel to several local archives including the Newberry Library and the Stony Island Arts Bank for research.

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

This course offers several graduate-level trajectories through visual studies, each with its own historical precedent, some drawn from neighboring disciplines and some manufactured sui generis, but all sharing one common concern: how power manifests and what it might mean to bear witness. Each week begins with a canonical text and extends its lineage to contemporary thinkers invested in how a schematic of power concretizes through the shifting context of our current moment. Contained here are multiple histories of ways of seeing, state surveillance and policing, biopower and state sovereignty, queer embodiments and the representation of gendered and raced bodies, time and its illusions, visual networks and otherwise occluded spaces of technology, and the spectacle of capitalism. The final half of the term will be devoted to your own work, in the form of shared research, lecture-conversations, and seminar papers. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

In the introduction to Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen suggests that the study of photography has been largely divided by two opposing points of view, one that is interested in the essential, formal characteristics of photography and another that considers photography, and photographic meaning, to be determined by cultural context. Starting with this general rubric, we examine how that divide is addressed, reinforced, reconfigured and dismantled in recent studies of photography. Readings range from the pre-history of photography to digital imaging. We discuss works by cultural historians and art historians, and consider both popular and professional photographic practices. Texts will include books by Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Mavor, Robin Kelsey, Blake Stimson, and Christopher Pinney, among others. Class assignments include rigorous weekly discussions of the readings, two turns at leading class discussions, a final presentation based on the final project for the course, and a final project that may be written (15 pages) or studio-based.

Psychoacoustic research entered the popular consciousness at the frontier of media studies, imaged as the future of art and listening. This course considers a range of experiments in recorded sound and the growing archive of human sonic ecologies: sonic utopias, cyborg sound poems, the human archiving of self, and popular culture phantasmal media -- a blend of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.

Publishing yourself and publishing others will both be addressed in a start-to-finish manner as we cover the key aspects of publishing as a creative enterprise, from pitching and editing to fundraising and promotion. We will look at various historical and current models for both digital and print publications as students develop and produce their own publishing projects.

The thesis, as the final requirement to be fulfilled for the Masters of Art degree in Visual and Critical Studies, is expected to constitute an original contribution to the current body of research in its field. For the thesis, students are encouraged to use innovative approaches to research and analysis, and the formats with which they disseminate the outcomes of their research. The thesis requirement may be satisfied in a variety of ways incorporating visual, sonic, and verbal media. This seminar assists the student in selecting, researching, analyzing, designing, and, organizing the thesis. During this semester, the student selects her or his thesis advisor and two other faculty committee members and defends the proposal before this panel. The student also completes most of the research and the preliminary work for the thesis. This seminar is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies. Open to MAVCS students only.