Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year Undergraduate Students.

Major Requirement | BFA

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year Undergraduate Students.

Major Requirement | BFA

The scientific term adjacent possible refers to small evolutionary shifts away from an established position to a new position. Eventually, increments of deviation become stepping stones for the creation of a new species. In the studio context, the adjacent possible affirms the generative power of adjustments, revisions, and redirections, and recognizes the potential of unexpected anomalies.

The versatility of drawing makes it especially suited for opening up your decision-making to innovate and allowing new concerns to radically or subtly shift your work. In this course, broad biweekly open-ended prompts will help you generate new drawings through a responsive, critical, and experimental process. At the beginning of the semester you’ll define and produce initial works to begin the process. After that starting point, you’ll be challenged to find intersectional depth within your interests as you consider what is relevant and important in each new prompt. When you pivot toward producing the next cycle of drawings, you’ll build your confidence and creative elasticity.

Elective

This course creates a structured yet individualized space for developing a series of drawings. Initially, each student will identify important aesthetic, narrative, and conceptual concerns to launch their visual and material-based research. A broader and prolific generative process at the beginning of the semester will lead to more refined and more specific choices. Students will pursue multiple iterations of the concepts and aesthetics that interest them, culminating in a series of cohesive works. Responsive, directed weekly group and individual discussions will be aimed at invigorating the decision-making process and critiquing the work at each stage of development. This course can be taken for credit as a studio elective or as a Drawing Concentration course. As with any studio elective or Drawing Concentration course, your pursuits can connect to your work in your major or serve as an opportunity to create work distinctive from your work in your major. The class is co-taught by two instructors to give you a wider critical context for understanding and responding to the development of your work.

Elective