This beginning course will provide comprehensive technical instruction on basic glass coldworking" processes including glass polishing, sandblasting, etching, cutting, engraving, gluing, laminating, glass drilling. Students will apply new technical skills to self-generated projects. Students must maintain detailed technical notes and a project sketchbook.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Major Requirement | BFA Glass

The student is expected to begin refining a personal viewpoint that incorporates glass in preparation for the graduate degree project. Studio work continues to include consultation and group critique with department faculty, its visiting artists, critics, and the student's own outside advisors.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

All Glass junior, senior and graduate degree program students meet together to engage both practical and theoretical issues of a glass career through: field trips, technical demonstrations, visitor presentations, and direct exchange with visiting professionals from relevant disciplines through student/professional collaborations, artist residencies, individual consultations, critique, and organized group discussion. Class will require reading, active participation in weekly discussions, and prepared student presentations.

First-year graduate students register for GLASS-435G (Fall) and GLASS-436G (Spring).

Second-year graduate students register for GLASS-437G (Fall) and GLASS-438G (Spring).

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

All Glass junior, senior and graduate degree program students meet together to engage both practical and theoretical issues of a glass career through: field trips, technical demonstrations, visitor presentations, and direct exchange with visiting professionals from relevant disciplines through student/professional collaborations, artist residencies, individual consultations, critique, and organized group discussion. Class will require reading, active participation in weekly discussions, and prepared student presentations.

First-year graduate students register for GLASS-435G (Fall) and GLASS-436G (Spring).

Second-year graduate students register for GLASS-437G (Fall) and GLASS-438G (Spring).

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

This graduate seminar provides an intensive study of current critical issues in contemporary art. Each Fall a visiting curator or critic is invited to lead the course. While the themes covered each semester will vary with the visiting instructor, the structure of the course will remain the same. The class is divided into two segments: a seminar and a studio. Each week the seminar lasts for three hours followed by studio visits with each student. This course helps students carry the dialogue of contemporary art issues into the studio more effectively.

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

This is a semester long research study group focused on Alchemy and Glass. As a discipline and a material, Glass is inherently connected to Alchemy. Their combined histories have shaped our understanding of the relationship between material and meaning, the role of process in art and science and, ultimately, the ways in which making shapes knowledge. One of the goals of this research group is to explore the conceptual and material potential of Alchemy through Glass. Our research will combine the examination of practical, theoretical and historical texts along with hands-on experiments in Glass Department Shops. The group will meet weekly for discussions, research presentations, lectures and working/lab sessions. As the semester progresses the direction of our research will be determined by the materials brought forth by the group.

Elective

This seminar is for graduate students who are preparing their written thesis. Within the context of this writing-intensive course, we examine the thesis form as an expressive opportunity to negotiate a meaningful integration of our visual work, how we think about it, and how we wish to communicate it to others. In support of this exploration, weekly thematic writing sessions are offered to open the imaginative process and to stimulate creative thinking as a means of discovering the underlying intelligence of our work. In addition, we also engage in individual studio visits to identify and form a coherent 'voice' for the thesis, one that parallels our actual art involvement. Literary communications generated out of artists' and designers' processes are also examined. The outcome of this intensive study is the completion of a draft of the thesis.

Elective

The course aims to create sufficient awareness of what yields life on earth, and a complementary biocentric view of the world. New ethical and critical challenges are continually presented to human society with the growth of material science and its implications for design; the course introduces sources and research references to assist with our understanding of these challenges. We explore aspects of human knowledge of living systems, providing a research-based approach to such topics as BioDesign; biomimicry in materials, processes, and structures; functional morphology and the cognitive phenomena of Biophilia. The 'affinities and aversions' we as humans have regarding natural living systems are in everything: from the spaces we inhabit to the metaphors we employ in order to understand complexity in general, including issues connected with health, recuperation and resilience. Using the recently extended facilities and resources of the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, faculty and graduate students together create opportunities to experiment, observe, and learn about the networked aspects of living systems, materials, structures and processes. Theoretical frameworks associated with the biology of living systems, the growth and formation of natural materials including the contemporary revolutions in evolutionary theory are introduced and examples discussed with visiting specialists.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00

Elective

This course frames contemporary art as a set of conversations, arguments and counterarguments that have been proposed in key exhibitions, works of art, and critical writings produced across multiple continents over the past three decades. We will identify and critique the ideas that have shaped contemporary art, discuss their impetus, and examine their assumptions. Through such conversations, the course presents contemporary art as a form of processing a present and a past in which the artwork is indivisible from the dialogues and conversations that create, define and continue to change it. The title of the class alludes not only to the idea of making and reading contemporary art as cognitive, rhetorical and dialogic activities, but also to the art world as a series of geographically dispersed and temporally promiscuous processes, deeply resistant to modernist systems of order, periodization and mapping. The course combines lectures by the instructor, as well as by visiting critics and art historians, which outline some of the key issues and historical pressures of contemporary art, alongside seminar-type discussions where we process the lectures and select readings as a group.

Elective

Theories of NatureCulture is a graduate-level critical and cultural theory seminar with a focus on environmental justice approaches that lays the foundations for advanced study in the interdisciplinary field of nature-culture-sustainability studies, introducing students to vital topics, theories, and perspectives in the environmental humanities.

Why does mainstream US environmental thought conceive of nature and human culture as separate? Are they really a dichotomy? What does it mean to describe something as “natural”? What do the humanities and arts have to contribute to environmental studies and environmental justice? This iteration of Theories of NatureCulture asks students to engage with a variety of cultural production, including poetry, essays, short fiction, film, music, and critical theory to analyze how the concept of nature is represented in different cultural imaginaries, as well as the embodied and material consequences of its representations. The course will expand and complicate students’ understandings of environmentalism by asking them to carefully and thoughtfully engage with a variety of ecological modes of thought, including: queer ecologies, ecofeminisms, Black ecological imaginings, Indigenous environmental thought, anticolonial environmentalisms, eco-crip theory, and Black feminist ecologies, among others.

In this seminar, we will carefully read and discuss a range of texts centered on environmental issues and concepts. Our readings and discussions will be complemented by field trips, writing assignments, group projects, and site visits. Close engagement with theoretical material will enable us to consider how different styles and disciplinary practices encourage particular forms of comprehension and interaction with the environment. This course is open to all graduate level students and to junior, senior/fifth year undergraduate students, with priority given to those in the NCSS and other Liberal Arts concentrations pending seat availability.

Elective

The poster has been an archetypal graphic design format since the late 19th century when lithographic printing technology came of age and captured the imagination of artists, bringing their vision into Paris streets. This course will invite you to explore future possibilities and contexts for the poster-as paper and as screen-building on its singular capacity to transform ideas into iconic picture planes; and examining the dynamics of typography and image, both still and in motion. Prompts will progress from individual posters, to sequences, to site-specific installations that explore the potential for interactive discourse in public space. Studio assignments will be supported with presentations and readings about poster history and contemporary poster design.

Elective

The poster has been an archetypal graphic design format since the late 19th century when lithographic printing technology came of age and captured the imagination of artists, bringing their vision into Paris streets. This course will invite you to explore future possibilities and contexts for the poster-as paper and as screen-building on its singular capacity to transform ideas into iconic picture planes; and examining the dynamics of typography and image, both still and in motion. Prompts will progress from individual posters, to sequences, to site-specific installations that explore the potential for interactive discourse in public space. Studio assignments will be supported with presentations and readings about poster history and contemporary poster design.

Elective

Digital text is an interface for so much of our emotive, interpersonal, industrial, and political lives. Language in digital space is inseparable from the aesthetics of automation, network culture, and its origins within computational history. What is the role of a graphic designer in digital space-where language is simultaneously content and code, and exists at such scales that we begin to call it data.

This course will be a laboratory for designers to explore the relationship between computation and language. We will transform text using processes such as paper cut-up, copy paste, autocomplete, crowdsourcing, and Natural Language Processing models. Through projects, we will explore questions like, How does the addition of computational ingredients- networks, automation, randomness, etc- affect the visual form and meaning of language? Who produces digitally-based language, and how?

Students will create projects through a range of expressions, including but not limited to websites, printed objects, and readings-out-loud. Students will be supported if they want to pursue project work through HTML/CSS, p5.js, RiTa.js, Twine, Scratch, or NLP engines like GPT2. As part of this class, we will also discuss the ongoing relationships between computation, reading, and writing in a social context - transcription workers, human computers, web moderators, and so on. Basic HTML, CSS and/or programming experience is helpful but not required.

Elective

Motion design is a powerful, foundational feature of digital screens. It helps direct the viewer’s attention, present information sequentially, add personality or depth to otherwise static graphics, contextualize interactive elements, and so much more. In this studio elective, students will learn the fundamentals of motion design and explore a wide variety of video and animation techniques. We will look at a wide range of influences and styles ranging from stop motion animation, to film title sequences, to early-Internet Flash animations, to interface design, to contemporary practices for brand identities and social media. Instruction will focus on digital motion design using Adobe After Effects, with additional tutorials in Premiere Pro, audio production, and HTML/CSS for web-based animations. Students will leave the course with a broad overview of the field of motion design and a deep understanding of rhythm, timing, sequence, narrative, and expression.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Elective

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of motion graphics, as well as the implementation of video, and sound design. Students will learn a variety of motion graphics software, such as Adobe After Effects and Premier, as well as studio tools like Ableton Live, and/or other audio-visual programs. Students will learn how to capture, manipulate, mix and optimize audio visual material for final production and implementation. Through a series of in-class and multi-week assignments, students will create animated projects that include motion design real-world assignments, as well as experimental exercises, with the goal of exploring intersections between graphic design, story telling, visual composition, and the realms of rhythm and sound. Adobe After Effects will be the primary production tool for this class. Each student will propose a long term project, this project will be developed throughout the semester and presented as the final project for the class. In addition to our software tutorials, there will be a series of short weekly lectures to review specific histories, and also current practitioners who are using motion graphics and sound to create works in the worlds of design, fine art, and performance.

Elective

Building on a collection of texts at the intersection of language, identity, and societal conditioning, this course examines the extent to which typography can engage in world building and the production and dissemination of proposals for alternative systems. Through a series of parallel assignments including reading, writing, and making, we will individually and collectively explore different strategies and mediums through which we can activate a multitude of voices and approaches that comprise our complex world of many worlds.

Elective

This course is for students who want to explore or further develop their understanding of typography. It will cover the study of letterforms, type classification, legibility, organization, and hierarchy, along with text applications, grid systems, and page layout. Typography will be examined as a means of communication and as a medium for experimental expression. Projects may include various studies that address text at both micro and macro levels and the creation of posters, signage, and publications. Systematic versus intuitive learning methods, or programming, will be introduced. 

Elective

Type + Code is a studio course in which students combine web programming with variable fonts to create interactive, dynamic typographic experiences. Students will become proficient in code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and type design (Glyphs) to create original fonts, web specimens, digital articles, and more. This course encourages students to push the boundaries on contemporary type design and find new or underutilized use cases for experimental typography, both as a form of expression and in practical applications. These experiments are supported by readings from a wide variety of influences, including video games, performance studies, and computer science. No prior experience in type design or coding is required.

From Letterpress to Inkjet: this workshop will offer the students a unique opportunity to connect the dots. Two technologies more than 500 years apart will inspire the students in finding either harmony or discord. Neither is proven wrong. Students will be introduced to the Type Shop through the techniques and procedures for setting and printing metal and wood type on the Vandercook proofing presses. Engaging in this historic craft, newly developed skills will be transformed into contemporary results. The students will unite the digital with the analog technology, for example by feeding a letterpress print through the inkjet plotter or to digitize hot metal type. The options are endless. Specifications on paper selection will be discussed and samples of letterpressed books will be shown for inspiration. Any such targeted integration of science and art goes beyond the sheer structural and aesthetic qualities of given product. But as regards graphic design "product," it must contain the conscious integration of the human factor, technology, and aesthetics to prove effective.

Elective

From Letterpress to Inkjet: this workshop will offer the students a unique opportunity to connect the dots. Two technologies more than 500 years apart will inspire the students in finding either harmony or discord. Neither is proven wrong. Students will be introduced to the Type Shop through the techniques and procedures for setting and printing metal and wood type on the Vandercook proofing presses. Engaging in this historic craft, newly developed skills will be transformed into contemporary results. The students will unite the digital with the analog technology, for example by feeding a letterpress print through the inkjet plotter or to digitize hot metal type. The options are endless. Specifications on paper selection will be discussed and samples of letterpressed books will be shown for inspiration. Any such targeted integration of science and art goes beyond the sheer structural and aesthetic qualities of given product. But as regards graphic design "product," it must contain the conscious integration of the human factor, technology, and aesthetics to prove effective.

Elective