Visual Arts

An introduction to digital visual communications and basic creative software applications used by professionals outside of the visual arts. The course focuses on building a digital and visual vocabulary and developing skills within the Mac iLife suite and Photoshop. Concepts include basic design principles, resolution, printing, scanning, optical media, and multimedia presentations. Digital literacy is promoted through observation, discussion, workshops, tutorials, exercises, collaborative work, reading, writing, and small projects. Coursework is designed to integrate the student’s field of study with digital visual communications.

Credits: 2

This common experience brings freshmen in the School of Art+Design together as a community, allowing them to engage and draw links between the class activities and the rest of the foundation curriculum. Students experience happenings ranging from artist lectures, films, and readings to performances and field trips. Includes required meetings each week with peer advisors outside the scheduled class time.

Credits: 2

Drawing is explored as a distinct practice inspired by particular media and traditions, as well as a fundamental tool for exploring ideas across disciplines. Observational skills are emphasized, but seeing extends beyond the visual, enriched by physical, intellectual, and personal experience. Analytical and intuitive approaches are developed toward the goal of communicating significant form and content.

Credits: 3

Working thematically toward a finished project (realized in an artist’s book), students gain experience in traditional and alternative methods for art making. Digital media, printmaking, and photography are used as unique forms or in new combinations. Emphasis is on the process of making and the challenge of expressing ideas. Demonstrations, critiques, readings, slide lectures, visiting artists, and films are included.

Credits: 3

Introduces the fundamental theories and methodologies of visual communication that explore the relationship between form and content. Through observation, analysis, writing, exercises, and projects, students begin to develop work processes that involve articulation, visual research, concept generation, form making, and craft skills. Class time is spent generating ideas, establishing criteria, and making and refining form.

Credits: 3

Students explore various art-making processes through the unique lens of the cultures of India and Tibet. Readings, lectures, writing, and studio work are combined with locally developed research to form projects that focus on themes established by the instructor.

Credits: 4

A foundation studio course that introduces the fundamental skills and vocabulary needed to design and create three-dimensional works. Students explore areas of 3-D construction, sculpture, and design, ranging from object to installation and using a variety of processes, materials, and techniques, including wood, metal, plaster, clay, mixed media, and digital tools (e.g., vector and raster graphic programs).

Credits: 3

Students explore time- and lens-based artistic processes that use pictorial space, narrative strategies, sequence, sound, video, social practice, screen-based interaction, and coding.

Credits: 3

Students incorporate on-site drawing, ephemeral site-specific sculptures, and performance around the city, using both found and traditional materials. Exploration of the spaces that are Antibes is expanded to include not just the physical, but also the historical, political, and psychological.

Credits: 4

Students create a photographic essay that is inspired by their observations and experiences of Pisciotta. The development of content and narrative strategies, along with a consideration of sequence, rhythm, and layout in books, is discussed. Working with digital cameras (a simple one is fine) and Internet publishing, each student creates a self-published book.

Credits: 4

Students research, investigate, and comment on the architecture at Purchase College, using the Visual Arts Building as a focal point to investigate both 2-D and 3-D methods of site-specific art. Projects may include site drawings, temporary interventions with interior and exterior architecture, and object-based installations. All media and backgrounds are welcome.

Credits: 2

Engaging the daily newspaper as a readily available and highly tactile form of communication, students use broad and deep research to develop an understanding of the printed medium as a visual abstraction of its content. Students engage in diverse mediums to present their evolving, experimental work as an abstraction of the newspaper in a visual cultural and social context.

Credits: 3

Composition is an experimentation in synthesizing word, image, sound, and movement through close observation and cohesion presentation. Exploring the universality of composition in musical and non-musical terms engaging processes of translating and effectively communicating ideas from and within mediums and disciplines, students use their own evolving mediums of expression in diverse ways.

Credits: 3

Wordless books, or novels in pictures, are from the early 20th century. Using the medium of woodcuts, artists like Frans Masereel were able to create complex narratives told only with images. This course examines the history of these books and how they are relevant today. Students learn how to effectively plan, develop, and create a hand-printed woodcut novel.

Credits: 3

Color affects the work of all artists and designers. This seminar/studio engages two ways of understanding color: color behavior and color meaning. Assignments include color studies, readings, and discussions. Color is addressed as relevant to all media, and students are asked to make color studies and present analyses of how color is used in their own studio practices.

Credits: 3

Color is the most relative of all visual attributes. The seminar makes use of this relativity as the means by which visual awareness is heightened and refined through fundamental studies in color action and interaction. This is not a course in color theory; rather, it is a practicum in color as experienced. Mastery of basic color grammar and syntax leads to a personal sense of looking and expression.

Credits: 3

Juxtaposes art and science as inquiring and creative pursuits. Exchanging knowledge of the materials and processes used in their creative endeavors, students collaborate on three innovative projects that focus on perceived relationships between science and art. Visiting professionals, at work in studios and labs, provide insight into thinking and doing through and across the disciplines of art and science.

Credits: 3

Introduces new transfer students to the School of Art+Design, its faculty, and core values. The class explores what it means to be an artist at Purchase College. What are the expectations, challenges, and rewards? Activities include discussions, artist lectures, films, performances, field trips, and peer advising. Includes required meetings outside the scheduled class time.

Credits: 1

The collage medium is often associated with Cubism because it has the power to both fracture and reassemble shapes and images. This course explores the fabrication of two-dimensional artworks, using a variety of materials (both found and created), including paper, fabric, wood, metal, and string, along with drawing and painting elements.

Credits: 3

A survey of contemporary artists, ideas, and texts in which cross-disciplinary research and critique skills are taught. A combination of slide lectures, discussions of readings, and museum/gallery visits familiarize students with contemporary art discourse, its interdisciplinary character, and many of its important figures. Guest lecturers from various backgrounds visit throughout the term.

Credits: 3

An overview of electronic media and its relationship to the fine arts. This course covers the genre from its infancy to the present and focuses on the study of the art and artists critical to the genre’s development. Lectures, hands-on demonstrations, and visiting artists are augmented by assigned readings, critical writing, and examinations.

Credits: 3

Coordinated by faculty in Art+Design, this master class includes guest lectures by the resident artist in the Center for Applied Design and focuses on areas related to the particular artist’s pursuits. Students engage in collaborative research and studio production as they explore the cultural relevance and social impact of objects. Open to students in other disciplines; may be taken a maximum of three times for credit.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: (SCP2080 Or VSC2080 ) And (SCP2150 Or VSC2150 )

Juxtaposes art and science as inquiring and creative pursuits. Exchanging knowledge of the materials and processes used in their creative endeavors, students collaborate on three innovative projects that focus on perceived relationships between science and art. Visiting professionals, at work in studios and labs, provide insight into thinking and doing through and across the disciplines of art and science.

Credits: 3

An interdisciplinary investigation of making, using such methods as collage and assemblage. Working both digitally and physically, students explore materials, found images and objects, and original content, culminating in kinetic and animated projects.

Credits: 3

An extensive study of a particular topic or technique in the visual arts. Topics vary each semester.

Credits: 3

This colloquium augments the Art+Design undergraduate program by focusing on the independent research of a current MFA student with advanced standing. The graduate student shares his or her unique research through readings, workshop activities, studio critiques, writing, and other assignments.

Credits: 2

Students present their work for discussion by peers from across disciplines, creating a dialogue that mirrors those taking place in the arts at large. The result will emphasize interdisciplinary thinking and approaches to critique. Using the critical workshop as a model art world, students will exhibit work for the workshop-as-audience during each class period, examining how their studio practices (with its medium-specific or medium-diverse preoccupations) compare to those of students working with other materials and subjects. Intensive, in-class discussions will be supplemented with readings, screenings and writing assignments.

Credits: 3

Public art is used in this course to promote community engagement and cross-cultural interaction. Students use established, recognized methods of collaboration to explore local community issues, concluding with the physical implementation and exhibition of student-led solutions.

Credits: 3

Collaborate with Beninese students researching cultural artistic production in Benin. Activities include service-learning workshops at local mini-libraries; visits to cultural sites including Ouidah and the slave trail; visits to artists’ studios; and drawing and DIY printmaking workshops with both Beninese and Purchase students. Students write response papers, participate in class discussions, co-teach workshops, and make artwork.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ARH3030

A summer service-learning course that takes place in struggling urban centers, in which students work with city residents to help rejuvenate abandoned homes. Activities and topics include skill-sharing workshops with residents, readings, lectures, and Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, interrogating the impacts of gentrification, the roles of outsiders in development, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in transitional neighborhoods.

Credits: 4

Students will conduct independent research on the landscape of the region in terms of borders, history, politics, geography, and migration. This research will be compiled in various ways and result in a final artwork or paper to be determined by the faculty and student.

Credits: 4

Independent research is introduced as a major focus. Students gather threads from classwork, with their humanities studies, to begin a comprehensive archive. Discussion and critique reinforce the loop between making, research, and analysis. Course topics focus on advancing key frameworks in the field. The seminar serves as a laboratory for senior projects and culminates in an independently driven project.

Credits: 3

Students assist visiting resident artists in the School of Art+Design or the Neuberger Museum of Art with the creation of a new work. Duties are assigned, overseen, and evaluated by the faculty sponsor and may include fabrication, technical support, rendering, printing, or other artistic practices.

Credits: 6

In this seminar, which facilitates the peer-mentoring program, students are taught methods to support their roles as leaders and peer mentors of incoming students in the School of Art+Design. Their mission is to reinforce the student community, providing a support system that supplements the curricula. Tools are introduced in class meetings to enhance student experience and professional practice. Students meet weekly with their peer mentees.

Credits: 3

The class meets at various museums, galleries, and alternative spaces in and around New York City, where students encounter a wide range of media, aesthetic sensibilities, and institutional settings. At least one class is devoted to discussing student work in relation to concepts explored during the field trips. Student-funded travel required.

Credits: 3