Courses
The BSVA draws from required and elective course offered by:
Painting and Drawing | Photography | Printmaking | Sculpture
Foundation and General 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
What are possible paths for the life and career of an artist or designer? ComX complements Foundations studio courses by bringing first-year Art+Design students together as a community. Classes include visiting lectures, field trips, alumni panels, and experiential activities. Students are assigned an upper-level peer mentor to meet with each week in small groups to help support their curricular experience.
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
How do you develop an idea? In this course, students take a thematic journey while learning research skills and building a personal archive. Through monoprint, transfers, screen print and relief printmaking techniques students explore printmaking concepts of series, sequencing and narrative. Emphasis is on the process of making and the challenge of expressing ideas.
Credits: 3
How do we communicate visually? What makes a compelling visual experience? This course introduces fundamental graphic design-based strategies for making creative thinking visible that are relatable to all visual practices and media. Mixing theory and experimentation, students will engage in a reflective process of research, ideation, and prototyping—learning how to learn in an environment of boldness, joy, and curiosity.
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
This course introduces the fundamental skills and vocabulary needed to design, create, and analyze three-dimensional works of art. A variety of materials are explored, including wood, metal, plaster, clay, and mixed media while working with various techniques and tools. Students investigate sculptural concepts as they relate to objects, the body, and built and natural environments.
Credits: 3
Students explore traditional and contemporary approaches to photographic and time-based art. Projects consider pictorial space, narrative strategies, sequence, sound, video, social practice, screen interaction, and coding. Lectures, practical exercises, and discussions foster artistic growth, providing students a place to develop a focused practice of image-making. Students will explore objective and subjective ways of seeing.
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 explore the interdependence of form and color as an aspect of visual language engaging word, image, proportion, and order through 2- and 3-dimensional construction. The study of color as a reflective and contemplative endeavor engages writing and speaking skills.
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
Students learn how to use Adobe Photoshop to expertly work with images to create expressive works. They experience making digital art for print, multimedia or social media. Each participant will make a body of work that articulates a central idea and their increasingly advanced skills. Readings and lectures will focus on the history of photo-editing software and diverse contemporary applications.
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
Students use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the art-making process, exploring different methods for collaboration with AI's. Students explore how the AI's were taught, their defaults or biases, what they reveal about our world and themselves, ethical questions and future implications. The course is centered on hands-on learning through direct experience and reflection, augmented with readings, lectures, and discussion.
Credits: 1
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
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
Students experiment individually and in partnerships within and without the class, broadening and deepening skills in observation & presentation as a primary means of comprehending exhibition design as a purposeful, comprehensive communication of form and content. 2 and 3-dimensional work incorporating journal writing, drawing, and continuing critique in diverse media underscore ongoing exchanges with the Neuberger Museum of Art and Yale University museums/institutes.
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 And SCP2150
Explores the sociopolitical dimensions of the arts across diverse creative outlets. Students examine and make art in relation to the politics of power in society and engage the activist dynamics of artistic expression with regards to persistent forms of inequality and oppression.
Credits: 6
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
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
Using still photography, students make a photo book inspired by their observations and experiences of Pisciotta, Italy. Students develop content using the visual languages of photography and artists’ books. Narrative strategies and consideration of sequence, rhythm, design and layout are discussed and tested. Working with digital cameras, editing/layout software and internet publishing, students create a self-published, printed book.
Credits: 4
Students explore the land, our ancestors, and local wildlife to develop our relationship to this particular place. Through a combination of readings, time in the woods, and handcrafts with wild materials, students explore the Purchase campus as a site of past, present, and future interactions between humans, within nature, and human-wild relationships.
Credits: 3
Students experiment individually and in partnerships within and without the class, broadening and deepening skills in observation & presentation as a primary means of comprehending exhibition design as a purposeful, comprehensive communication of form and content. 2 and 3-dimensional work incorporating journal writing, drawing, and continuing critique in diverse media underscore ongoing exchanges with the Neuberger Museum of Art and Yale University museums/institutes.
Credits: 3
While exploring language as an artistic tool, students will focus on the use of language as an artform from an historical and contemporary standpoint. In this semester, students will use the Spanish language to engage in critique and conversations about language in art. They will utilize their conversational Spanish skills for art-specific dialogue. A casual/conversational fluency with Spanish is recommended.
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: 3
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
Students will explore art materials and processes to broaden their artistic practice and develop learning experiences for a variety of settings including the traditional classroom, museum spaces, community centers, and pop-up events. Through individual and group projects, students will exercise problem solving, leadership, organization, collaboration and communication skills necessary to successfully teach hands-on art projects.
Credits: 3
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: 4
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
This seminar is focused on artistic research and designed to complement advanced art practice. It prioritizes research, theoretical and art historical readings, discussions, and development of student ideas through writing and presentations. The goal is to prepare students for their senior thesis and post-bac professional opportunities. To achieve this, each student will articulate a series of statements about their work.
Credits: 3
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