Artist Studio Practice

Catalog description

This course will engage students directly in the discourse of contemporary art and in the hugely diverse practices of artists in their studios in New York. Framed predominantly around studio visits, the course will expose students to hybrid mediums and working strategies that will complicate, not facilitate, systems of categorization. Meeting outside of the physical classroom for the majority of the semester, students will be expected to be prepared to navigate the city independently to various locations across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens for site visits. Each week, we will sharpen our abilities of seeing, questioning and understanding not only physical spaces of creativity but also mental strategies of production across a wide variety of media. Supplementing the visual feast of these weekly adventures, students will participate in material workshops at a number of artist’s studios and will build a record of influences, ideas, research and modes of making in individual sketchbooks that will be compiled during the semester and which will help inform the class’s collaborative project at the culmination of the semester – a Studio Guide to assist in oblique strategies of creating. Weekly readings, videos and podcasts will introduce elements of art criticism, theory, philosophy and history and will inform our understanding of what we see and how we approach making in the studio. Prior experience in object-making is recommended, however, it is not required. This class is best suited to Collaborative Arts BFA students as well as NYU students through the Open Arts program.