This full-time, low-residency visual arts and studies program integrates in-person and remote learning to explore not only art-making but also trends in contemporary art criticism, with a focus on this year's Whitney Biennial. Our work will be driven by a spirit of experimentation and criticism, two forms of generative inquiry that exist in dialogue with each other through practice. “Experiment” is from the Latin verb experiri, signifying the process of observing, risking, and testing through experience, and “criticism” is from the Greek, kritikos, which means to make judgments, to decide, to discriminate, essential capacities for art making and the study of visual culture. By embracing experimentation as both method and ethos, this program will help to develop a studio practice using form, basic materials, and research, and an art writing and criticism practice using analysis and interpretation of visual culture to help us decode our ways of seeing, judging, and forming tastes in an image-saturated culture. As we encounter imagery through contemporary art and art history, our local physical surroundings, social media, the internet, and advertising, how are these contributing to visual sign-systems, histories, and politics that shape our constitution of self, other, and culture in ways beyond language and conscious awareness?
The first half of the quarter will prepare students for their individual art projects with studio workshops that experiment with materials, abstract forms, and processes, and critical writing assignments that will explore reflective writing on artistic practice, formal description, analysis, and discernment. Students will then develop an individual project (including research, individual meetings, a project proposal, and a final essay), with formal critiques of studio work throughout and culminating in a final exhibition. Students will attend the Evergreen Art Lecture Series to hear from artists, writers, scholars, and activists.
Expect to develop a degree of artistic practice and critical and visual vocabulary and literacy through challenging texts and images by John Berger, Barthes, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Thomas McEvilly, Holland Cotter, Fred Moten, and Susan Sontag; Francis Bacon; Robert Rauschenberg; Kara Walker; Louise Bourgeois; and artists in the Whitney Biennial. Classes include lectures, seminars, critique, studio workdays and workshops, and student-led salons. Assignments include weekly progress reports on program work; creative materials exercises; reading and writing for seminar; 3 critical visual essays; and an individual art project with critiques of in-progress studio work; an annotated bibliography, proposal, and project essay.
Travel to New York City: In Week 5, there will be an optional research trip to NYC to attend the 2026 Whitney Biennial exhibition. This one-week immersion treats the city as a laboratory for visual culture, with visits to museums, galleries, artist studios, and foundations moving between traditional and avant-garde work at both the 'centers' and 'margins' of visual culture. Students who plan to go on this trip register for 16 credits.
This program is for students who are ready to commit to their studies, to engage deeply, take risks, remain open to discovery, and accept that meaning emerges through process rather than being predetermined. It serves exploratory and entry-level students in the Visual and Media Arts and Humanities Paths; students with appropriate backgrounds can do intermediate- and advanced-level work.
Credit Options:
16-credit CRN is for students registering for the research trip to New York City.
12-credit CRN is for students not registering for the NYC trip.
Low-Residency Schedule:
Students are required to meet in person at the beginning and end of the quarter and may use the on-campus designated studio for the entire quarter or set up a home studio.
Weeks 1-2 and 8-10: Required to be in-residence in our campus studio (there is some flexibility for out-of-state or not local students).
Weeks 3-6: Class sessions will be mostly remote. Students may work remotely or in the campus studio, which will be available all quarter.
Weekly Schedule: Monday: 10-1 PM Tuesday: 10-3 PM Wednesday: 10-1 PM Thursday: 10-12 PM
Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:
4 - Visual Art: Experimental Studio Practice, Material Investigation, and Critique
4 - Writing: Critical Analysis, Experimental Writing, and Visual Studies
4 - Research Trip to New York City or Equivalent Regional Experiential Research
4 - Individual Studio Project
Registration
Academic Details
Cultural non-profit or private organizations and institutions in art, writing, curating, education, and administration; Entrepreneurial or contract work in art, writing, curating, and education; Graduate school in philosophy, aesthetics, curating, critical writing or visual art
$280 fee includes museum passes, artist studio visit fees, and travel to Dia Beacon.
Students can expect to pay $2000 to $2300 to cover airfare, local travel, lodging, food to New York:
$500-750 airfare
$240 local travel (public transportation to and from the airport and around the city)
$700-800 board (at $90-100/night for 7 nights)
$280-420 food ($40-60/day)