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Beyond its use in commercial and fine art photography, image compositing is a useful tool for artists and designers more broadly. This course will cover processing, combining, and editing images in Adobe Photoshop to an intermediate level. Students will learn about the Photoshop interface, and how to work with images using filters, masks, levels, color and saturation controls, and a variety of selection and editing tools to create digital collages and composites. Student work will culminate in a large-format printed project.

Chavela Vargas has often been called “la voz de México”. An iconoclastic figure, a publicly queer woman singing rancheras and comporting with radical artists and activists, her life is a study in refusing to submit to social norms and embracing the power of art as an act of solidarity, resistance and love. 

Westworld (Season 2) HBO’s “science fiction western thriller” television series, drives a broadly-conceived visual culture/cultural studies course in which we identify and analyze various aesthetics and genres, histories and visions, typologies, theologies, and allegories on screen and off—both inside and outside the show’s narrative.

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

Understanding the form of a container is an integral part of the aesthetic reconfiguration of nature in Ikebana. The concept of activating an interior architectural space with collected cut plants and their arrangement stems from ancient Japanese animism. The container is considered a mysterious receptacle for the sustainability of life and acts as a symbolic focal point in its spatial context.

This course will track the development of the long poem and extended poetic sequence as a poetic form in 20th and 21st century poetry. While the long poem does not have a narrow, succinct definition and can refer to many types (and lengths) of writing from sonnet cycle to verse novel, long poems are often associated with the ambition to write an iconic, all-encompassing, be-all end-all lyric or iconic text, allowing a writer to be encyclopedic and maximalist in how they see the world, to communicate a world view or indulge in obsessive world-building.

This course is an introduction to unique prints, or prints that are not necessarily printed as an edition. We will emphasize the making of mixed media prints using a broad range of methods from monotypes to digital prints. The class is structured around a series of projects where rigorous experimentation is encouraged.

Every fictional universe has its own history, culture, geography, and ecology that act as a backdrop to the narratives that inhabit it.  This course will investigate the relationship between such a fantastical place and its characters – with a particular emphasis on the philosophy and symbology of the characters and their clothes.

Although it was born in India, Buddhism has had a deep and profound influence on Chinese and East Asian culture, but this philosophy remains relevant to modern life in both the East and West. Students will be introduced to the spirit of Buddhism through modern Mandarin interpretations of classic Chinese Buddhist poems and stories. Students will explore Chinese Buddhist concepts while building on their competencies in listening, speaking, reading and writing Mandarin Chinese.

“Disability justice culture is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as important [to disability justice culture] as a blog post about accessible bathroom hacks—because they are interdependent.”
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This course is an introduction to Sabar (traditional dance, drum, and ceremony) from Sénégal and Gambia and Traditional West African Mandingo dance and music forms.

This class is for seniors writing extended manuscripts in a unified genre: literary criticism, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, screenwriting, or a hybrid form that combines genres. We welcome entirely hybrid-form manuscripts, but mixed collections, i.e. some poems with some prose, are not acceptable in this class, for we privilege extended immersion in a single genre. Think of your work as having two, equally important parts: The steady development and drafting of your own project; and sustained engagement with the work of your peers.