Special Topics courses offer students opportunities for more concentrated focus beyond general curriculum offerings. Courses may align with an instructor’s own research, they may propose topics responding to contemporary events and issues, or they may offer a specialized skill. Primarily intended for advanced undergraduates and graduates in Art Practice but open to others.

How have contemporary artists used the visual language and resources of archives and collections to inform their work, and even to subvert and challenge historical power dynamics? Archives and institutional collections can provide material for artistic inquiry, but can be fraught with limitations and blindspots. Who is included and who is left out of these archives? We will look at alternative archives that function as institutional critique, artist-made archives, radical community archives, parafictional projects that pretend to be archives, and artist projects that subvert the archive. This upper-division studio course is ideal for students interested in working on a semester-long project that utilizes archival material in their artwork (images, photographs, text, stories, oral histories, etc.), including but not limited to: museum/institutional/anthropology collections, libraries, public resources and community archives, "the internet," family histories, folklore, and other spaces in which information is gathered and held together. Students will develop a thematic project and timeline, dive into the research areas of their choice, prototype ideas and materials, work together to provide feedback and critique, and produce a final body of artwork. Projects can utilize forms such as painting, drawing, sculpture and installation to new media such as websites, databases, publications, books, performance, and video. Prerequisites: junior or senior Art Practice major, MFA Art Practice, or by permission of instructor.

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Requirements class fulfills