ARTH 302(S) When Art Needs Room to Breath: Public Art Beyond the White Cube
This course will consider the history, controversies, and evolving aesthetic approaches to publicly sited art from Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, removed from its downtown NYC site by court order, to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates for Central Park, to Mark Dion's Seattle Vivarium, a 60-foot nurse log housed in a monumental urban greenhouse created in collaboration with, amongst others, scientists, ecologists, and botanical illustrators, and Rick Lowe's community-based Project Rowhouse in Houston. Through lectures and guided readings, it will provide an overview of landmark projects including "plonk" art in corporate plazas, site-specific commissions, and new-genre public works as the foundation for student discussions and interactions with artists, curators, and representatives from architecture, government, and non-profit public art commissioning organizations. The course will also include a practicum in which students work together in teams to research, create/curate, and problem- solve actual public art projects unfolding in the Berkshires and beyond. The instructor is the Director of the Williams College Museum of Art. She is chairing a campus committee on public art at Williams, and is the former artistic lead of the new Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront.
Format: seminar, discussion based on topics connected to required readings, practicum. Final grades determined by presentation of this project and completion of associated essays synthesizing this collaborative work, critical participation in discussions and review of the practicum projects of other students, and one written exam.
Prerequisites: any 100-level ArtS or ArtH, and any 200-level course in ArtS, ArtH, Theatre, Sociology, Environmental Studies, History, Psychology, Women and Gender Studies, or permission of the instructor. Enrollment limit: 12 (expected: 8). Preference will be given to undergraduate majors in studio art or art history/graduate students art history.
Hour: CORRIN