The curriculum is constructed of five interpenetrating subjects: drawing, painting, photography, mixed media and critical studies. Each student will study and practice all five areas as a means to better encounter and assimilate visual principles. Most students will declare a major concentration in painting, photography or mixed media. Drawing is a continuing activity over the entire course of instruction. Photography students, who initially may have a reluctance to draw, find the experience informs their work and their thinking, and they adopt it enthusiastically. Critical studies, including involvements with art history, are included as well as regularly scheduled presentations and seminars. Instructors are present in the studios for demonstrations, critique and discussion at stipulated times each week. At other times the students further their work from models and set ups as well as executing individual solutions to assignments defined by the instructors. Fall 2009 Series Descriptions - "Truth & Beauty" The resonance between concepts of truth and beauty will be explored throughout the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 semesters. Issues related to nature, traditional beauty, the sublime, horror, expression and challenges to the concept of Truth in favor of multiple truths will be explored. Rather than being a chronological history of aesthetics, multiple aspects of aesthetics with particular relevance to the contemporary visual artist will be encountered along with identifying significant positions in aesthetics over history. Spring 2009 Series Descriptions - "Redefining the Avant Garde" The early and neo-avant-garde as a component of modernism and as a force in 20th-Century art will be considered. The concept of the autonomous artwork, aesthetics and the interaction of the spectator with the artwork will be traced. The dilemma presented by the Avant Garde's evisceration under postmodernism as a result of widespread acceptance, market endorsement by the art world, and investment by the financial establishment will be explored. Fall 2008 Series Descriptions - "Spatial Concepts & the Visual Artist" An exploration of the visual artist's involvement with spatial concepts. Semester readings will follow on the considerations of the last two semesters which included Jed Perl's Laissez Faire Aesthetics, Charles Taylor and Lionel Trilling's essays related to ethics and authenticity, Paul Tillich's A Prefatory Note to New Images of Man, Wallace Stevens's essay related to the imagination, William Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Proust's observations on intellect and the senses, Gertrude Stein's Pictures and Krishnamurti's thoughts on creativity. Readings and discussion will explore the internal as well as external spaces the artist must encounter, engage, bridge and unify. Spring 2008 Series Descriptions - "Sense, Intellect and the Imagination" The semester will build on last semester's investigation of form and metaphor and the artist's authentic involvement with his/her work and the matter of the freestanding artwork. Fall 2007 Series Descriptions Spring 2007 Series Descriptions