Courses

Students will learn techniques used by Japanese potters, and those from around the world, to make vessels associated with the production and consumption of tea. Both handbuilding and wheel throwing processes will be explored throughout the term. We will investigate how Japanese pottery traditions, especially the Mingei “arts of the people” movement of the 1920s, have influenced contemporary ceramics practice in the United States and how cultural appropriation impacts arts practice. Special attention will be paid to the use of local materials from Carleton’s Arboretum as well as wood firing and traditional raku processes. Requires concurrent registration in ARTH 266.

This course will introduce the basics of silkscreen, an art technique used to create everything from t-shirts and band posters to fine art. We will engage with different aspects of this artistic process to generate imagery, including color mixing, layering, combining analogue and digital output, as well as contextualize the historic and contemporary tradition of this art form. This course will emphasize creativity, artistic growth, and technical skill development.

The integrative exercise for the studio arts major consists of an independent research project involving experimentation, reflection, and deep engagement in the production of a cohesive body of artwork. The comps process is designed to give students the opportunity to develop ideas over the course of a term with close advice and support of the studio faculty and fellow students. Class of 2025 the department highly recommends students take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of the senior year. Class of 2026 will be required to take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of senior year.

This 3D foundations course will engage students in learning to articulate and dissect the elements of three-dimensional design. Using metal, wire, clay, wood and found objects, students will construct and fabricate three dimensional objects while developing an understanding of visual language and its power to tell a story or convey a message. 3D modeling software will be explored as a way to conceptualize ideas before creating them in physical media. Students will study examples of historical and contemporary artists and designers to provide context for their projects.

The integrative exercise for the studio arts major consists of an independent research project involving experimentation, reflection, and deep engagement in the production of a cohesive body of artwork. The comps process is designed to give students the opportunity to develop ideas over the course of a term with close advice and support of the studio faculty and fellow students. Class of 2025 the department highly recommends students take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of the senior year. Class of 2026 will be required to take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of senior year.

Understanding the basic techniques of drawing the human form is fundamental to an art education and is the emphasis of this class. Humans have been engaged in the act of self-representation since the beginning of time. The relationship artists have had with drawing the human body is complex and has been the subject of religious, philosophical and personal investigation for centuries. Concentrating on representational drawing techniques we will explore a variety of media and materials. Supplemented by lectures, readings and critiques, students will develop an understanding of both contemporary and historical approaches to drawing the human form.

In this hands-on course, taught (in an art studio) by a sculpture professor and computer science professor, we'll explore and create interactive three dimensional art. Using basic construction techniques, microprocessors, and programming, we bring together sculpture, engineering, computer science, and aesthetic design. Students engage the nuts and bolts of fabrication, learn to program microcontrollers, and study the design of interactive constructions. Additionally, students will deliver technical presentations describing their work and receive feedback for improvement. Collaborative labs and individual projects culminate in a campus-wide exhibition. No prior building experience is required.

ARTS 220* is cross listed with CS 220*.

This course focuses on lost wax casting, 3D modeling and printing, and stone setting as methods to create jewelry and small sculptural objects in bronze and silver. Specific instruction will be given in the proper use of tools, torches, and other equipment, wax carving, and general metalsmithing techniques. Through the use of 3D modeling software and 3D printing, new technologies will expedite traditional processes allowing for a broad range of metalworking possibilities.

This course will engage in relief printmaking, a tactile and versatile form for creating multiples of art. Using materials like wood and linoleum, we will design, carve, and print blocks for the printing press and consider our art work in both historic and contemporary contexts.

This course challenges students to move beyond the basic technique of drawing the human form and into a more focused artistic practice centered around the complex relationship artists have with the body. Concentrating on representational drawing, students will investigate a variety of media and techniques building on their previous experience with drawing from life. Lectures, readings, and critiques provide opportunities for reflection and growth.

This course focuses on the creative possibilities of throwing on the potter's wheel as a means to create utilitarian and sculptural objects. Students are challenged to explore conceptual ideas at an advanced level.  An understanding of aesthetic values and technical skills are achieved through studio practice, readings, and demonstrations. Basic glaze and clay calculations, various firing techniques, and a significant civic engagement component, known as the Empty Bowls Project, are included.

The integrative exercise for the studio arts major consists of an independent research project involving experimentation, reflection, and deep engagement in the production of a cohesive body of artwork. The comps process is designed to give students the opportunity to develop ideas over the course of a term with close advice and support of the studio faculty and fellow students. Class of 2025 the department highly recommends students take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of the senior year. Class of 2026 will be required to take five credits of comps fall or winter term of the senior year and one credit in the spring term of senior year.

Between 1300 and 1600 depictions of witches, monsters, and demons moved from the margins of medieval manuscripts and the nooks of church architecture to the center of altarpieces and heart of princely collections. Although this diabolical imagery was extremely diverse, it came from one place: the mind of the Renaissance artist. This course examines how images that came from within were devised and fashioned into works of art. It considers why fantastical imagery that showcased the artist’s imagination was so highly valued during the Renaissance–a period typically associated with the rebirth of classical antiquity. Finally, it explores the connection between illusions, visions, dreams, and other visual phenomena that highlighted the potential malfunction of the mind, and artistic creation. Some of the artists discussed include, but are not limited to, Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Staggering wealth inequality spurred by transformative technological innovation and unbridled corporate power. Political tumult fueled by backsliding civil rights legislation, disputed elections, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Culture wars. American imperialism. Such characteristics have increasingly fueled comparisons between the present day and the late-nineteenth century in the United States. The Gilded Age witnessed the flourishing of mass culture alongside the founding of many elite cultural organizations—museums, symphony halls, libraries—that still stand as preeminent civic institutions. With an occasional eye to the present, this seminar examines the art, architecture, and cultural history of the Gilded Age.

Since NASA's "Whole Earth" photographs emerged in the late 1960s, people have struggled with humanity's place in the cosmos and our interconnection with all life on our "blue marble." How can we comprehend the whole while valuing each component of this complex system? In the U.S., Romantic landscapes and frontier imagery continue influencing perception despite tensions with vast scales of space, time, data, history, and non-human perspectives. These challenges of seeing our planet and ourselves have inspired diverse creative responses across photography, new media, mapping, alternative archiving, theater, music, data visualization, and other interdisciplinary approaches.

Artists have long explored the dual themes of plant cultivation and knowledge cultivation. What explains this connection between horticulture and pedagogy in art? This course examines these interconnections, beginning with early modernist art circles and following their influence on developments like Black Mountain College and Joseph Beuys's Free International University. We then explore contemporary artists who employ permaculture gardens, traditional ecological knowledge, ecofeminist principles, guerrilla plantings, and foraging as tools to foster new social, political, and spiritual understandings. Through these practices, artists cultivate not just plants but future-oriented ways of knowing and being in the world.

This course will examine the history and aesthetics of the tea ceremony in Japan (chanoyu). It will focus on the types of objects produced for use in the Japanese tea ceremony from the fifteenth century through the present. Themes to be explored include: the relationship of social status and politics to the development of chanoyu; the religious dimensions of the tea ceremony; gender roles of tea practitioners; nationalist appropriation of the tea ceremony and its relationship to the mingei movement in the twentieth century; and the international promotion of the Japanese tea ceremony post-WWII. Requires concurrent registration in ARTS 236.

This course will trace major trends in western architecture from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the dawn of the Cold War, concentrating especially on the decades from the 1870s through 1950s. We will discuss technological developments and stylistic issues in different cultural and political contexts, such as Chicago after the Great Fire and Berlin after the Great War. We will consider critiques of modern material culture, from the Arts & Crafts movement to Soviet Constructivism, analyze styles from Art Nouveau to Art Deco, and consider new building typologies such as train stations, department stores, and skyscraping office buildings.

Why did Renaissance artists produce hundreds of paintings of the Christ Child touching his genitals or presenting his genitals to someone, for instance his mother the Virgin Mary, inside the picture? Why did images of the dead Christ emphasize or exaggerate Jesus’s genitalia? And why were these phallic features of Renaissance religious painting not openly discussed and debated in art historical scholarship until 1983? These questions are at the heart of this course. In order to answer them we will examine the art critic Leo Steinberg’s groundbreaking book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983) and the dramatic responses Steinberg’s book engendered. 

This course will provide students with foundational knowledge in the art, architecture and archaeology of Egypt, East Africa, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia from the Neolithic through Late Antiquity (ca. 7,000 B.C.E. – 650 C.E.). Students will gain an understanding of the relationship between the visual material and the social, intellectual, political and religious contexts in which it developed and functioned. In this regard, students will also gain an understanding of the evolution of, and exchanges and differences among, the visual cultures of these time periods and regions. It will also expose them to the preconditions for contemporary geopolitics in the region.

This course will survey the history of ideal plans for the built urban environment. Particular attention will be given to examples from about 1850 to the present. Projects chosen by students will greatly influence the course content, but subjects likely to receive sustained attention include: Renaissance ideal cities, conceptions of public and private space, civic rituals, the industrial city, Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris, suburbanization, the Garden City movement, zoning legislation, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, New Urbanism and urban renewal, and planned capitals such as Brasília, Canberra, Chandigarh, and Washington, D.C.

An intensive study of the nature of art history as an intellectual discipline and of the approaches scholars have taken to various art historical problems. Attention as well to principles of current art historical research and writing. Recommended for juniors who have declared art history as a major or a minor.