Class Snapshot: 'The Artist at Work'

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This spring, 13 Princeton undergraduates are exploring the artist's studio from historical, contemporary, physical and conceptual perspectives in a Princeton-Mellon Initiative funded course, "The Artist at Work."

Instructor: Irene Small, assistant professor of art and archaeology, who teaches courses on modernism and contemporary art and criticism in a global context.

This is the second time Small has offered the course. "The most important realization I want students to have is that the artist's studio — broadly defined — is a site of rigorous intellectual practice and exchange," she said. "The course also aims to build skills of close reading, looking and formal analysis, and to facilitate a serious engagement with critical discourses related to the field of contemporary art."

Description: The course is structured around five visits to the studios of artists in New York City. This semester, the artists are Jonathan VanDyke, whose work is inspired by the legacy of Abstract Expressionism; Tania Bruguera, a Cuban performance artist and political activist; Gedi Sibony, a sculptor whose practice builds on minimalist and conceptual strategies; and Taryn Simon, whose work integrates photography, text and graphic design. The preserved studio of the minimalist artist Donald Judd, who died in 1994, is also a class destination.

Students engage in weekly readings and discussion on a range of texts, from art history to artists’ writings and criticism. Assignments include interviewing Princeton students in the Program in Visual Arts and writing about their work in the mode of a professional critic introducing the artist to the public. Students also write an analysis of a work from the exhibition "In the Studio" on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York. One class is held in the Princeton University Art Museum, focusing on paintings produced in the context of 18th- and early-19th-century studio workshops.

Full story at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S42/66/10O31/index.xml?section=featured