Spring 2015

Spring 2015
Making Sense of the City
Subject associations
ARC 449
This course starts from the premise that to engage the spatial politics of cities of the Americas, we must engage with the senses. We will ask how vision, affect, and smell shape our understandings of and connections to urban space. And conversely, how different spaces condition our sensorial experiences. Employing the critical, interpretive and theoretical knowledge of the humanities, we examine how these sensorial markers of belonging in urban spaces relate to and expand social markers of citizenship, political boundaries, gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
Instructors
Johana LondoƱo
Mariana Mogilevich
Spring 2015
Photo, Urbanism and Civic Change between 1960-1980
Subject associations
ART 388
In conjunction with the concurrent exhibition The City Lost and Found, this course focuses on an extraordinary period of visual responses to the changing fabric of America's three largest cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. We explore their seismic transformations, from political protests to urban renewal projects. Students assess original artworks, films, texts, photographs, and a variety of print media (all on view in the Princeton University Art Museum) and analyze readings from disciplines as diverse as cultural geography, urban planning, urban theory, and art history.
Instructors
Katherine Anne Bussard
Aaron Peter Shkuda
Spring 2015
Princeton Atelier: Performing Environmental Stories
Subject associations
ATL 497 / ENV 497
The term "social practice" refers to an increasingly popular form of public art that takes a participatory and often lighthearted approach to urgent social and political issues. In this Atelier, we will create an eco-corps that focuses on environmental issues. Students will design interactive projects--for example, tours, games, hoe-downs, dances, podcasts, installations--that encourage the audience to experience, perform, and reimagine environmental problems and solutions.
Instructors
Kelly Christine Baum
Jenny Price
Spring 2015
The Artist at Work
Subject associations
ART 349
What are the environments, fictions, fantasies, and ideologies that condition the artist at work? This course takes as its investigative locus the artist's studio, a space of experimentation and inspiration, but also of boredom, sociability, exhaustion, and critique. Structured around visits to the studios of multiple practicing artists in New York City, the course tracks the trope of "the studio" from the Renaissance to the present, with emphasis on the concept's reconfiguration and reanimation in contemporary art. Lecture with discussion and field trips.
Instructors
Irene Violet Small
Spring 2015
Topics in American Literature: Mapping NYC Modernism: Lit. and Art
Subject associations
ENG 357
The years 1880-1930 overturned much of the settled ground of art and literature. Cities accelerated these changes by bringing together disparate racial, ethnic, and artistic communities, nowhere more so than in New York. Through a study of multicultural literature and the arts, we will begin to map the role the city itself played in these transformative years. We will also travel to the sites that made these narratives possible--including extensive study of the holdings from our own museum collection--engaging in experiential learning about the modern period and studying the lasting aftereffects of modernism on the city in the 21st century.
Instructors
David M. Ball