This course introduces students to the fundamental principles of visual language, including the formal, technical and conceptual aspects of image making in two-dimensions. Focus is placed on hand skills, observation, and implementation through a variety of materials, processes, and methodologies. Students will develop a visual and verbal language for analyzing, organizing, shaping, and communicating two-dimensional form and meaning.

An examination of color theory and its application to the art of painting.

Designing and sculpting of objects in clay, using such traditional techniques as coil and slab construction and throwing on the potter's wheel. This course provides an introduction to the ceramic process covering the nature of clay, application of glazes, firing procedures and aspects of the history of pottery. Drawing is part of some assignments. There is a laboratory fee.

This course introduces video as a medium for artistic expression and social investigation. Students gain an understanding of video production, including the video camera, sound, lighting, and editing (e.g., Adobe Premiere), with emphasis placed on the relationship among the camera, the maker, and the subject. Students explore video making and its broad possibilities within contemporary art. Screenings and readings of work by filmmakers, and contemporary artists are analyzed. This course may be repeated for credit.

An introduction to animation for story telling and artist expression. Students explore various techniques including metamorphosis, walking cycles, holds, squash and stretch, blur, and resistance using traditional and contemporary processes . Students undertake weekly assignments and a final project. Class screenings and critiques supplement in-class demonstrations. Course may be repeated for credit.

This course introduces the visual language of Drawing and its fundamental concepts and strategies. Emphasis is placed on drawing from observation. Strongly recommended for beginning students with no studio background, yet the subjects and ideas studied offer enough complexity for more advanced students.

This course is a study of drawing through practice and analysis. Emphasis is placed on drawing from observation, alongside consideration of abstraction and its potential. Recommended for beginning students with no studio background, yet subjects and ideas studied offer enough complexity for more advanced students. May be repeated once for credit.

Problems in representation and pictorial structure. The student learns about painting by concentrated study of the works of painters from the past and present and by painting from nature. Prerequisite(s): Any painting or drawing course

A study of photographic image making using digital technology. This introductory course covers concepts and techniques of photography and the use of basic image-editing software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop). The course offers improvement in perceptual awareness and the study of expressive possibilities, especially as they pertain to digital manipulation. A DSLR or equivalent digital camera with adjustable shutter speed and aperture is required. There is a laboratory fee.

Combining images offers many creative and expressive possibilities, from the construction of fictional narrative to the visual articulation of ideas for social or political commentary. Using image editing software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop), students gain proficiency in digital compositing techniques and develop efficient workflows to produce seamless images from multiple sources. In addition to producing and working with composite imagery, students study its historic context from early twentieth-century photomontages to digital fabrications employed by contemporary artists. There is a laboratory fee. Recommended background: AVC 219 or equivalent experience.

Physical remains from the ancient world are important for reconstructing daily life in past societies. The goal of the course is to familiarize you with the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world and the social contexts that gave rise to important sites, monuments, and objects. We will use archaeology and material culture as a lens to explore Roman values, political and religious institutions. We will examine critically how ancient sites and monuments have been appropriated over the centuries by different groups and why these sites continue to fascinate archaeologists, collectors, and the general public millennia later.

Our contemporary lives are unimaginable without the photograph, yet the medium has been shaping our world for almost two centuries. This course is an introduction to the visual, material, and cultural debates surrounding lens-based technology from its inception in the nineteenth century to the digital age. Working within a networked history of photography that constellates cross-cultural currents and comparative national frameworks, we will explore multiple and overlapping histories of photography, tracing the medium’s migration and adaptation in global contexts. From images made in artistic, scientific, political, and journalistic frameworks—to those that blur boundaries between genres—we will consider not only what is inside the frame, but also what occurs outside of the photographic frame. Key theoretical readings will structure our inquiry into ideas about vision and justice, while discussions will be grounded in the materiality of photographic objects and image technologies. We will engage with photographs firsthand through visits to the Bates College Museum of Art and area institutions as well as in-class object study.

Tea and Zen Buddhism came to Japan from China in the twelfth century. The tea ceremony developed from these imports and many schools have been formed since then, but all have kept the ceramic tea bowl as one of the most important focal points. In this course, students explore the history of the ceremony by making tea bowls and related utensils. Various clays, forming methods, and styles are explored. There is a laboratory fee.

Through lecture, discussion, object-based learning, and digital humanities projects, this course maps image and artistic exchange between the Euro-American and Islamic worlds from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Students explore reciprocal currents of visual and technological encounter in between imperial centers and across national borders. Taking a historical and critical view that highlights both continuities and ruptures between modernizing imperial social bodies, the course traces the ways in which material culture cross-pollinated Mediterranean geographies, charting how images were made and re-made beyond the prospects of national heritage. Beginning with colonial rule in India, students examine transnational dialogues across London, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Vienna, Tehran, Berlin, Baghdad, London, Cairo, Rome, and Mogadishu. Through case studies, students consider relationships among artists, printers, authors, and patrons in an increasingly global world.

Many people conceive of Vietnam through images of war rather than through its culture. This course offers students an opportunity to study modern Vietnamese culture through documentary and feature films produced by westerners and Vietnamese during the last fifty years. The course helps students to gain insight into a traditional culture that, in part, shaped the modern course of Vietnam's history. The course challenges the old stereotypical views of Vietnam advanced by Hollywood movies with the new cultural images presented through Vietnamese eyes. Not open to students who have received credit for AVC s29 Modern Vietnamese Culture through Film.

This course introduces students to the problematic and colonial histories upon which museums were built. Beginning with an introduction to postcolonial theory and institutional critique, students critically examine the containment of colonial objects and related efforts to control colonial bodies. By acknowledging colonial records and structural racism as the foundation upon which the modern museum was built, students grapple with historic and exploitative systems of power that formed the world’s first collections and still govern modes of display and interpretation today. Through experiential learning, the class engages with cases of repatriation and the marginalization of art histories from the Global South, and analyzes museum practice in relation to global migration, COVID-19, the racial justice movement, climate change, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The course uses the Bates College Museum of Art and Lewiston Middle School for community engaged projects.

This course surveys Chinese visual cultures, from the Neolithic period to the modern era, with a focus on exemplary artworks and monumental landmarks within cultural contexts. The course studies close interrelationships and related issues among the contemporaneous developments in religion, philosophy, and government and society. Topics studying, readings and discussions enrich students to gain a good understanding and knowledge of Chinese cultural issues, artistic developments, theories of arts, questions of patronage, and traditional indigenous art forms. Principal objects studied include pottery, bronze vessels, ceramics, porcelain, lacquer ware, architecture, sculptures, landscape and figure painting, and calligraphy.

This course surveys the history of Japanese art and visual culture focusing on the development of pictorial, sculptural, and architectural traditions from the Neolithic to the present time. The course explores the relationship between indigenous art forms and the foreign concepts, art forms and techniques that influenced Japanese culture, and social political and religious contexts as well as the role of patronage for artistic production. Topics include architecture, sculpture, painting, narrative handscrolls, the Zen arts, monochromatic ink painting, woodblock prints, decorative arts, contemporary architecture, photography, and fashion design.

Portraits have occupied preponderant places in East Asian cultures, depicting visual forms and revealing the subjects' spiritual essences. This course offers a cross-cultural study of portraitures in East Asian art. It introduces students to the physical likeness of a wide variety of subjects and explores underlying meanings and messages. It provides a comprehensive study of East Asian portraits, offers the current scholarship, and explores the core issues, including the relationship of portraitures, oral and written stories, the art of physiognomy, aesthetic principles and artistic styles, material cultures, and religious beliefs, social rituals, political ideologies, and underscored functions and meanings in the wide-ranging contexts. The course offers timely and astonishing transformations of the concepts of "self" examined via various aspects of social echelons, and reconsidering portraits as a thread to weave aspects of East Asian art together.

What does it mean to call an object or monument a work of Islamic art? The term has been applied to a global geography of visual cultures and works made between the seventh century and the present day. In this introductory course, we will explore the question by analyzing key works ranging from the c. 692 CE Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to contemporary art that challenges Orientalist assumptions about Muslim identities.

This course will examine the historical and archaeological aspects of death and burial in the Roman world from c. 150 BCE – 300 CE, in order to understand how the Romans cared for, disposed of, and commemorated the dead. We will explore culturally-specific attitudes to death, grief, mourning and funerals, alongside the physical monuments that commemorate the deceased. Geographically, we will focus on Italy, although case studies will span the Mediterranean world. Together, we will investigate Roman funerary rituals and follow the body on its journey from the world of the living to that of the dead, while exploring new narratives about death in different classes of ancient (and modern) society.

The course offers an introduction to the study of Buddhist art and architecture. It provides a broad spectrum emerging from the early development of Buddhist images and architecture to the modern artworks expressing Buddhist ideas; from images served as devotional objects and narrative telling stories to sacred sites and religious monuments served as pilgrimage centers. The course starts by surveying Buddhist art and architecture in India, and then traces its dissemination and transformation to other regions in Asia. It offers a complex picture of Buddhist art, reflecting cultural diversity and forms, the role of art and architecture, devotion and meditation.

This course examines the arts of Southeast Asia by focusing on significant monuments of the countries in the region. It examines the architecture, sculpture, and relief carvings on the ancient monuments and their relations to religious, cultural, political, and social contexts. Sites covered include Borobudur, Angkor, Pagan, Sukkhothai, and My-Son.

This course examines the important artistic tradition of narrative painting in China and Japan. Through study of visually narrative presentations of religious, historical, and popular stories, the course explores different contexts in which the works-tomb, wall, and scroll paintings-were produced. The course introduces various modes of visual analysis and art-historical contexts. Topics include narrative theory, text-image relationships, elite patronage, and gender representation.

The art of Zen (Chan) as the unique and unbounded expression of the liberated mind has attracted Westerners since the mid-twentieth century. But what is Zen, its art, and its culture? This course considers the historical development of Zen art and its use in several genres within monastic and lay settings. It also examines the underlying Buddhist concepts of Zen art. The course aims to help students understand the basic teachings of Zen and their expression in architecture, gardens, sculpture, painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Recommended background: AV/AS 243.

The study of medieval churches enables us to address many historical questions: how people used architecture to define their communities and their places in the cosmos, how traditional building practices and technological revolutions shaped spaces in different cultural contexts, how a monument’s users navigated spaces layered with images and symbolic meaning, and many intersecting concerns. This introductory course surveys churches built in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Caucasus between 300-1500 CE.

This introductory course focuses on visual cultures of the European “Middle Ages” (c. 350-1450). We will explore how objects like illuminated manuscripts, precious metal reliquaries, painted icons, silk textiles, and funerary sculpture shaped medieval understandings of faith, community, and power.

From antiquity to the present day, people have traveled to local or far-off sites to approach holy figures, to appeal for divine intervention, and to fulfill obligations. This course explores the material dimensions of these journeys, from the spaces entered and sites encountered to the things travelers brought or took away. The class focuses on shrines built and used c. 300-1500 CE.

This course reconsiders canonical notions of portraiture, and seeks to redefine portraiture as a cultural medium (and not an art historical genre) by which multiple identities are formed. In considering portraiture as a ground upon which beliefs, technologies, ideologies, and materials can be added, subtracted, exposed, and manipulated, students will consider how portraiture operates in different socio-political climates. Is a portrait always a face? Through visual and textual representation, portraiture offers an opportunity to study how facial likeness both reflects and constructs identity with artistic, scientific, and non-representational imagery. Classes will focus on historical precedents and themes related to biography/autobiography, presence/absence, power/privilege, as well as the interrelationship between the self and self-representation. Assignments include object-based analyses of portraits at the Bates College Art Museum, Maine MILL, and a semester-long digital humanities project.

This course examines the special expectations we have for documentary images—to tell the truth. Over the semester, students study the changing uses, definitions, and archives of documentary photography from 1839 to the present. Through lecture and discussion, students explore the ongoing nature of the documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. While scholarly discussions of the documentary are rooted in Euro-centric assumptions about lens-based media, this course includes international practices, concepts, and histories of documentary photography, engaging with the complex relationship between photographic neutrality, racial hierarchies, and colonial control. Readings and assignments concentrate on theoretical approaches to the documentary, raising ethical questions about the medium’s aesthetic practice and everyday popularity. Students utilize archival resources at area institutions and Bates college for research opportunities.

This course examines entanglements between artistic expression and the movement of people, ideas, and capital across the globe between the 19th and 21st centuries. Addressing visual culture’s relationships to these forms of movement, it focuses on the relationship between art and migration. The realities of which have de-linked art history from the nation-state and allowed for a recalibration between center and periphery. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates, this class explores current trends in artistic and cultural analysis, migration theory, and the politics of mobility through frameworks of decolonization and questions of identity. By looking at the circulation of material culture, ideas, and peoples, students consider art in relation to border, home, exile, and resistance. They analyze the multiple temporalities created by migration and intersections of visual culture, politics, migration, and the environment, examining how migratory movements have reshaped art, culture, and publics in recent decades.

Situating an intersectional trans and queer studies at the center rather than the margins of gender studies, this course has two primary and interconnected areas of focus: the study of people as gendered makers and viewers of visual culture, with emphasis on the later 20th and the 21st centuries; and the role of visual culture in the gendering of people, objects, activities, and more. With objects of study ranging from art-making to music videos to material objects like powder puffs, the course considers gendering in relation to matters including but not limited to race, ability, class, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, ability, and colonialism/settler colonialism.

This course considers visual constructions of race in art and popular culture, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. General topics include the role of visual culture in creating and sustaining racial stereotypes, racism, white supremacy, and white-skin privilege; the effects upon cultural producers of their own perceived race; and the relations of constructions of race to matters including but not limited to gender, ability, class, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, ability, and colonialism/settler colonialism.

This course combines scholarly inquiry and research of historical and contemporary social practice with practical studio experience and collaborative practice within the community with attention to issues of, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice and issues of power and privilege. Students study the history of socially-engaged art, looking at historic political posters and woodblock prints, murals, and other modes of socially engaged art as well as contemporary artists and collectives that utilize similar methods for their work. Students work with a community partner to understand strategic goals and concerns and collaboratively create an action plan that utilizes art making as a form of collaborative activism and support. The course focuses on the design and production of a collaborative studio project such as relief prints, a mural, or a community workshop; the course culminates in the performance, exhibition, and/or distribution of the collaborative work within the community.

Immersive Media Installation is an advanced interdisciplinary creative production course that guides students through theoretical and technical frameworks for combining sound, video, and live performance in the conceptualization of an artwork. Students will exhibit their work in Bates’ new Immersive Media Studio (“IMStudio”) located in Coram. This studio allows for artwork to be exhibited utilizing multiple projections and speakers to create immersive media architectures. Readings/viewings and discussion support students' understanding of intermedia creative practices in varied contexts. Weekly workshops support technical learning. Students will create two major creative projects through the term: one as a class collaboration, and one in small teams. Students will also learn about the process of media installation, media exhibition, will document their work and write a short artist statement, offering tools for professional artistic development.

A study of analog and digital animation techniques and materials for video. Students work with different drawing and painting materials, cut-outs, cameraless animation, under the camera destructive and constructive animation, objects, rotoscope, and compositing images in Photoshop. Basic sound design for animation are covered, including Foley and voice recording. After experimenting with these techniques, students propose and produce a short animated video. The course emphasizes the intersection among storytelling, content, and the animated image. Distribution for independent animation is discussed, including but not limited to film festivals, gallery/museum installations, and/or performances. Class screenings and critiques supplement in class demonstrations. Prerequisite(s): AVC 209 or 211.

This course emphasizes drawing from the human figure, the development of conceptual drawing attitudes, and drawing as a medium of lyrical expression. Recommended background: previous drawing experience. Prerequisite(s): AVC 212 or 213; or permission of the instructor.

This course explores work generated on the potter's wheel through making and studying aspects of historic and contemporary pottery. Emphasis is placed on developing utilitarian pots as students examine the processes, methods, and theories of ceramic pottery work, glazing, and firing. There is a laboratory fee. Prerequisite(s): AVC 203, 224, or s21. May be repeated twice for credit.

This course is an introduction to printmaking tools and techniques. Students learn fundamental printmaking concepts and develop skills using a hybrid of traditional, contemporary and environmentally safe techniques with intaglio, relief, and monotype methods. Emphasis is placed on development of a printmaking skills along with research based projects. There is a laboratory fee. May be repeated twice for credit. Recommended background: drawing experience.

Continued study in digital photography, offering refinement in technical skills as introduced in AVC 219. The further development of perception and critical analysis of images is emphasized. There is a laboratory fee. Prerequisite(s): AVC 219 or equivalent experience. May be repeated once for credit.

The history of the modern Mediterranean has often been described as a history of fragmentation, fueled by nation-building and divided by the forces of colonialism. This course will approach this history through the architecture of transcultural studies, examining narratives of twentieth-century migration. It will explore how material culture visualizes intersections of gender, imperial hegemony, and systems of labor, seeking to expand our understanding of work, homeland, and womanhood. Through object-based research, museum visits, and digital humanities projects, students question what role does “women’s work” play in histories of migration, cross-pollination, and connectivity? How do gendered representations of labor (paid and unpaid) or craft codify differences even inflicting segregation around the Mediterranean after 1900? This class illuminates an understudied and marginalized group – the female migrant - as an active agent in regional and trans-regional art history.

American art history has historically neglected the Islamic world. Yet, the long-standing relationship between the fields of American and Islamic art demonstrates a history of encounter and exchange. By examining the transnational circulation of modernisms across the Atlantic, this class highlights implicit biases in both fields. It explores an insidious Islamophobia and connects Orientalisms across the Atlantic in both Indigenous and Islamic contexts, investigating a deeply-rooted belief that outside of Europe and America, the 18th and 19th centuries were an age of stagnation, and decidedly unmodern. More specifically, by putting these art histories into conversation with one another, students will learn that the cross-cultural circulation of modernisms is critical to our understanding of American, Indigenous, and Islamic art. Course lecture and discussion will follow historical case studies, emphasizing the intersection of national frameworks and imperial contexts—many of which still today engineer a neo-Orientalist fervor in the American art market.

Choosing media they would like to investigate closely, students focus on methods and ideas in order to develop their work. Students are encouraged to investigate the possibilities that arise when they choose limitations on subjects, materials, processes, and form, and make a group of closely related works. This course offers an opportunity to maintain a regular, independent, and self-sustaining studio practice for a full semester. There is a laboratory fee. Prerequisite(s): two studio art courses in any medium. This course can be repeated if space is available.

In recent decades, many people have welcomed increased visibility of trans and/or gender-nonconforming people as a sign of progress. Yet who is visible and who do particular visibilities benefit and harm? This course uses a trans studies framework to consider both the products and the politics of visibility, with attention to the historical and current contexts. Topics include: the representation of queer and trans genders in contemporary visual culture; critiques of visibility in relation to state surveillance and white supremacy; and the interconnected roles of norms regarding race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and ability, among other matters, in perceptions and practices of gender normativity and transgression. Recommended background: at least one course with substantial work in gender, queer, or trans studies or the study of visual culture.

This course investigates conceptual approaches to art making through a range of topics represented in the contemporary and historic art world. These topics reflect pertinent contemporary social, ecological, and political issues reflected upon aesthetically by artists. Working in various media of their choice-students address overarching themes and approach making meaning through material exploration of ideas. Topics include the potential of format and material to explore meaning, with emphasis on a process that balances critical thinking with creative generation. Topics are introduced with examples of Divers, contemporary artists aligned within the same conceptual context. Prerequisite(s): two or more previous studio art courses. May be repeated once for credit.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

Students who have arranged to participate in an unpaid internship at the Bates College Museum of Art may receive one course credit by taking this course at the same time. Depending on the needs of the museum, internships may involve collections management, exhibition development, education programming, or research. The same arrangement is possible for students who obtain internships at the Portland Museum of Art or summer internships. Students may have internships throughout their college careers, but may receive credit for one semester only.

This upper level course provides students with prior painting and/or drawing experience an opportunity to further develop their work. Students will expand their understanding and capacity as makers by responding to a range of material and conceptual prompts. This course may be repeated for credit. Recommended background: AVC 214. Prerequisite(s): AVC 201, AVC 202, AVC 211, AVC 212, AVC 213, or AVC 214.

Considering recent debates regarding travel bans, the tenets of citizenship, and global migration, representations of landscape warrant renewed attention. How does land become landscape? How does place become property? This course seeks to answer such questions by decentering a white, patriarchal, Eurocentric vision that has canonized histories of landscape and situated survey practices as modern strategies of expansionism. By understanding colonial visual strategies: the emptying of land, erasure of people, picturesque composition, together with modern optical technologies: telescopes, microscopes, cameras, and even firearms, students will dismantle landscape as a scenic facade engineered to assert dominance and legitimize imperial politics. They will explore how landscape is fundamental to identity formation, placemaking, and settlement, connecting contemporary eco-critical methods to scientific missions of the 19th century through a capstone digital humanities project.

This course examines artworks produced by diverse communities in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia from the period ca. 500-1500 C.E. Through case studies of luxury objects, iconic architecture, monuments, and paintings, students explore the ways that artists, patrons, and viewers within Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions articulated spiritual and intellectual values and religious and socioeconomic identities. The course focuses on visual and cultural interactions such as commerce, gift exchange, reinterpretation of visual forms, and reuse of significant objects and spaces. Attention is given to scholarly debates on the concept of a "global" Middle Ages and popular (mis)conceptions about the medieval era. Recommended background: at least one course in art history, premodern history, or religious studies.

This course considers methods of pursuing research, thinking, and writing in the history and criticism of art and visual culture. Surveying a wide range of approaches, while attending to issues of power and privilege that have affected the histories of our field(s), the course works to prepare students to join curiosity, creativity, and scholarship in the development of a research proposal. Prerequisite(s): two 200- or 300-level courses in the history of art and visual culture.

Guidance in the development of a body of work in studio art accompanied by a short essay and culminating in an exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art. Students majoring in art and visual culture in the studio track take 457A in the fall and 458A in the winter and must take these courses consecutively in their senior year. Students undertaking a thesis in studio art meet weekly.

Preparation of an essay in the history or criticism of art and visual culture, conducted under the guidance of a member of the department faculty. Students may conduct a thesis in either fall or winter semester. Students conducting a senior thesis in history and criticism do not meet as a class. Students undertaking a thesis in the fall semester take 457B.

Guidance in the development of a body of work in studio art accompanied by a short essay and culminating in an exhibition presented at the Bates College Museum of Art. Students majoring in art and visual culture in the studio track take 457A in the fall and 458A in the winter and must take these courses consecutively in their senior year. Students undertaking a thesis in studio art meet weekly.

Preparation of an essay in the history or criticism of art and visual culture, conducted under the guidance of a member of the department faculty. Students conducting a senior thesis in history and criticism do not meet as a class. Students undertaking a thesis in the winter semester take 458B.

This course explores glaze, color, and design on ceramic tile. Students work with preliminary drawings and paper studies progressing to a series of handmade ceramic tiles. They investigate one technical approach to the glazed surface such as slips and glazes or tin-glaze majolica, and they strategize about tile layout using imagination and traditional perspectives of historical tile design.

The course provides a context for studying and analyzing images of the landscape by viewing and discussing historic and contemporary landscape photographs. Questions considered include the role of the sublime in current landscape photography, beauty as a strategy for persuasion, perceptions of "natural" versus "artificial," and contemporary approaches in trying to affect environmental change. Students explore the depiction of the landscape by producing their own body of photographic work. Recommended background: AVC 219.

In this course students consider a wide range of Vietnamese history and culture through a multidisciplinary lens. Students explore Vietnam within the framework and context of specific historical and visual culture, ranging from ancient monuments to contemporary sites. Students visit a variety of field sites including national museums, historical monuments, imperial palaces and tombs, and traditional craft villages as well as important sites of battles during the Vietnam War. Students discuss background texts and field trip experiences in light of their historical and cultural contexts. Recommended background: AVC 245 or s29.

The course will cover historical dress, (cross)gendered dressing, the levels of formality and seasonal patterns using a selection of vintage kimono. We will engage in kimono dressing, the visible mending technique sashiko, and the practice of preserving textiles with indigo dye. In addition, the course will address the issues related to Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and sustainability.

This course studies the major collections of more than 200 pieces of Asian art in the Bates College Museum of Art. They represent cultural richness and diversity in medium, and artistic expression, from the seventeenth century to the present in Asia. The course focuses on the art of shaman ritual objects from Southern China and Vietnam, on the popular images of the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and the painting of flowers, birds, and water creatures from the Edo period, and on political propaganda posters from the mainland China. The course a) provides students with the first-hand experiences of viewing real objects in the museum; b) offers students the underpinned cultural contexts and original functions, meanings, purposes, and aesthetic concepts; c) helps students practice writing museum pamphlets and a short catalogue. Moreover, the museum’s director and curators assist in facilitating the course to achieve its goals and objectives.

Settlements throughout history have been described as “textile centers” to indicate that their economies and environments were shaped by the production of cloth. Museum collections tend to frame textiles as luxury products that circulated within elite global networks. In this course, we will use the contrasting case of the Maine MILL to explore how medieval Italian cities like Florence, Lucca, and Prato were defined by the people who produced and profited from silk and wool, the networks of materials that went into the woven bolts, and the spaces and conditions of labor.

This course radically refocuses critical debates about contemporary photography on local image-making economies and vibrant centers of artistic production that too often sit at the margins of art historical discourse. It shifts the conversation away from dominant narratives that chart photographic history as a hegemonic Euro-American explosion of technology and instead orient thinking toward globalized photographic networks that connect continents, countries, and cultures. Through thematic lectures, discussions, and museum visits, students study photographic practices from outside of the Global North from 1980 to the present. This course seeks to decolonize the relationship between history and cultural representations by studying the migration of photographs and practitioners within the diaspora. Students will complete a term-length object-based creative project, incorporating photographs at the Bates College Art Museum.

Scene painting relies on visual illusion to achieve realism, and scenic painters must master creating two-dimensional works on a large scale that are seen at great distances. In this course students are introduced to a broad array of tools and techniques to turn paint and canvas visually into wood, marble, ornate stone carving, trompe l'oeil-virtually anything that exists in three dimensions. Projects are designed to be cumulative, building skills that can be incorporated into individually chosen final projects.

This course combines scholarly inquiry and research on historical and contemporary social practice with practical studio experience and collaborative practice within the community with attention to issues of equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Students study the history of socially-engaged art, looking at historic political posters and woodblock prints, murals, and other modes of socially engaged art as well as contemporary artists and collectives that utilize similar methods for their work. Students work with a community partner to understand strategic goals and concerns and collaboratively create an action plan that utilizes art making as a form of collaborative activism and support. The course focuses on the design and production of a collaborative studio project such as relief prints, a mural, or a workshop; the course culminates in the performance, exhibition, and/or distribution of the collaborative work within the community.

Three-dimensional models and two-dimensional images are a fundamental part of building, studying, and thinking about architecture. Architectural design practices are culturally specific, and many building traditions planned monuments prior to construction and communicated a structure’s form in a portable format. Students will learn about and practice different modes of historical and contemporary architectural representation, from the paper plan to the digital model. We will introduce the topic of architectural visualization through reading, discussion, and making. No prior experience with architectural history, studio art, or software platforms is required.

Independent study during the Short Term in the Department of Art and Visual Culture is available only in the history and criticism track of the department. Independent study is not available in studio art during the Short Term. Acceptance of a proposal for independent study is entirely at the discretion of the faculty member. Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.

The Intaglio short-term is a workshop in which students explore etching techniques with a focus on the language of print addressing concept, format, and context. Students will learn formal techniques of copper-plate etching, including hard ground, soft ground, sugar lift, and aquatint, with a hybrid of traditional and state-of-the-art methods. During this class, we will travel to an offsite museum/gallery to look at historical and contemporary examples of intaglio with attention to diversity and inclusion of marginalized and underrepresented artists. Students will complete a folio of prints with a self-directed thematic focus. The focus will be research-driven and examine the history and context of their topic. Readings on artists and issues of contemporary printmaking will be assigned throughout the short-term. This course includes a $75 course fee. Recommended background: background in drawing or printmaking. Prerequisite(s): AVC 212, 213, or 316; or permission from the instructor.