Mining the Museum—What makes your pupils dilate when you look at an art work or artifact? This course will be a laboratory or workshop to experience and develop such instantaneous experiences of visual excitement: looking at artworks, objects, and artifacts in comprehensive museums in New York City like the Metropolitan Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney, as well as smaller more specialized museums like the New York Historical Society and museographical exhibitions mounted by commercial art galleries, as sources for something that could be useful to art work in unexpected ways: thus a filmmaker might find inspiration in the glaze of a Sung Dynasty bowl, a painter might snatch some bit of visual information from an Assyrian stone carving, a photographer could get information from a Rajput painting, a video artist could learn from Charlie Chaplin’s early two-reelers or from a Gee's Bend quilt. This course will engage and extend students in what potential sources for art can be – what may inspire surprising new passions for life long art making. The course will be conducted both through faculty-led visits to museums and galleries and through in-class discussions as well as faculty and student presentations.

This course will combine workshops, studio projects, and discussions to explore the multiple connotations of color. We will follow Joan Retallack's call to consider poetics and politics together through the term "poethics." We will use color not only as an emotional or aesthetic signifier, but also a means of philosophical and political inquiry. The aim of this course will be to better understand and control the use of color by grappling with a wide range of perceptual, formal and theoretical approaches. Short studio projects—including exercises in color interaction—will lead to more sustained independent projects. We will discuss Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color alongside Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color to better understand how we see and how we categorize and understand what we see. We will explore specific uses of color to explore issues including race and nationality. Examples include a consideration of black and blue, as deployed by Kara Walker and David Hammons, alongside Frants Fanon's writing on racialization. Byron Kim's problematizing racial categories by painting skin tones in his seminal Synecdoche paintings. We will consider Gray as a color of immanence as explored in Hito Steyerl's video Adorno's Gray, and theorized by Trinh Minha in Between Dog and Wolf. And we will consider red as a conveyor of spiritual significance in the sculptures of Chiharu Shiota and political power in the work of Sheela Gowda, amongst many others.