An edible weed can grow from a crack in the bricks. A single seed can grow into an oak that can live 400 years. As we experience unprecedented transformation around us, we will explore cultivating creative practices that consider the 7 generations principle. Are we being good ancestors? We will use sound, text, video, and drawing to deepen our sensorial connection to the world around us. How will these artifacts be understood by future generations? Will their world resemble ours? What does it mean to cultivate connectedness to a landscape that is transforming? What does it mean to record that for an unknown future? We will experiment with materials that change, grow, and propagate: bioplastics and myselia; seedbombs and seedbanks. Can biomimicry be a catalyst for creative invention? We will examine and draw inspiration from relationships and systems of the natural world and weather data. We will discuss the Earthseed poems within Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” and their vision of inevitable change that can be shaped. Can individuals be the seeds who shape a changing world? Can artists? We will explore the work of Guadalupe Maravilla, Joiri Minaya, The Lenape Center, Fallen Fruit, and Kim Stanely Robinson, among others.

This observational-based painting and drawing course engages the facts, fictions and impossibilities inherent in visual perception when focused intensely on a portion of the phenomenal world. Working directly and extremely close-up from “life” students will produce thoughtful and responsive works, cultivating technical skill, conceptual ingenuity and material experimentation. While reality will be the primary source, experiences with abstraction will be embedded and encouraged: the more specific you make something the more it becomes something else. Realism is not necessarily the goal, rather the record of a hyper-attentive and specific investigation as a means for insight and for learning painting: how your touch is caught and held, how your thinking and intentions become forms connecting to the eyes and minds of others. Discussions will present artists such as Ellen Altfest, Sascha Braunig, Jennifer Packer and Josephine Halvorson. Fundamental techniques for drawing and for basic ground preparation, oil and acrylic painting mediums and direct as well as indirect processes will be taught. We will learn abstract principles that organize composition, depict spatial illusion and describe form while developing a shared language for critiques. After a series of guided prompts students will self-direct their own projects, choosing and creating their own observed subjects as armatures to foster spaces for their own individual ambitions and perceptions.