In this studio course students will expand beyond traditional exhibition strategies by exploring the possibilities that various locations, both indoors and outdoors, hold. Each student will explore themes that are important to them by putting handmade and found objects into conversation with the formal, emotional and historical properties of specific sites. This course will introduce students to global trajectories of Installation Art that include the varied practices of Pope L., Kishio Suga, Sheela Gowda, Xu Bing and Ann Hamilton to name a few. The class will combine presentations on artists and short readings with prompt driven projects that lead up to independent work.

This course offers a focused investigation into putting things together mainly using hand tools with minor usage of heavy machinery. Students will be introduced to various joining methods including various wood joineries, basketry, riveting, sewing, weaving, and other cold connections. This technique-driven course also provides various traditional form giving methods such as wood bending, wood carving, metal bending, sheet metal forming etc. This course will allow students to re-defined their relationship between hand and materials and it will encourage them to find a meaningful connection with the making process. Each student will explore their own unique way of making and investigate themes of their interest in line with how it's made. This course will examine the work of Martin Puryear, Richard Deacon, El anatsui, Nick Cave, Alexander Calder, Judith Scott, as well as many others.

This course fuses the digital to the real world. Making sculptures that range from small-scale objects to both proposed and realized installations, students will utilize 21st-century means of drawing at the intersection of the Parsons Making Center. Through Computer Aided Drawing (CAD), rendering, rapid prototyping, and a headfirst dive into the E4 metal shop, students will make their way through their concepts while exploring a range of artists and practitioners who employ similar literacies. This course will examine the work of Baseera Khan, Grace Lee Lawrence, David Howe, Jonathan Brand, David Hammonds, The Ben Keating Foundry, Maker Space NYC, as well as many others.

In this special topics 3D class, students learn about different approaches to sculpture, installation, and object making with special emphasis on performativity. The goal is to explore objects as extensions of the body/adornment, the body as object, installation spaces activated by participation, and kinetic objects that perform on their own. Research on artists working performatively in sculpture include Cassils, Ann Hamilton, Jordan Wolfson, Guadalupe Maravilla, Jacolby Satterwhite, Pat Oleszko, and Scott Burton among others. In addition to contemporary artists active in the field, this course will include readings and lectures by theorists and new materialists like Jane Bennett to scaffold students’ artistic production. By the end of this course students will demonstrate nuanced understanding of object performativity and have executed four major projects on the themes listed here.

This course will focus on the interconnections between people’s lives and modern society. We will explore topics such as mass media, identity, politics, and the environment. Students will be encouraged to explore various media to convey their own perspectives on the interconnected relations between themselves and the world they inhabit. Through presentations and gallery visits students will be introduced too artists who exemplify this approach including Doreen Gardner, Guadalupe Maravilla, Yeon Ji Yoo, Angela Yuen, Leilah Babirye EV. Day, Chiharu Shihota, Cassils, Julia Phillips, and Cristina Tufiño. By utilizing the facilities in the Making Center, students will continue developing hands-on making skills so everyone in class can build their sculptures or installations with integrity and confidence.