When designing costumes, projections, sound, lighting, props, or scenery, do theatre designers read plays any differently than a director or an actor? Should they? When reading a play, to what does a designer respond? Theme, character, dialogue, stage directions, place, time, rhythm, flow, and arcs all play into a designer's process of discovering the visual and aural possibilities of texts. How does a designer sift through the body of a script and discover clues of the physical nature of the play? This course focuses on reading plays with design in mind.

Working collaboratively and individually, students will undertake a series of design exercises as they work toward shaping "performances" that are inspired by design ideas. Traditionally, theatre directors, playwrights, or actors take the lead in creating performed projects. What happens when designers initiate theatrical work? How can design speak to an audience? How does design develop narrative, tension, and conflict? After an introduction to the individual theatre design disciplines, we will examine methods that can carry an audience and sustain engagement.

An exploration of conceptual frames and artistic/literary strategies shaping the burgeoning field of Black Aesthetics, as exemplified by recent practices and theories. What role do notions of the aesthetic and the political play in shifts that are happening in the field? How do understandings of the cosmopolitan, the cross-cultural, the nation, the local, migration, diaspora, gender, race, queering, culture, and the global take form in current work? What new questions arise? Artworks in multiple media and traditions will be considered.

This course investigates the imaginative, mythic, historical, and aesthetic meanings of "America," from its earliest incarnations through the mid-nineteenth century, and the ways in which the "national imaginary" has continually been challenged, shaped and pressured by the presence of radical and marginal groups and individuals. We will read both major and unfamiliar works of the colonial, revolutionary, early republic and antebellum years, and examine how these works embody, envision, revise, and respond to central concepts and tropes of national purpose and identity.

This course is an opportunity for Division III students whose projects contain a significant element of creative writing - in whatever genre - to share their work with others, bring their Divisions III to a successful close, and reflect jointly on the possible meanings of 'community' for writers, whose work so often necessarily unfolds and progresses in private. Students will present work to the workshop two times, and each student will prepare a short presentation about the Div III work of another student.

Students in this class will have an innovative idea for a social impact initiative or a business venture, will have developed this idea into a rough plan through an entrepreneurship class, and will trying to figure out how to take the next step towards action. In this class students will take an entrepreneurial nonprofit or for-profit venture and, work-shopping with professors and class, take real steps to prototype and test their idea.

In this course students will refine their technical and perceptual skills in response to the human form. The course will focus on the full figure allowing students to explore this challenging subject from multiple perspectives. Historical and contemporary issues and approaches to the figure will be elucidated through presentations, critiques, and independent research. A $90 lab fee will cover most materials. Intermediate sculpture at the college level is recommended.

This is an intermediate creative writing course that explores narrative structure. The focus will be on works (mostly fiction, but also non-fiction) that have pushed the boundaries of conventional "girders" by using as building materials visuals, verse, and radical space/time-shifts, all while maintaining a clear cohesive whole.

Workshop members should arrive willing to explore and to expand their interests through the long poem and/or the lyric essay. We'll experiment with the "malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, [and] complexity"* available in these forms. Workshop members will also keep regular journals, research areas of interest, submit formal (typed) passages and self-contained segments of writing for peer review, and respond to peer and published works.

Working in drawing, printmaking, digital media, bookmaking, sculpture, and design we will engage in the concept of the multiple in art production and theory. We will look at the multiples relationship to print media, design, politics and propaganda, DIY culture, and other subjects in relationship to the dispersion of ideas through images and objects. Throughout the course we will learn new studio skills in specific materials and methods that will culminate in a final self-directed project. Pre-Requisites: Two previous art courses - Instructor permission.