Featured Courses

Introduction to the Galleries and Museums of New York

Survey a broad spectrum of visual art resources through guided lecture-tour visits to current exhibitions at leading museums, galleries and alternative art spaces located throughout New York City. Onsite meetings with art administrators affiliated with various organizations shed light on a wide range of career and management issues pertaining to the field and add to an understanding of the development and continued growth of New York's exciting art world.

Design Studio for Non-Majors

A continuing exploration of graphic design to help students refine their skills & develop more personally expressive ways to solving problems through visual communication. Assignments, readings, & research projects will allow students to consider the complex nature of graphic design. Both traditional & digital approaches to typography & layout will be incorporated with a wide range of assignment. A priority is placed on the use of concepts to dictate design techniques & on the pursuit of a genuinely creative vision.

20th Century Fashion

Examines the evolution of fashionable dress and practices from 1900 to the 1980s, investigating high style as well as mainstream fashion, changing materials and silhouette, and the interplay between fashion and the arts. Original research via primary materials including museum objects, periodicals, designer archives, and film is emphasized, as the class explores the dynamics of dress in the international culture of the 20th century through lectures, readings and discussions.

Race, Education, and the Politics of Visual Representation

This course addresses philosophical. historical, socio-political contexts of multiculturalism in the United States, with an emphasis on relationship to critical pedagogy and contemporary art practices. Current ideas about representation and identity will be considered specifically in relation to a critique of mainstream notions of multiculturalism and art. Topics may include the history of race in the United States, the role of ethnicity and class in shaping identity, and feminism and multiculturalism. The course of addresses pedagogy and curriculum in a variety of educational settings, including schools, museums, and alternative spaces.

Introduction to Art Therapy

Fundamental principles of art therapy practice will be presented through discussions and case presentations. Students learn the historical development of the profession, its distinction from other disciplines and its commonalities to social sciences. Basic pictorial analyses examine artistic processes and products. Students study the artistic expression across the developmental span. Clinical applications for populations struggling with varied psychological and physiological issues are offered. Each class includes experiential art making to demonstrate interventions.

VAA Topics: Art, Equity, & the Design of Democracy

This course follows an arc from public funding of art through the artistic design of public policy. The core aim of the class is to ask, in the U.S. and within a comparative global context, whether creative policy design is possible, and whether models in the arts—including resale royalties, fractional equity in art, and collaborative solidarity economies—can offer unexpected tools for the reimagination of reparations, redistribution, and revitalization of the democratic project in an age of, as Will Davies writes, the “disenchantment of politics by economics.

VAA Topics: Performa

This course will examine the history of the art biennial in the context of contemporary art from 1972 to the present, situating the work in its historical & social context. It will explore how the format of the international biennial has become, over the past four decades, the main outlet for the production and presentation of contemporary visual art & performance, & the curatorial strategies that have shaped public understanding of this material.