Talking Contemporary Art
This graduate seminar presents a survey of practices related to contemporary art and exhibition making. It is organized to provide valuable context, framework, and history for students studying fine art, curatorial practice, film, theory, and writing. Students engage with a recent critical discourse in contemporary art, representing a broad range of strategies for cultural production. Classes have visiting practitioners, area field trips, and student-led discussions with readings.
Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Wed, 8:30–11:30 am
CCA Enrollment: Talking Contemporary Art (CURPR-630)
Exhibition Form
This seminar takes up a series of case studies in order to consider the ways in which exhibitions make history and define creative fields. The course introduces students to a variety of formats for curating, including museum and gallery exhibitions, biennials, blogs, collection installations, performance, discursive events, curatorial texts, and catalogs. Readings, in-class lectures, discussions, and assignments encourage critical reflection on theme, thesis, juxtaposition, and association, as well as logistical, intellectual, and political aspects of making, viewing, and inserting work and ideas into the public realm.
Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Tue, 12–3 pm
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Form (CURPR-604)
Art and Experiences
Emphasizing firsthand encounters with artworks through visits to local collections and current exhibitions, this seminar imparts techniques of formal observation, conceptual understanding, and verbal argumentation about individual works of art. Through constant engagement with a range of art objects, students will establish a familiarity with the tools of both textual and verbal art analysis, and the confidence to share this knowledge through public address.
Professor: Dena Beard
Convenes: Thu, 12–3 pm
CCA Enrollment: Art and Experiences (CURPR-605)
Exhibition Project 1
This course is the first in a two-part seminar extending over both semesters of the second year of graduate studies in curatorial practice, culminating in the production of a thesis exhibition. Through readings, visits to exhibitions, and discussions with faculty (including the program’s Curator-in-Residence) about current discourses and topics in contemporary art and curating, students develop a proposal for an exhibition and public program for presentation at CCA’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in April 2019.
Professor: James Voorhies
Convenes: Wed, 12–2 pm, and by arrangement with professor
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Project 1 (CURPR-624)
The Art of Criticism
Why are you here? What are you values, your ethics, your politics, your agendas, your limitations, your beliefs, your blind spots, your fears, your loves? These are big and changeable areas for investigation — people spend their whole lives tangling and untangling their answers. If these people are writers, they do it, in part, on the page. And for the purposes of this course, you are all writers; your subject is art, which, really, means the world. Criticism is a powerful, deeply human tool; i.e. flawed and fraught and full of contradictions. It is also an art form in its own right. Let’s explore.
Professor: Claudia La Rocco
Convenes: Tue, 4–7 pm
CCA Enrollment: The Art of Criticism (CURPR-628)
Contemporary Art History and Theory
This course is a series of lectures exploring diverse episodes in art since 1960. Both art historical and discursive in nature, the course offers incoming students a body of shared knowledge and common language for talking about contemporary art. The course presents an array of ideas, artists, artworks, and theoretical frameworks with particular focus on how artworks of various media are engaged with their social, political, and cultural contexts. Team-taught by CCA faculty, each class consists of a 90-minute lecture, followed by hour-long discussion sessions among smaller groups of students and faculty.
Professors: Nil Bayraktar, Karen Fiss, and Frances Richard
Convenes: Thu, 8:30–11:30 am
Location: Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF campus
CCA Enrollment: Contemporary Art History and Theory (FINAR 600)