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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This course is a practicum concentrated on real-world engagement with artists, with a focus on the formats of the studio visit and the interview. Students conduct, document, and present studio visits and interviews with artists, with a view to accumulating a substantial body of knowledge about contemporary artistic practice.

Professor: Michele Carlson
Convenes: Tue, 1–4 pm
Location: Room GC12, CCA SF campus
CCA Enrollment: Artists and Designers (CURPR-606)

This class positions exhibition-making as an interdisciplinary practice that lies at the heart of institutional design and programming. In addition to surveying the contemporary landscape of institutional structures, students will engage in the discourse around exhibition design and undertake collaborative, project-based opportunities to develop installation strategies, as well as consider techniques of visual and spatial design across all aspects of an exhibition’s manifestation, from display furniture and materials to the catalogue and publication.

Professor: Sara Dean
Convenes: Mon, 12–3 pm
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Design (CURPR-615)

Through selected readings and discussions, this seminar course includes critical analyses of artworks and exhibitions from late modernism to the present by artists and curators whose practices engage with questions of nation-state, immigration, and colonialism. The course includes close studies of recent editions of perennial exhibitions—such as documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster—organized by institutions in the West with satellite or branch components in non-Western parts of the world. Overall, studies in this course seek to define an aesthetic of the colonial in contemporary artistic practices and exhibitions in order to consider the efficacy of critical positions within the context of globalized contemporary art and visual culture.

Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Tue, 8:30–11:30 am
CCA Enrollment: Global Art Worlds (CURPR-602)

In this second of a two-part seminar extending over both semesters of the second year of graduate studies in curatorial practice, students focus on the production and final realization of an exhibition and public program for presentation at CCA’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in April 2019. Having developed and refined much of the content during the first semester, this course concentrates on practicalities of form, design, communication, marketing, printed matter, and documentation related to their culminating thesis exhibition. Stewarded by the director of the course and the program’s curator-in-residence, students gain firsthand experience in both conceiving an exhibition and inserting it into the public realm.

Professor: James Voorhies
Convenes: Wed, 12–2 pm, and by arrangement with professor
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Project 2 (CURPR-626)

Exhibition Form surveys the history of exhibitions and museums, paying critical attention to the evolution and invention of institutional and exhibition forms, as well as the changing nature of the curator over recent decades. This semester the course focuses on transformations in the field of exhibitions between 1989 and 2001, examining eight case studies that argued for artists previously discounted by Western institutions and historical narratives, that experimented with exhibition forms, and that produced a new geography of the field of art.

Professor: J. Myers-Szupinska
Convenes: Tue, 12–3 pm
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Form (CURPR-6040-1)

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 textural and verbal art analysis, and the confidence to share this knowledge through public address.

Professor: Dena Beard
Convenes: Mon, 9–12 pm
CCA Enrollment: Art and Experiences (CURPR-6050-1)

This is one of four courses devoted to the realization of the collaborative exhibition project. Students work together to research, develop and present an exhibition, as well as produce a related catalogue and interpretation program. The theme or idea for the project, as well as the working process will be developed collectively. Each student will then fulfill a practical role in the production of the exhibition and catalogue.

Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Mon, 9–12 pm
Location: YBCA Lounge, 2nd floor
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Project: R&D 1 (CURPR-6200-1)

This is the second of four courses, in which students work together to research, develop and present an exhibition, as well as produce a related catalogue and interpretation program. This class will focus particularly on the logistical aspects of organizing the exhibition as well as producing the exhibition catalogue.

Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Mon, 2–5 pm
CCA Enrollment: Exhibition Project: Org 1 (CURPR-6220-1)

This course engages with curatorial writing through a spectrum of approaches and practices circulating in contemporary art discourse. Weekly exercises and discussions will survey and develop texts with a critical eye towards the expression of clarity and significance in art writing. For each form under examination (whether wall texts, catalogue essays, exhibition reviews, etc.) emphasis will be placed on the development of tools and techniques for the judgment and criticism of contemporary art, among them - evaluation, self-reflexivity, and experimentation.

Professor: Glen Helfand
Convenes: Tue, 4–7 pm
CCA Enrollment: The Art of Criticism (CURPR-6280-1)

This seminar presents a critical survey of practices and discourse related to contemporary art and curatorial practice in the SF Bay Area and beyond. It is organized to provide useful context, framework, and history for student artists, designers, curators, theorists and critics alike. Students engage with a curators, artists, ideas, and exhibitions that represent a broad range of strategies for cultural production. Classes will include guest lecturers, local field trips and a student-led discussion series with readings.

Professor: Liz Thomas
Convenes: Wed, 10 am–1 pm
CCA Enrollment: Talking Contemporary Curating (CURPR-6300-1)

Thesis Project 1 is a guided seminar devoted to the self-directed production of new research and writing in the fields of contemporary art, curating, and exhibitions. This year’s projects focus on the complexities of curating underground culture in the context of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the aesthetics and politics of Etel Adnan’s poem-drawings, and on Charles Gaines’ artist-curated exhibition The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.

Professor: J. Myers-Szupinska
Convenes: Tue, 8:30–11:30 am
CCA Enrollment: Thesis Project 1 (CURPR-6340-1)

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: Jordan Kantor, Beth Mangini, Karen Fiss
Convenes: Thu, 12–3 pm
Location: Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF campus
CCA Enrollment: Contemporary Art History and Theory (FINAR-600)

Documenta 11, curated by the first non-Western director, Okwui Enwezor, in 2002, serves as the departure point for a study of activity in exhibitions, institutions, and publications around the globe in order to define and analyze situations wherein the contemporary art world of the West has influenced an aesthetic of the postcolonial. Students are introduced and become familiar with a discourse surrounding a selection of international exhibitions, institutions, and publications in order to articulate and traces situations in art over the past two or more decades where postcolonialism is increasingly aestheticized, from the art presented at major international exhibitions to the work seen at smaller institutions and informal arts initiatives.

Professor: James Voorhies
Convenes: Tue, 8:30–11:30am
Location: Curatorial Research Bureau
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6020-2

This course considers critical strategies of writing as a profession, focusing largely on the dynamic and creative sphere of arts publishing. Studies focus on the state of the field by assessing art writing and criticism from the site of diverse publications in print and online art journals, newspapers, blogs, and magazines. Special attention is paid to thinking expansively about where art writing and criticism can “live” and the many forms it can take from a zine, graphic novel, infographic, and video, to a meme, creative writing, poetry, or social media. Students conduct, document, and present studio visits and interviews with artists, with a view to accumulating a substantial body of knowledge about contemporary artistic practice.

Professor: Frances Richard
Convenes: Tue, 12–3 pm
Location: Curatorial Research Bureau
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6060-2

This class positions exhibition making as an interdisciplinary practice, that lies at the heart of institutional design and programming. In addition to surveying the contemporary landscape of institutional structures, students will engage in the discourse around exhibition design, and undertake collaborative, project-based opportunities to develop installation strategies, as well as to consider techniques of visual and spatial design across all aspects of an exhibition's manifestation, from display furniture and materials, to the catalogue and publication.

Professor: Christopher Hamamoto
Convenes: Wed, 4–7 pm
Location: Curatorial Research Bureau
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6150-3

The thesis is an extended essay in an area of independent research that relates to current art practice. This seminar provides sustained practical and theoretical support to develop the skills through which to write a thesis.

Professor: J. Myers-Szupinska
Convenes: Tue, 12–3 pm
Location: CCA SF Campus, Room GC12
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6400-1

Students continue to work together on the organization and presentation of their thesis exhibition, as well as related catalogue and interpretation program. This class supports the compilation and collation of materials for the exhibition publication, and each student will fulfill one or more roles related to the process of producing the publication.

Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Thu, 1–4 pm
Location: Curatorial Research Bureau
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6240-1

Students continue to work together on the organization and presentation of their thesis exhibition, as well as related catalogue and interpretation program. This class supports the organizational and logistical aspects of the process, and each student will fulfill one or more roles related to the process of presenting the exhibition.

Professor: Christina Linden
Convenes: Thu, 9 am–12 pm
Location: Curatorial Research Bureau
CCA Enrollment: CURPR 6260-1