360°: Material Worlds
How do the materials we have impact the art we make?
This cluster examines literature, art, and forms of material culture that foreground questions of the relationship between humans and the environment in the context of four foundational categories: animal, vegetable, mineral and fungus. From films focusing on sand and waterways, to the poetry of dyes, this 360 cluster engages our material worlds, culminating in an interactive, student-led public project in which each student will present their research on a Special Collections object and will demonstrate one component of its material origins.
Courses
We will explore how artists question, explore, celebrate, and critique the relationships between humans and the environment. Through a topics-focused course, students examine the ways that narratives about environment have shaped the way that humans have defined themselves. We read novels and short stories and view films that contest conventional binaries of man and animal, civilization and nature, tradition and technology, and even truth and fiction. We read and discuss animal theory, theories of place and landscape, and theories of modernization or mechanization; and there will be frequent (and intentional) overlap between these categories. We also watch films that extend our theoretical questions of these themes beyond national, linguistic, and generic borders. With Prof. Shiamin Kwa, students are participants in a collaborative process in which they share responsibility for leading discussion in this course.
This course on art and material culture from South and Southeast Asia, taught by Prof. Sylvia Houghteling, looks at the often-overlooked constraints and possibilities for art-making shaped by the natural world. We study the ways that the unique materiality and ecological sustainability of minerals, vegetables, animals, and fungi have determined the colorants and substrates of art-making.