Contemporary artists use their talent, imagination, and skill to create works of art that add beauty and richness to the world. They produce work for a vast global network of museums, commercial art galleries, publicly funded arts organizations, and artist-run spaces. Taught by a faculty of active professional artists, students in Fine Arts delve into each of the core disciplines—Painting, Sculpture/New Genres, and Photography—before selecting an area of emphasis.
Program Learning Outcomes
Upon graduating from the program, students will learn to:
- Formulate questions and ideas clearly and precisely based on relevant information and research and to come to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions. Students will develop the ability to think open-mindedly with the ability to consider alternative systems of thought that challenge received notions and social cultural bias.
- Effectively express abstract concepts in concrete form.
- Skillfully create artistic form using techniques and methods appropriate to the intended result.
- Consider the role of art making in the larger social context.
- Understand that the meaning of a work of art is conditioned by the manner in which it is exhibited or otherwise presented and distributed. They will have the ability to consider methods of presentation and distribution in innovative ways that respond to, and potentially influence, existing conditions in the field.
- Have an awareness of current professional standards in their chosen media and in the larger field of contemporary art as well as the ability to effectively meet those standards.
Course Sequence
Course Title
Course Number
Credits
Fall Semester
Form and Figure
FNDT 100
3.00
Course Description: This course provides a comprehensive study in drawing from observation. Students begin by learning to draw a simple geometrical form, progressing to rendering objects within a compositional setting and drawing the entire human figure based on an investigation of its anatomical structures. Students will develop an awareness of the playful, rhythmic relationships between various components of a compositional setting and the human form, constructing drawings which reflect their unique vision. Drawing techniques such as perspective and isometric projection facilitate successful form generation. Skills of relational measurement, compositional organization, and the accurate placement of form in space, will inform all drawing activities such as drawing objects, figures, and environments, which will enhance students’ perceptual abilities.
Color and Design
FNDT 101
3.00
Course Description: Students will create innovative and impactful designs by learning and applying essential elements including, line, shape, color, texture, space, balance, contrast, and rhythm. Utilizing digital and analog tools, students will engage in diverse design challenges, enhancing their problem-solving and critical thinking skills, as well as developing their visual literacy and communication abilities. Through this course, students will learn fundamental concepts relevant to today’s creative industries, laying a solid foundation for further explorations
Contemporary Studio and Creative Action
CAIL 102
3.00
Course Description: Students explore the built environment, analyzing its physical, spatial, and temporal elements. This course introduces students to art and design fundamentals, including scale, material, measurement, context, and function. They will explore innovative and sustainable solutions using fabrication, technology, studio labs, and joint activities with other classes. This course includes the Creative Action & Integrated Learning (CAIL) component, which encourages engagement with the city of Los Angeles. Students will participate in site visits, lectures, and relevant readings that highlight cultural, social, political, ecological, or economic aspects of responsive design. Throughout the course, students will also develop professionalism and collaboration skills.
Visual Culture 1: Gateways to Art and Culture
AHCS 122
3.00
Course Description: This introduction to visual culture will address the history of visual communication and the changes that visual culture has undergone up until the 19th century across geographical boundaries, while providing students with the tools to understand the visual culture of the present. The class will address formal analysis, the study and history of materials, techniques, and genres. Students will also learn the semiotic language of visual culture and the socio-cultural contexts framing the history of art, both in the past and present. This course will help students understand how visual objects reflect the cultural context in which they were originally produced and consumed, and how the meaning assigned to them changes over time. This will create bridges for the students to connect to the present visual culture while understanding that images are fluid signs which help create and maintain cultural, social, and political discourses.
Writing as Discovery: Thought Lab 1
ENGL 108
3.00
Course Description: How does the world influence you, and how do you influence the world? In this class, you will discover narratives and other texts that reveal the complexity of your identity. You will apply that understanding to a broader exploration of the necessity of empathy in navigating difference in today’s global society. You will be invited to turn your curiosity into a research question about a topic that captures your interest. By the end of the semester, you will have completed a personal narrative, learned how to critically analyze diverse texts, and developed research techniques that will be valuable during your academic career and beyond. You will continue to hone these skills in a specialized Thought Lab 2 course of your choosing during your second semester. A minimum grade of "C-" is required to pass this course. Prerequisite: Successful completion of ENGL090 or placement through the Writing Placement Assessment.
Spring Semester
Choose ONE of the following courses from the dropdown
3.00
FNDT 103
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: These drawing courses are designed to support students in preparation for their chosen majors. Students will experiment with various materials and mediums while exploring a broad spectrum of approaches to drawing as an active form of thinking, seeing, and understanding. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Students must complete 6 credits from the following course options: FNDT103,FNDT104 and FNDT105. Students may take 2 courses with the same course number if the topics are different, for example FNDT103A and FNDT103B.
Expanded Studio Dimensional Studies
FNDT 104
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: Dimensional Studies explores the tangible world, built environment, and object making. Courses are offered in a variety of mediums and investigate a range of topics including spatial analysis and thinking, material experimentation, form design, digital fabrication, hand skills, and building strategies while creating in 3 dimensional and 4-dimensional space. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Students must complete 6 credits from the following course options: FNDT103,FNDT104 and FNDT105. Students may take 2 courses with the same course number if the topics are different, for example FNDT103A and FNDT103B.
Expanded Studio Transmedia
FNDT 105
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: Transmedia explores strategies for visual communication. A range of cross-disciplinary studio courses investigate multi-model applications for conveying bold ideas through form. Courses invite innovative approaches to contemporary media, strengthening fluency in design principles and cultural literacy. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Students must complete 6 credits from the following course options: FNDT103,FNDT104 and FNDT105. Students may take 2 courses with the same course number if the topics are different, for example FNDT103A and FNDT103B.
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Visual Culture 2: Unpacking Art, Power, & Modernity
AHCS 123
3.00
Course Description: Planned as a continuation of Visual Culture 1, Visual Culture 2: Unpacking Art, Power & Modernity offers a transparent chronology to continue but deepen an investigation of art, design and world perspectives from roughly 1800 to 1960 -- years loosely associated with "modernisms." It explores Western and non-Western, dominant, and marginalized histories during this proposed 200-year time frame, broadening and reinforcing first-year students’ historical awareness, while de-centering dominant canons. Visual Culture 2 uses multi-cultural artifacts, readings, seminar-like discussions and experiential collaborations to explore and critically analyze key works and key themes like colonialism, structural racism, xenophobia, industrialization, technology, capitalism and consumerism from multiple perspectives. By the end of the semester, students should have the necessary critical tools to become empathic citizen-artists who can engage an equitable, trans-global, diasporic, technically creative and environmentally demanding present and future.
Exploration into Making: Thought Lab 2
LIBS 115
3.00
Course Description: Where do your curiosities in the world lead you? How can you transform general interest in a subject into specific knowledge that can fuel a creative practice? Building on concepts from Thought Lab I, Thought Lab II will allow you to take a deep dive into a themed seminar of your choosing. Seminar themes may range from environmental and social justice to narrative to technology. These courses will invite you to explore a special topic through a variety of media to deepen your understanding of key events that have shaped its history. By the end of the semester, you will complete assignments which may include an exploratory essay or a research paper, and ultimately, a creative translation of course themes. Four Potential Themes: Narrative Story & Culture Technology: From Industrial Design to AI Media: Materials and Meaning Environmental + Social Justice
Fall Semester
Painting I
PNTG 204
3.00
Course Description: This is a hands-on investigation of technical and formal issues in painting (oil, acrylic, and mixed media), focusing on developing technical abilities in collaboration with concepts and exploration of different methods of achieving visual “dexterity.” Offered fall semester only
Choose ONE of the following courses from the dropdown
3.00
PHOT 204
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: This course introduces students to the technical, aesthetic, and conceptual aspects of the medium of photography. Basic skills, including digital and analog (film) camera operation, the fundamentals of image exposure, black-and-white film processing, black-and-white and digital color printing, and basic presentation techniques, are covered in regular lab sessions. Group critiques, slide lectures, and field trips help students to develop a critical vocabulary. Offered fall semester only
Sculpture/New Genres I
SCNG 204
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: An introduction to the history and practice of sculpture and new genres (new art forms that use time and space). Students are introduced to technical and contemplative approaches to commanding space and material to produce meaningful objects, events, or places. Technical instruction covers introductory use of wood and metal shops (including digital 3D printer), adhesives and joinery, basic mold making and casting, as well as contemporary new genres forms such as performance and installation art. Offered in Fall semester only.
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Digital Media
FINA 217
3.00
Course Description: Digital Media is an introductory course in new media – exposing students to a wide range of digital art-making practices while providing the technical fundamentals that enable students to begin integrating digital methods in their respective practices. The course consists of lectures, demonstrations, and computer lab experience. Particular attention is placed on balancing technical skills with creative content and experimental approaches. We will explore the evolution of new media and the corresponding social and cultural impact. The core software is Adobe Premiere, InDesign and Photoshop.
Sophomore Seminar: DEI in Global Art and Culture
AHCS 237
3.00
Course Description: With diversity and equity at its core, Sophomore Seminar engages the western and non-western philosophical canons as a way to critique and de-center eurocentrism, white privilege, ableism, misogyny, patriarchy, systemic racism, power and exclusion at the very root of Western culture. The class asks the following: How do officialized and unspoken philosophies or worldviews shape our most essential and normalized standards/canons of beauty, value, "truth," as well as produce our centuries old privileges and prejudices? Who/what is advanced by these entrenched ideas; who is excluded? Who are the non-dominant but powerful voices that oppose philosophical givens? This is an interconnected two-semester class. Sophomore Seminar 1 introduces key concepts in ancient and modern, European, and non-western philosophical systems, to trace the impact of these ideas on current art, thought and racial/gendered biases. Then Sophomore Seminar 2 critically considers contemporary theorists, non-western and LGBT creatives who challenge the classical and modern philosophical canons covered in Soph Sem I. In both courses/semesters, students learn to evaluate the ideological impact of power, gender, economics, and social class on social and artistic norms. This course may be taken in either fall or spring, must be completed in the sophomore year.
Electives
Performance, Ritual & Politics
FINA 406
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: This course allows the student access to a cohesive body of information connected with simultaneous components of subject and object making. A three- or six-hour seminar and/or studio explores the historical and contemporary models and contexts of artistic practice. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Only certain courses will count for the Sustainability Minor. Please see the Interdisciplinary Studies Director.
Section Description: This performance studio class explores intersections the body, politics, symbolic exchange and ritual within the contexts of performance art and social action. Students perform weekly and workshop their performances throughout the semester, culminating in a series of public performances during the final weeks of class. Students make their work responding to specific prompts (readings and current or historic political issue/event/process for 7 weeks. Then, for the next 7 weeks students choose their own prompts, responding to political issues, histories and events. All final performances will be documented with photos, sound and video, and shared among the students. In addition to performance, students will also learn fundamentals of performance in a safe, judgement free, learning community.
Wilderness
FINA 406
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: This course allows the student access to a cohesive body of information connected with simultaneous components of subject and object making. A three- or six-hour seminar and/or studio explores the historical and contemporary models and contexts of artistic practice. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Only certain courses will count for the Sustainability Minor. Please see the Interdisciplinary Studies Director.
Section Description: This course begins as a seminar exploring aesthetic and political uses of the Western United States’ landscape as preparation for a five day trip across the Great Basin, ending amidst stalactites in a cave below Nevada. Some of the topics covered in the seminar section of the course will include: Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime, the Freudian Oceanic, Anton Ehrenzweig’s concept of dedifferentiation, Romanticism, the writings of Robert Smithson, the history of land art and earthworks, the role of landscape in narrative cinema in particular the Western and science fiction genres, distinctions between land and landscape and space and place, and an analysis of wilderness as an ideological construct. This class culminates in a road trip across the Basin and Range. Students will camp and cook each night, practice the skill of extended observation, as well as have fireside group discussions of the surroundings and the experience in light of texts.
The Artist's Joke
FINA 406
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: This course allows the student access to a cohesive body of information connected with simultaneous components of subject and object making. A three- or six-hour seminar and/or studio explores the historical and contemporary models and contexts of artistic practice. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Only certain courses will count for the Sustainability Minor. Please see the Interdisciplinary Studies Director.
Section Description: The Artist’s Joke will investigate the relationship between humor and art by engaging a wide range of artistic jokes and mediums from the past several centuries to the present for us to laugh with. The course will evoke how art and humor have been used to betray and undermine hegemony and power relations, to rethink cultural and societal norms, to envision and/or reorder the visual and experiential worlds, and most of all to give us hope. Special attention will be paid to modern and contemporary art making by thinking through artists like James Ensor, Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists, John Cage, Fluxus, Sophie Calle, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, the Guerrilla Girls, William Pope L., David Shrigley, and Hennessey Youngman, amongst others. We will also screen films like Being There, Dr. Strangelove, Playtime, and Black Dynamite and read about the development and analysis of humor by figures like Sigmund Freud, David Sedaris, Hamza Walker, and Andrea Fraser. Students will be encouraged to write jokes, and process the content of the course by utilizing humor to produce rich and thoughtful works of art.
Out on the Town
FINA 406
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: This course allows the student access to a cohesive body of information connected with simultaneous components of subject and object making. A three- or six-hour seminar and/or studio explores the historical and contemporary models and contexts of artistic practice. See the schedule of classes for course offerings and course descriptions. Only certain courses will count for the Sustainability Minor. Please see the Interdisciplinary Studies Director.
Section Description: This is a course designed to acquaint students with exhibitions of artwork currently being produced and shown, as well as the discussions happening around them. We will visit artists and art organizations websites and read texts related to them. Through these materials we will examine the political and art dialogues of the moment, considering the ways colonialism and inequities in the art establishment are being addressed and what some alternatives might be. We will also investigate the methods that artists and arts organizations are using to make artwork available physically and virtually. Course structure: The class will meet for four to six hours on Fridays, mostly every other week, eight times during the semester. The start time of the class will change depending on the time the gallery or museum opens but will mostly start at 11AM or noon. Meeting dates and times will be listed in the class syllabus.
PNTG GNRS: Action Painting
PNTG 306
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: The genres courses provide students with the opportunity to explore a variety of topics within the context of painting, targeting specific conceptual, aesthetic and material approaches in depth, offering theoretical and vernacular driven investigations. Recent topics offered: Real Art; Methods, Materials & Concepts of Color, Figure
Section Description: Action Painting is a studio painting class and students will spend almost all of the class time painting. Taking our cue from French, Japanese and American painters working in the immediate aftermath of WWII, we will explore how our bodies can be used to activate paint, and how paint can be a register for our physical actions and sensory experience. Students will throw, push, drop, pull, scrape, schemer, sweep, (and use any other physical movements they can devise), to get paint of all kinds onto their canvas or other supports. Using the class time to experiment with materials and to create works whose outcome is impossible to foresee at the beginning, students will discover, explore, and experiment, surprising themselves in the process. At the end of the term students who take this class will have significantly increased their confidence, and command of paint and its possibilities. They will have discovered new territories of material and affect and will have increased the reciprocity between their bodies and their paintings.
Painting Genres: Printmaking and Painting
PNTG 306
Credits: 3.00
Course Description: The genres courses provide students with the opportunity to explore a variety of topics within the context of painting, targeting specific conceptual, aesthetic and material approaches in depth, offering theoretical and vernacular driven investigations. Recent topics offered: Real Art; Methods, Materials & Concepts of Color, Figure
Section Description: This painting course is designed to give students an introduction in printmaking techniques such as block printing, screen-printing and transfers. The focus being experimentation, the combining of these techniques is the creation of mixed media paintings. Attention will be placed on formalist qualities, the use of found or made imagery, and layered content. Our studio time will be complimented with lectures on contemporary artists who are engaged in and/or merging printmaking with their artistic practices.