Assignments

Readings

You may purchase copies of the following textbook at the Reed bookstore (optional):

Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).

All assigned readings are available on Moodle (logon to moodle.reed.edu & enter email username and password). Please print out all Moodle readings and bring hard copies to class, or annotate your digital copy with marginal notes.

Attendance & Participation

Attendance: All students are expected to do the weekly readings and participate actively in the conference conversation. Consistent attendance is necessary for a dynamic conference. Students who miss more than three (3) conferences will fail this course, unless special circumstances (specifically COVID quarantine) prevent your attendance.

COVID requirements: When your health allows, you are expected to be present and engaged in class. At the same time, each community member has an individual responsibility to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Following public health guidance is part of living in an honorable community. 

  •       If you test positive for COVID, you should not attend class for five days. Please contact the HCC. You can find more information on Reed’s COVID policies here.
  •       The CDC suggests that people with the following symptoms may have COVID: fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea. As always, please consult a medical professional (members of the HCC or otherwise) if you have any questions about your health or health safety. 

If you need to miss a class, or series of classes, due to COVID, you are responsible for emailing me to let me know as soon as possible. You are also responsible for coordinating with me to complete work that you might miss due to absences. I will provide makeup options in cases involving COVID.

If you were potentially exposed to COVID and have no symptoms, please come to class; however, you are required to wear a mask at all times in class. If you have a medical issue that will make this challenging for you, please see me and/or Disability and Accessibility Resources to discuss accommodations.

Special accommodations: Accommodations will be given to students who have conditions that affect their performances in class. Please provide documentation for these concerns and be sure to speak to the instructors within the first two weeks of class. For questions on these accommodations and official processes of getting tested, please contact Disability Services: dar@reed.edu.

Extensions: I do not give extensions. I will accept late papers but will mark it down. Students must complete all classroom assignments to pass the class.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism will result in an immediate failure of the course. Proper citations must be used when you quote from another’s work, but also when your writing is built upon others' preexisting ideas or writing. When in doubt, you should cite the material. The following resources speak to the importance and severity of the matter and provide guidelines for how to cite properly in the Chicago format:

Discussion Leading

You and another student will work together to lead the discussion one week during the semester. In preparation, you will circulate to the entire class a list of questions [at least five (5) per conference] that you create collaboratively with your partner. For Tuesday’s conference, you will need to email us by Sunday at 5pm. For the Thursday conference, please circulate questions no later than Tuesday at 5pm. These questions serve to stimulate conference discussion; therefore, all students are required to read them and explore possible responses.

When preparing questions, please consider the principal issues raised by the selected readings. What is the proposed thesis? How is it substantiated? Conceptually, how do the themes brought out in the text correspond to other readings we have studied? How do they correspond to the imagery we have analyzed?

In addition to your prepared questions, please bring in an image that will initiate our discussion. You will start conference with the image you and your partner(s) have selected and pair it with one of your questions. The image must relate to the week's readings; however, ideally this image will not be taken directly from the reproductions included in the readings. I would like you to extrapolate from the readings and apply the issues raised in them to any image/object of your choice. Be creative and have fun!

Papers

I have assigned two (2) papers this term. Please remember to center your writing around a well-defined thesis statement.

For the first assignment, please write a formal analysis of any work of art from the Portland Art Museum. You must also include a reproduction of the image you select. In writing this paper, consider the artist's treatment of the subject matter. How does the artist handle the various formal elements (e.g., light, color, texture, scale, perspective, contours, proportion...)? How does the artist organize the composition? What choices does the artist make in terms of material and media? Please submit a 3-page (double-spaced) paper, uploaded as a PDF on Moodle, by September 26.

You will all be given free passes to the Portland Art Museum for a full year. The hours for the Portland Art Museum can be found here. The Portland Art Museum is currently under construction; therefore, the permanent collection galleries are closed. For this assignment, you can visit the special exhibitions, including Guillermo del Toro (open until September 17) and Black Artists of Oregon (September 9 - March 17).

For your second paper, I ask students to write a research paper [five (5) double-spaced pages--please upload to Moodle as a PDF] on any work of art of your choice. The paper must incorporate one of the methodologies we have studied in class. You must also cite at least ten (10) scholarly sources. Following your 5 pages of text, please include an appendix with the images you studied in your paper and their corresponding captions (artist, title of work, date). Due December 5.

In preparation for the paper, I ask students to submit a proposal describing your research project. The proposal should include a one (1)-page, double-spaced abstract, a working bibliography of at least four (4) sources, and copies of the images under consideration. Due October 3.

Virtual Art Exhibition

I would like you and your partners to design an art exhibition of your choice using the web-based tool Artsteps. Your group will need to create one (1) account and share login credentials for the group project. Please center your exhibition around a theme and provide text labels that extrapolate on your selections. Your exhibitions should have at least ten (10) works of art.
 
On September 12, Chloe Van Stralendorff will come to class to give a tutorial on Artsteps. You are welcome to meet with her in the Visual Resources Center as many times as you would like in preparation for this assignment. In addition, you may find the following online tutorials helpful:
The virtual art exhibition is due October 9. Each group will present their exhibition to the class on October 10 and October 12. You have a maximum of twenty (20) minutes to describe your curatorial choices. Be creative and have fun!

Portland Japanese Garden

Your assignment is to visit the entirety of the Portland Japanese Garden and pay attention to what you are feeling and experiencing, both physically and emotionally/intellectually/cognitively. How does this garden make you feel? Do those feelings change as you move through its various spaces? Do your emotions change as your embodied (physical) experience changes? What is the most exciting or exhilarating location to you? What is the most unsettling? What is the most peaceful? Tune into how these emotional experiences are informed by changes in light, sound, size/scale, textures--even scents/smells.

While experiencing the Portland Japanese Garden, please use your smartphone (or an iPad you can check out from the IMC for 3 days) to record:
  • One sound/audio experience that you found especially interesting (enjoyable, beautiful, troubling, unappealing, distracting, riveting); sound recording (no visuals!) should be no longer than 60 seconds.
  • One visual/spatial experience captured in just one photograph.
  • One visual/spatial experience (sound optional) documented in a video recording; video recording should be no longer than 60 seconds. Video may capture movement, or it may attempt to document stillness.
These sound/video recordings and photographs may enhance or contribute to your understanding of the assigned readings...or vice versa! Be prepared to share one video or audio recording or photograph in class and discuss this documentation with the class. Important to consider: how do these documents help or hinder your creation of memories of your embodied experiences of the sequence or a given location? And how can design influence our physical and psychological well-being?

All recordings and photographs should be uploaded to Moodle by November 14.

Due Dates

September 26: formal analysis [three (3) double-spaced pages, upload to Moodle by 7pm as a PDF]

October 3: research proposal [upload materials to Moodle by 7pm as a PDF]

October 9: virtual art exhibition assignment [upload Artsteps url to Moodle by 7pm]

October 10 & 12: presentation of virtual art exhibition [in class, 20 minutes max]

November 14: Portland Japanese Garden assignment [upload materials to Moodle by 7pm]

December 5: research paper due [five (5) double-spaced pages, upload to Moodle by 7pm as a PDF]

Sensitive Topics

A course of this nature will cover, on a regular basis, challenging and sensitive topics in both its reading and discussion material, including but not limited to: scenes of sexual violence, sexism, racism, orientalism, explicit depictions of sex, etc. If you are highly sensitive to (or strongly object to) representations of these kinds of topics, you should not take this course.

Any student who elects to take this course does so with the full knowledge that we will not censor images, reading materials, class discussions, or passages read out loud in class.