Fine Arts Seminars are intended to broaden and clarify students' perspective on contemporary art practice. Each semester these seminars shift in focus and subject matter. Seminars may concentrate on art from the perspectives of art history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth, or may take the form of a discipline-based critique focusing on the history, theory, and practice of painting, sculpture, and photography, among others._______We are living through an extraordinary social transformation in the midst of COVID19, where the realities of deconstruction and recalibration are reshaping society and a reorientation to the local. This evolving situation will be our laboratory for creative-research and social discourse. Taking a field-research approach, this workshop will focus on poetics of engaging people and places in intimate, public and civic contexts. We will walk through the now-changed cityscape, make a foray to an old growth forest, hike around an island. The strategy of de-densifying will serve our agenda to transform our studios into sites for local, ecological and social research. This seminar is designed for students who want to dive into context, develop a new facet of their work or iterate work they have done looking at their practice through a different lens, or launch new research working in social and public realms. Situated somewhere in the intersection of performance, experimental theater, social practice, mediation, decolonial theory, ritual, interspecies communication, activism, and participatory games is where we will dig in. Through extensive reading, an eye to honing creative-research, critique, written responses, lectures and talks with artists and curator in the field, we will attend to the theory and practices of deep listening and attunement, building equity and transformative justice, collaboration and radical pedagogy. In an election season we will consider current social, political, and ecological ruptures and contemporary art in relationship to deep local context. There is a conversation in this seminar that only people at this moment can have. We will find it.Online course sections will be delivered mostly asynchronously, with some synchronous components that will be outlined in the course syllabus if applicable.

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