Course Description:
Topic Seminars introduce students to the aesthetic concepts, art historical frameworks, and theoretical scholarship relevant to contemporary textile practices. Through lectures, discussions, and extensive readings drawn from the emerging discourse on textile history and theory, art and fashion history, anthropology, literary criticism, and contemporary craft theory, students gain awareness of historical precedents and global contexts of their work. Topic Seminars are offered for upper division students in the fall semester only and have a two-year rotation of topics including Thinking Textiles and Chromophilia.

Section Description:
Chromophilia, n. The property possessed by cells of staining readily with dyes. The title of this course is derived from a chapter in David Batchelor's book, Chromophobia. The author eloquently traces concepts of color in nineteenth and twentieth-century Western art and literature as they relate to notions of purity and contamination. This course analyzes how color is folded into a complex set of Western cultural narratives and how the so-called neutrality of "whiteness" in the museum setting is constructed on racist and gendered stereotypes. Through readings, discussions, and assignments, students investigate the diverse meanings of color in different cultural landscapes. Texts are selected from multiple disciplines including anthropology, art criticism, art history, and fashion theory. Students conduct independent research projects and make work, which will be critiqued in the context of this course.

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