Investigating Women's Art

Investigating Women's Art is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies course taught by Karen Koehler.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
This course will investigate contemporary exhibitions and collections of art in the Five College Museums, concentrating on the many shows and conferences on women's art in the Spring of 2010, including "Touch Fire: Contemporary Ceramics by Japanese Women Artists" and "A Room of Their Own: Bloomsbury Artists" (a show of British modern art associated with Virginia Woolf's circle.) We will visit a number of museum and gallery exhibitions and permanent collections, and look at artworks from a variety of times, cultures, and places. The course will include presentations and discussions, as well as semi-weekly field trips to area museums. Occasional evening lectures and symposia by visiting artists, critics and curators are also required. This course will consider the historical context, critical analysis, and curatorial issues of the art on display, as well as exhibition design and museum architecture (including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.) This is a speaking and writing intensive course; and students will be responsible for a creating a portfolio of progressively more rigorous exhibition reviews, critical art writing, and scholarly papers, as well as presentations and group reports. Classes meet regularly in one of the Five College Museums (students need to be prepared to travel) and at Hampshire for discussion and presentations.

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing