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ART 133 - Monuments, Movements, and Manifestos

A course exploring Monuments, Movements, and Manifestos throughout time where students will discover, design, and develop their own. Readings will focus on histories in which these contexts are noteworthy and contemporary instances in which artists work with these ideas. Each project will explore one of these three methods of human expression as well as how they overlap and/or are in conflict with one another. Students will delve deeply into their own thoughts and ideas about the world, how they live, and how they see themselves in community. We will study basic methods of construction including drawings on paper, printmaking, hand lettering, as well as wood rod and cardboard supported paper mache. Students are required to do studio work outside of class times.

ART 137 - Introduction to Socially Engaged Art

This course focuses on the world of socially engaged art through participatory and interactive creative processes within the classroom and beyond. Students will work together to learn basic principles of social art by discussing ideas in pairs, small groups, and the entire class. Projects will be dialogical, collaborative, and embodied. Students will perform social projects with their own communities outside of class. While the class may use basic craft materials in a limited capacity, the emphasis will be on socio-cultural human exchange. The class does NOT have an emphasis on tools, physical material sculpture, or image making in a traditional way. Students are required to do social artwork work outside of class times.Ìý

ART 151 - Introduction to Visual Narrative

Introduces students to the use of images to tell stories. Explores different image-making strategies through print and drawing media as well as simple animation and performative images. Explores narrative structure, traditional storytelling, and presentation strategies. Stories bind us. Using a small set of folk tales and myths, this class will examine how storytelling can shape community andÌýpublic dialogue and create agency. The class will work through oral storytelling and drawing. We learn how to shape existing stories, how to work with improvisation and apply old stories to current situations. We will discuss story structure, audience, and performance as well as visual storytelling. The course will explore myriad forms, including printmaking technologies, illustration, shadow puppets, stop-motion animation, and scrolls.

ART 168 - The Artist Book

This studio course focuses on the book as a vehicle for artistic voice. We will explore the intrinsic nature of books: that they are physical objects operating in one moment as sculpture, in the next moment as a piece of interactive time art; that they are understood in the hands of a reader who performs the book's content; and that they speak to us not only through words and images but through the weight, texture, and body language of the object itself. Students will learn techniques of ideation, model making, material manipulation, print/binding processes, and more as they create two-to-three artist book projects. The course will also delve into the history of artist books in their many iterations, from unique objects to hand-printed editions to zines and other forms of artist publications. Visits to Reed's artist book collection as well as other field trips and artist talks supplement this course. Four to six hours of outside studio time is required for this course.

ART 171 - The Figure

Making an image of the human body is one of the most basic artistic acts. It involves sympathy with another body, self-identification, and empirical observation. As practiced by Western artists it serves as both the basic roots of drawing and the height of artistic facility. In this class we explore all dimensions of the studio practice of rendering the figure. The course begins with observational drawing moves through figure sculpture and finally ends with portraiture. We will create a rigorous studio practice centered on the act of drawing. Readings, homework assignments, and discussions will unpack traditions based in gender and race. Through field trips to galleries and museums we will look at the uses of the figure in art history and contemporary art. The bulk of the studio work will be done in class. An average of one to three hours outside of class per week is expected. Aside from the work of observing and sussing out the details of the figure, classes will include discussions of assigned readings.

ART 172 - Painting I - Imaginary Worlds

This studio art class illuminates foundational painting techniques through the study of real and imagined lifeworlds. We will draw inspiration from our multispecies community to observe form and colorÌýand to create future ecological imaginaries. We will learn introductory painting strategies for creating 2D compositions and for integrating color theory. We will develop the skills needed to conjure illusions of movement and to communicate emotion through abstraction, composition, and mark making. This class will include field trips, microscopic work, and repeated observations of a location on the Reed campus. Through this work, we will consider how an art practice can help us to imagine new futures for ecological and equitable living. Students will create multimedia paintings in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other's work.

ART 174 - Critical Natural History Illustration

This introductory drawing and printmaking class takes a decolonial approach to natural history illustration and printmaking. We will consider how the visual histories of power and empire are embedded within natural history illustration and how we can attempt to repair those stories through a visual arts practice. Together, we will draw from our unique histories and relationships to the natural world in an attempt to rewild the archive through our art practices and illuminate new multispecies relationships. To do this work, we will consult the illuminated manuscripts and monoprints held in the Reed special collections. We will learn about the rich history of printmaking as a form of resistance to oppression. Students will use charcoal, colored pencils, and inksÌýto make multimedia works on paper in the studio and in the field. Students will be able to articulate the relationship of these visual works to the conceptual foundations of the class.

ART 176 - Beginning Bookbinding

This hands-on course offers an introduction to the techniques, tools, materials, and processes used in bookbinding. We begin with basic box construction in order to build eye/hand skills, then follow with a variety of sewn book structures that have evolved in different cultures around the world. We end with a multisection hardcover binding. Along the way are field trips, artist lectures, and two self-directed assignments that allow students to express their own ideas within the realm of book and box structure. Four hours of additional studio time is required to complete each week's binding.

ART 177 - Drawing in Many Forms

Drawing is a basic building block for visual art and other creative practices. It is important to develop the skill of producing an image on a page. It is also important to think about how to apply the practice of drawing to other methods of making. In this class students will learn some basic methods of drafting an image and begin to apply those methods to other media, platforms, and social contexts. Students will lean on their own intuition in regards to subject matter and styles of representation. The class will begin with making drawings in felt tip pen and over time include watercolor, collage, digital arrangement with Google drawings, risograph printing, and sewing.

ART 181 - Architectonic Structures

This course introduces students to the structural principles and communicative possibilities of sculpture and architecture. Each project addresses one of the three scales: the architectural, into which the body fits; the human, to which the body relates or which the body physically inhabits; and the intimate, which relates to the hand or head. We will study the fundamentals of wood and aluminum fabrication, including handcrafted joinery, lamination, steam bending, wall construction laser cutting, and 3D printing. Readings will focus on the application of craft-based architectural construction and the direct impact this has on society through communal projects, new types of housing, and personal agency. Students will be exposed to diverse, international contemporary artists and architects. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times.

ART 182 - Material Objects

A crafts-based course that focuses on the form, function, and concept of handmade objects in our society. The class will learn skills in hand-built and thrown clay forms, casting and fabricating with ceramics, wax, paper, cloth, and glass. The assignments will explore the poetic language of each material, fusing the analog and the digital, and will focus on cooperative and community-based works that can emerge from these mediums. Readings will focus on social practices and culturally significant, politically motivated works made for and with communities. Students will have technical workshops with studio assistant in glass and ceramics weekly. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times.

ART 190 - Art and Photography I

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of photography through bothÌýanalogÌýand digital photographic processes and investigates the use of photography in the context of contemporary art. The class will cover camera operation, principles of exposure, basic understanding of light, film development, and darkroom/digitalÌýmanipulation of photographic images.ÌýTechnical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, slide presentations, and critiques.

ART 191 - Between the Mirror and the Window

This course seeks to question the history of photography and its identity as a medium. The class explores the ontological nature of the photographic medium, its relationship to the concept of the window of reality vs the concept of a mirror of the artist, to expand on the conceptual possibilities and materialities of the photographic. The central questions in this class will explore the identity of the medium within and beyond the frame. Students will explore through diverse photographic processes, scanning and printing mechanisms to investigate the use of photography in the context of contemporary art. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, lectures, slide presentations, lab work and group critiques.ÌýStudents are required to do studio work outside of class times.Ìý

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ART 192 - Black and White Analogue Photography

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of 35 mm photography, through black-and-white analog processes in the darkroom, and investigates the use of photography in the context of contemporary art. The class will cover camera operation, principles of exposure, basic understanding of light, film development, and darkroom printing. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, slide presentations and group critiques. Students are required to do studio work outside of class times.Ìý

ART 196 - Digital Video and Coding Interactivity

We will explore the use of the moving image, digital video, and interactivity as related to art. Students will be exposed to the concepts and visual strategies surrounding digital media, and techniques of nonlinear, nondestructive video editing and interactivity. We will look at the various ways in which artists employ these technologies and tools in their works through readings, class discussions, and slide presentations. First, students will deal with moving image as a medium as practiced in art and will be exposed to media software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Then, we will take apart and reexamine the moving image and the tools artist use to edit the moving image in an attempt to expand our understanding of the medium through a graphical programming environment for video, music, and data called Max/MSP/Jitter. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity.

ART 197 - Media Practice After Machine Learning

Introduces students to creative uses of machine learning for generating and transforming text, images, sound, and video. In a rapidly changing media landscape, the course takes the position that machine learning has fundamentally reshaped digital culture and digital production, with effects extending well beyond the arts. The course approaches these tools as both unavoidable and contested, and asks students to explore their possibilities alongside their limitations and risks. We will use machine learning both as a creative medium for studio practice and as an object of study, combining hands-on making with close analysis of how models, datasets, and interfaces shape media production, circulation, and reception. The course treats the study of technology as inseparable from social and political life. The course combines hands-on practice with lectures, readings, and discussion. Students will develop a working understanding of core concepts that underlie contemporary ML systems, including datasets and labeling, training and inference, tokenization and next-word prediction, embeddings and vector space, large language models, and diffusion-based image generation. These technical ideas will be approached in service of creative practice, making, and thinking, preparing students to navigate real-world contexts increasingly entangled with machine learning.

ART 201 - Introduction to the History of Art

Website (Katz)

Basic art-historical methods and examples of recent scholarship are examined in relationship to a chronologically, geographically, or thematically defined body of art.

ART 251 - Making Graphic Novels

This course will examine the history of comics as well as contemporary trends. Students will study the mechanics and structure of the medium. We will also refer to other forms of visual storytelling, such as serial television, film, and art-historical references. Students will apply these directly to their own work. Each student will create a self-published comic. Discussions and lectures will cover topics such as character studies, format, size, material choice, etc. Occasional field trips to printers, comic shops, and comic companies will give students a sense of professional resources. The class will produce an anthology based on a selection of work produced in class.

ART 270 - Experiments in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking

We will develop and articulate individual research approaches to an art-making practice. By working with traditional art mediums while also creating our own experimental inks, paints, and stains, we will consider how to give form to narrative through composition, color, and materiality. The first part of the course will involve exploratory mark making and technical skill development towards a research-based project to be proposed and executed over the rest of the semester. The project might involve continued work in drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, or experimental mixed media. In a weekly studio section that will include lectures, videos, discussions, and field trips, we will encounter and learn terms and concepts common to contemporary visual culture, ecology, design, and activism. Students will create multimedia works in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other's work.

ART 274 - Painting II - Naturecultures

In thisÌýpainting class, weÌýwill create work that is in conversation with the broader questions: Can we identifyÌýand follow specific naturecultures from our current surroundings as well as our ancestral lineages? How might we paint, map, and storyÌýsuch specificities as we engage with these environments as sites of knowledge production?ÌýIn this class we will use a contemporary painting approach to create alternative mapping narratives, trace our diasporic human and ecological relationships, and question what a decolonial painting approach could look like. We will develop our personal relationships to the more-than-human world. This class will includeÌýlectures, readings, technical skill demos, discussions,Ìýfield trips, and microscopic work.ÌýStudents will create multimedia paintings in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other's work.Ìý

ART 282 - Sculpture in the Expanded Field

This studio course examines sculpture as a spatial and temporal practice shaped by the human body, material transformation, and relationships to place. Students work with natural and found materials while learning ethical approaches to gathering and making. Through readings, case studies, and hands-on projects, the course investigates how sculptural form engages perception, environment, and personal meaning. Students will reflect on their own life practices, such as where they come from, what they wish to honor or release, and consider how authenticity and intention inform artistic work.

ART 291 - Art and Photography II

The course will introduce advanced topics such as color, large-format, and medium-format photography. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through projects, readings, slide presentations, lab work, and critiques. Class time will be spent in lecture, slide presentations, lab work, critique, and occasional field trips. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity.

ART 293 - Internet Literacy: AI Coding, Culture, and Art Practice

Students will develop an understanding of the technology and the issues surrounding the internet and the web through studio activities, readings, and online and/or physical fieldwork. Students will gain literacy in web development languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). We will cover the history of the use of computers and networks as a tool for empowerment and for creating art. We will explore topics such as hypertextuality, nonlinearity, interactivity, authorship, web as archive, net neutrality, and the open-source movement. With the newly acquired literacy in hand we will investigate how the convergence of the web/social media with social practice/activism reconfigures the ways in which artists and citizens view, participate in, understand, and narrate real-world issues.

ART 296 - Photography in the Expanded Field

This course invites students to reconsider photography beyond its medium specificity and explore its intersections with sculpture, painting, and installation art. Through an integrated approach combining conceptual inquiry and material experimentation, students will examine photography's shifting definitions within contemporary art. The class will emphasize both technical skill and critical thinking through projects, readings, discussions, demonstrations, and critiques. Students will develop hands-on experience in darkroom printing, large-format digital output, and the creation of photographic structures using wood, fabric, and aluminum, as well as laser cutting and related fabrication processes. Basic photographic knowledge is expected. Students must be self-motivated and willing to engage in studio work and workshops outside of scheduled class time.

ART 298 - Laboratory for Experimental Photography

This course will invite students to investigate the possibilities of art and photography as an experimental medium. This class is a space to problematize, dislocate, question, expand, collaborate, share, detonate and produce in new and unexpected ways. Students will experiment diverse processes in order to articulate their work beyond the frame and expand the notions of art and photography as a medium. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, lectures, slide presentations, lab work and group critiques. Students must be self-motivated and are required to do studio work outside of class times.

ART 301 - Recent Writing About Art

While open to all students who meet the prerequisites, this course is required for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Juniors will have additional assignments that will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history.

This team-taught course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art-historical scholarship, spanning a broad geographical and chronological range of topics. Texts will be read with an eye to understanding the methods currently engaged within the discipline of art history and its allied fields to interpret visual and material artifacts. While open to all students with the prerequisites, it is also a required course for all declared art history majors in their junior year.ÌýA major task of this seminar is to prepare majors in their junior year design and research a topic, compose and annotate a bibliography, and write and revise a 20-page research paper by the end of the semester. The experience of writing this paper, which will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history, will prepare students to write their senior art history thesis. At the end of the semester, students are also expected to produce a draft of their thesis proposal.

ART 313 - Art and Life in Renaissance Florence

In Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari describes how "the arts were born anew" in Renaissance Florence. The city's streets and piazzas, palaces and churches, paintings and sculptures all give visual form to the cultural and social changes that affected Florentine life. In its study of artists such as Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, this course concentrates on the 15th and 16th centuries as a period of innovation, in terms of both artistic theory and practice. Through an examination of Florence's public, ecclesiastical, and domestic spaces, we will consider how visual and material culture served as markers of civic identity and social distinction.

ART 314 - Indian Cinema Between Media

Since its inception in the early twentieth century, Indian cinema has reflected a unique aesthetic syncretism, shaped by the transfer and translation of visual forms and ideas across various media. This course explores the intermedial connections between Indian films and other visual traditions, such as painting, print, and photography to unpack the entangled technological and conceptual nexus between still, printed, and moving images. We will analyze how an array of art forms such as premodern painted manuscripts, colonial photography, 20^th-century mass-produced prints, and modernist architecture have shaped the visual economies of Indian films. In attending to the significance of formal choices and innovations evident within a particular film, genre, or directorial oeuvre, we will critically analyze the relationship between form and content. Through this study, we will not only consider a reading of the visual image through its cultural and symbolic meanings but also explore a phenomenologicallyÌýinflected understanding of images as constituting the experience of everyday life, and indeed, modernity, in India.

ART 317 - Museum History and Theory

This course will consider the history and theory of museums and collecting. Public institutions for the display and viewing of artworks and other cultural objects, which we now call museums, developed in Europe in the 18^th century in the context of revolution and imperialism. Museums are, therefore, distinctly modern and western institutions that served specific political functions which continue to play a profoundly important role in museum practices today. During the first part of the semester, we will study the history and development of large-scale object collecting, from Medieval treasuries filled with saints'Ìýbones and other relics housed in precious jewel-encrusted gold containers; to early modern cabinets of curiosities that placed animal carcasses side-by-side with ancient Roman coins, unicorn horns, Renaissance paintings, and Mexica feather headdresses; before discussing how the modern public museum came into being with a primary objective of decontextualizing cultural artifacts in order to serve as tools of burgeoning nationalism in Europe. We will conclude the first part of the semester by studying how museums today continue to reflect and uphold the values that led to their creation in the 18^th century. The second part of the semester will be devoted to studying museum design and curation, and the impact that they have on the presentation and consumption of culture and history. Finally, we will consider de-colonizing practices in museums through a series of case studies.

ART 320 - Early Modern Art Beyond the Visual

From its beginnings as an academic field of study in the 19^thÌýcentury, art history has taken for granted the primacy of the visual in the study of art and artifacts. As art history as a discipline has begun to move beyond its European colonialist roots, its practitioners have likewise sought to think about art and artifacts in more expansive terms than the purely visual. In this course, we will study medieval and early modern art (roughly 13^th-18^thÌýcenturies) from around the world using methodologies that prioritize non-visual ways of thinking about and understanding works of art. We will focus primarily on works of art and craft that were not meant to be understood or interacted with using the physical sense of sight, and thus our methodologies and the artworks to which we apply them will be aligned. We will begin by thinking about how the discipline's prioritizing of the visual has its origins in the beginnings of race thinking in the west in the 15^thÌýand 16^thcenturies, before discussing the instrumentalization of vision in the 19th century as a part of the western imperialist project. We will then move on to study how works of art produced meanings and relationships with their users and audiences that transcended the visual. For instance, we will consider objects that were explicitly not intended to be seen by human eyes, ones that prioritize process over product, art that was meant to be consumed and destroyed, objects that primarily appealed to physical senses other than sight, or used sight simply to access other sensory experiences, and conceptions of sight that are spiritual rather than physical. Throughout the whole semester, we will keep in mind the social implications of sight's ascendancy in the west: who has the power to see vs. who is surveilled and disciplined? Which traditions, values, and ideas are visible and thus available for study or acknowledgement, and which are made invisible, and thus for all intents and purposes, nonexistent?

ART 334 - Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art

This course focuses on twentieth- to twenty-first-century Chinese visual culture and will be organized loosely around four phases of art production during the past hundred or so years. It begins with the major transition from the imperial Qing dynasty to the tumultuous Republican period in 1911, paying close attention to discussions on Western and Chinese artistic practices that arose at this critical political junction. We then turn to art production under Mao Zedong beginning in 1942, with his famous Talks on Literature and Art presented in Yan'an, in which art became an integral part of his social and political platforms. From there, we examine the visual objects produced during and shortly after the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Finally, the rapid pace of China's economic growth has also greatly affected its visual material. In the last half of the semester, we will seek to critically examine the process in which China has become one of the most exciting geographic regions for thinking about contemporary art, and the ways in which artists have chosen to depict and negotiate their changing realities.

ART 336 - Art and Cartography

This course explores the intersections of art and cartography across a variety of time periods and geographic regions. Rather than being organized chronologically or geographically, the course will proceed in thematic units that transcend the disciplinary boundaries that often divide the study of art and maps, such as landscape, travel, urban planning, diagrams, and grids. While the course will not provide the technical skills of mapmaking with modern technologies such as GIS, it is nonetheless especially interested in how attention paid to the processes involved in mapmaking reveals different ways of visualizing data that are commensurate with the more common forms of artmaking in art history. The goal of the course is to use cartography as an entry point for further exploration into the relationships between art and scienceÌýmore broadly.Ìý

ART 337 - Queer Arts After Stonewall

What did queer art become when the closet was no longer the dominant structure of queer life? In this class, we will study how queer art practices reimagined artistic modernity as well as the social and political values that structured heteronormativity. In this framing, we will think together about technology and modes of production; race and racialization; public spheres, counterpublics and other models of collective life; sex and sexual practices; and other experiments with sex, gender, embodiment, and personhood. Some of the artists and writers we discuss includeÌýDouglas Crimp, John Paul Ricco, Andy Warhol, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, Zach Blas, Susan Stryker, Jonathan Flatley, Homay King, Sadie Benning, Cheryl Dunye, David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Samuel Delaney, Sharon Hayes, Tavia Nyong'o, Vaginal Davis, Jacolby Satterwhite.

ART 346 - Introduction to Media Studies

See FMST 302Ìýfor description.

ART 350 - Oceans, Rains, Rivers, Pools: Histories of Water

Why did artists from the regional courts of India paint poetic visions of rains, lakes, and rivers during periods of drought? How can the ocean serve as an archive, metaphor, and method for thinking about early modern and colonial material cultures, trade, and mobility? How do media images of environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina make visible, and invisible, the ocular tactics of biopolitical racism? How do our current water crises demand a wholesale rethinking of how we write and think about art? This class will focus on water as a subject and a methodology for studying early modern, colonial, and contemporary visual cultures. We will study a range of case studies, including regional Indian paintings, early modern hydro-architecture in South Asia, material cultures shaped by the Manila galleon trade and Indian Ocean trade networks, media images of environmental catastrophes, recent museum exhibitions on climate change, and more. Our studies will be supplemented by writings in art history, environmental humanities, anthropology, and new materialism. We will also consider the emergence of an art historiography of water that has been shaped by the ecological turn in the humanities.

ART 354 - Performing Mediation (Video Art, 1960-2000)

Video art began with artists turning the camera on their own bodies and their own studios. But far from being a privatized art form, the video medium implicates various popular media, including home video, cinema, television, and, more recently, webcams and online video. We will study the aesthetic precursors of video art as well as the histories of the popular media with which video art is historically and technologically enmeshed. Central to our discussions will be questions of media as well as questionings of embodiment, focusing particularly on gender and race. We will look at a wide range of video practices (analog, digital, closed-channel, broadcast, networked). We will watch videos together in class, but students should also expect to spend time each week watching videos outside of class.

ART 355 - South Asia and the British Empire

This course examines the art and architecture of South Asia, focusing on changes in artistic production and patronage vis-à-vis the shifting political, economic and social contexts of the British Empire. The class will provide a historical overview of British colonialism in South Asia, moving chronologically around historical transitions, from the expansion of the British East India Company in the eighteenth century and the rise of high imperialism in the nineteenth century to the development of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Through key case studies, including regional Indian and British paintings, colonial museums, photography, and print cultures, we will critically examine how art operates within and against imperial frameworks-both as an instrument of empire and as a site of mimicry, resistance, and fracture. ByÌý interrogating the relationship between art and empire through theoretical frameworks of Orientalism, mimesis, transculturation, and postcolonial theory, we will forge new possibilities for studying and writing about art in the context of colonial and cross-cultural encounters.ÌýÌý

ART 358 - Engenderings

This course sets out to learn from specific challenges that art and artists have posed to a system of gender that values some forms of life over others. Each iteration of the course will start with a specific challenge and then read within the history of gender politics and practice to see what changes in light of that challenge. For instance, what has to change inÌýunderstandings and readings of the feminist relationship between sex and gender in light of the work of trans artists? What has to change inÌýunderstandings and readings of gender-based oppression in light of the work of black feminists? In the Fall of 2025, we will take the Cooley Gallery exhibition of textile artist Freddie Robins as a prompt to study the long relationship between labor and gender.Ìý

ART 365 - Intersection: Architecture, Landscape Sculpture

This advanced studio sculpture course explores architectural and landscape-based works. Reading and research will focus on artists and architects from the 1970s to the present who use public process and sustainable materials to design and build innovative forms within urban spaces. The class will create a set of potential design solutions for a site in Portland. Studio training will include drafting, drawing, and planning strategies and building scale models in wood and metal. Knowledge of Google SketchUp and or Photoshop desired. Students are required to attend workshops and do studio work outside of class times.

ART 370 - Environmental Art

This studio art class focuses on species entanglements under climate change. Working from a multimedia art practice, we will consider the ways that power structures shape the environment. How do the hauntings from ongoing species extinctions impact us and what can we do about it? To do this work, we will draw on BioArt, feminist science, community ecology, and environmental policy to develop our individual and collective artistic research practices. We will consider the material histories involved in our art making and how those materials and practices can interrogate changing ecologies. We will expand our understandings of animism and kinship with the more-than-human world and question if artistic collaboration is possible with nonhumans. We will research, germinate, and caretake plants and other beings, focusing on those that have histories resisting oppression or as biomedicines. By expanding our ecological research as artists, we can illuminate new and vibrant ways to work within the environment.

ART 372 - Intermediate Experiments in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking

We will develop and articulate individual research approaches to an art-making practice. By working with traditional art mediums while also creating our own experimental inks, paints, and stains, we will consider how to give form to narrative through composition, color, and materiality. The first part of the course will involve exploratory mark making towards a research-based project to be proposed and executed over the rest of the semester. The project might involve continued work in drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, or experimental mixed media. In a weekly studio section that will include lectures, videos, discussions, and field trips, we will encounter and learn terms and concepts common to contemporary visual culture, ecology, design, and activism. Students will create multimedia works in the studio and the field, and thoughtfully discuss their own and each other's work.

ART 375 - Advanced Painting: Light, Embodiment, and the History of Seeing

This studio/seminar course treats light as both a technical problem and a conceptual framework: illumination, visibility, perception, atmosphere, exposure, shadow, and the politics of seeing. Students will develop advanced painting practices through sustained studio work, guided technical lessons, and seminar-style discussion spanning the history of painting (from early modern strategies of light to contemporary and expanded painting). Emphasis is placed on articulating one's process and style, building a repeatable studio methodology, and understanding embodiment as painting-how attention, gesture, breath, and movement shape both mark and meaning.ÌýWeekly meetings combine demos, discussions, close readings, and critique. Students work across a range of painting media, with structured studies (value, edge, temperature, glazing, optical mixing) feeding larger project-based works. Written assignments support conceptual clarity and formal decision-making through process documentation, short critical responses, and an artist statement rooted in visual analysis and material research.

ART 376 - Photobook - Narrative and Sequence in Photography

This classÌýbuilds upon the foundational engagements with photography, emphasizing independent work alongside structured exploration of photo books, narrative, and serial photography. Through independent projects, students will deepen their practice, exploring the daily act of photography as a medium for expression and social engagement. This course fosters a critical and creative environment, encouraging students to develop a significant body of work that showcases their individual perspective, supported by regular critiques, workshops, and discussions.

ART 382 - Installation/Participation

An advanced sculpture/multimedia course investigating research-based and social art practices including the intersection of art, science, and society. Students may make work in any 2D, 3D, or time-based medium they are comfortable with, including performance and electronic media, to create installation-based works that inform and immerse the viewer. All sculpture construction shops and tools are available, including laser cutting, 3D printing, and casting. Weekly readings will include contemporary art theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory, and will center on artists working directly with social and political issues at the intersection of art, science, and society.

ART 388 - Socially Engaged Art Forms

Socially engaged art forms, also referred to as social practice, are rapidly developing areas of the contemporary art world. Much of this work is embedded within the contexts from which the works are derived-a distinctive component of how this work functions. This can also be described as the creation of space for conversation, sharing of experiencesÌýand information, or connections to people and places for specific and/or exploratory purposes. This is all conducted with consideration for each of the underlying elements as individual artistic and creative decisions. In this course we will explore projects that center specific people and communities as well as places, things, and events. Students who are excited to engage with other classmates and collaborate to do work in the Reed community and beyond using an equitable and social justice-informed lens make strong candidates for this class.

ART 390 - Realism and Its Discontents in Contemporary Chinese Visual Media

See CHIN 390Ìýfor description.

ART 392 - Intermediate Art, Photography, & Digital Media

This studio course provides a forum for more advanced and independent work for students. Designed for self-directed students seeking an interdisciplinary critique course. This class is a space to experiment and expand your practice, and to gain insight and feedback into the work you are making. Readings and lab work will respond directly to individual and group interests. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through assignments, readings, lectures, slide presentations, lab work and group critiques. Students must be highly self-motivated and will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Students must be highly self-motivated and will be expected to design independent projects.Ìý

ART 393 - Art of Writing

This course is a survey of the history and aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1046 BCE) through the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). In addition to familiarizing students to the calligraphy of this period, this course also seeks to bring into conversation early Chinese theories on writing and contemporary art historical literature on the relationship between words and images. Some questions that will guide the general theoretical arc of the course include how the origins and development of the Chinese writing systems inform its later incarnations as an inextricable part of literati art; what it might mean to emphasize the look of writing more than its linguistic characteristics; and how an everyday skill (writing for the sake of communication) and medium (brush and ink) become an art.

ART 470 - Thesis

ART 481 - Independent Projects or Independent Reading

Independent courses are usually offered only to students already admitted to the division as art majors.

ART 522 - Early Modern Things

Things expose relations in and between societies that inform the past. As Arjun Appadurai argues, "even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context."ÌýIn this course, we will mobilize early modern things to explore what inanimate objects reveal about the animate world. We will study the social significance and cultural value of such things to look at and beyond their materiality. In particular, we will examine objects such as clothing from England, earthenware from the Italian peninsula, featherwork from the New World, and carpets from the Ottoman Empire to rethink how such things construct biography, impact memory, produce ambiguity, and dictate taste.