Art Now
- Spring 2019
Syllabus Description:
Art Now
Professor Adair Rounthwaite, vadair@uw.edu, office Art Building 367, office hours Monday 10am to 12pm or by appointment
TA Lane Eagles, lmeagles@uw.edu , office hours Thursday 10am to 12pm or by appointment
Marta Minujín, Parthenon of Books at Documenta 14, 2017
Course description
Contemporary art today confronts viewers with a bewildering array of images, objects, and processes. This can leave viewers thinking: can anything count as “art?” And what’s the point of it all? In this class, we explore how contemporary art connects artists and viewers in forms of creative engagement with pressing social and political issues. We will see how artists use diverse strategies to help us consider who we are, how our world is changing, and how we can best inhabit it together. Across a set of themes that address the state of contemporary global culture, students will discuss how today’s art speaks to both individual and collective life.
The course trains students how to express these ideas in clear, structured pieces of writing. In particular, contemporary art—which places heavy emphasis on the viewer’s subjective experience—provides an ideal case study for considering how to develop a convincing thesis statement based on one’s own experience or opinion, and how to support it using visual evidence.
Learning goals
In this class, students will:
- Become familiar with a wide range of contemporary art practices of the past twenty years, and with important milestones in the modern art from which they evolved.
- Build skills in the visual analysis of artworks.
- Practice writing and revising clear, well-structured texts that express ideas about artworks, supported by visual analysis.
- Make connections between contemporary artistic production and questions of pressing social and political importance, and explain these connections in writing.
Full syllabus:
Rounthwaite Art Now spring 2019.docx
School of Art policies: