Curriculum

Program curriculum: This is a 20-credit program comprising 5 components: 2 required seminars (2x4 credits); 2 elective seminars (2x4 credits); 1 required capstone project (4 credits).

Required Courses

Critical History of Museums and Curating
A critical review of the history of institutional collecting and display practices moving into the literature of recent innovative curatorial projects and debates around curatorial practice. Final assessment requires a polemical exhibition of research findings.

Dissolving the White Cube
A course on the evolution of contemporary curating from the debates in the 1960s around the concept of the gallery as white cube to the post-studio practices of the present.

Graduate Installation Art (capstone)
A seminar and studio class culminating in a student-curated exhibition. The course will review the history of recent installation art culminating in an exhibition component with an emphasis on installation practices. Exhibitions will be in the Meyers Gallery and specific sites on campus.

Elective Courses

Curating New Media
A seminar on the history of new media exhibitions, considering the options for showing digital work, art-based websites and the changing role of the web. This course will review the particular requirements of digital artists regarding display of their work and the efforts of museums to engage technology in exhibition design and education.

Video Art History
This course looks at the advent of video as an art form with an emphasis on single channel videos by American artists. Subjects include history, machine visions, recording performance, appropriation, and the post-human. The screenings will be supplemented by weekly readings.

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Globalism, and Exhibition
A seminar dealing with contemporary postcolonial theory and criticism in relation to the history of exhibitions of the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning the spectacular display of so-called primitive arts and peoples to now; contemporary state - sponsored biennials, which continue to proliferate and which have created a crisis, according to which artists and critics are required to trace and mime the tourism and globalization criticized by so much contemporary art.

Curating Architecture
A seminar to be offered collaboratively with faculty in the School of Architecture. This seminar will address current intersections of art and architecture in international gallery exhibits.

Internship
Students may choose to intern with a local gallery or museum for 120 hours of work.