GRAD 655 - Graduate Seminar: Visual Culture Studies

In this graduate seminar we examine the content and evolution of contemporary visual culture - that is everything we see, may see, or visualize and the how we use visual and textual means to communicate, define, and produce our culture and its artifacts. We examine historic origins and changing contexts that underlie and inform a broad range of creative practices including art, design, architecture, cinema, media, display, material culture, digital culture, popular culture, sustainable design, and performance. By addressing concerns for 21st century artists, art educators, industrial designers, museum designers and practitioners, students gain an understanding of the concepts, objects, and practices that comprise contemporary visual culture, and learn how these ideas may be applied to their concurrent graduate research, writing, and studio practice.

In this seminar that offers a critical overview of the varied contexts in which we create, offer and derive meaning from objects and practices that shape our relationships to our visual world, faculty office core texts and selected readings from a Course Reader as departure point for exploring visual culture and intersections with the arts, sciences, and media. Students access a range of theoretical issues that form the basis for making aesthetic judgments, examining the contextual basis and implication of their judgments discussing historic, philosophical, psychological, ethical, social, political, global, and gender-based consideration that bring our visual culture into being.

Prerequisites & Notes
Restricted to students enrolled in graduate programs.

Credits: 3 cr, 3 hrs