Find out about sustainability courses offered at MassArt each semester by searching in Self Service using the content tag: Sustainability Content.
Here is a selection of some of the courses with Sustainability Content. Note that not all of these courses will be offered in Spring 2020.
Amber Tourlentes, Studio Foundation , Time: Accumulate
This Course asks the questions: how and where is culture and how is community being produced and sustained. Through the lens of social and environmental justice how is cultural production, design and art making being reimagined? The course will draw on your capacity to see and think both critically and sympathetically into durational/time-based thought modes. We will be screening projects by artist, designers who are working with sustainability; environmental and community based projects. We will study and create projects involving mapping/drawing, photography, sound, video, installation, web, and artist books. What are some of the new forms of social and artistic capital such as intervening into systems of production and distribution, slow design principles, and community sharing skills and resources. We will view/discuss interdisciplinary projects from 1960’s to present, artists engaging–working with audience, community and reimagining; form, material, labor, function, resources, and sustainability.
Maura Smyth, LA/literature, LALW-411-01 Man vs. Wild, and Other Stories We Tell About Nature Wednesday 9:45-12:45
Droughts scorch the Middle East and the American southwest. Wildfires rip across Indonesia. Rising sea levels are already beginning to swallow up island nations, and warming waters are decimating ocean life. As the effects of climate change wreak havoc on human societies and ecosystems across the globe, they also shine an increasingly bright spotlight on how human beings think about and interact with the natural world. This class will explore changing attitudes toward nature over several centuries, including, and especially, the present day. We will discuss the role that writing and art have played in shaping our understanding of the natural world over time. We will also explore how writers, artists, and filmmakers are confronting the representational challenges posed by climate change today.
Over the course of the semester, you will undertake research on an interdisciplinary project that investigates a site of human-nature interaction of your choosing, traces its impact on the world, and explores creative ways to express this impact. You will receive feedback on this project in beginning, intermediary, and final stages, and it will include both written and creative components. We will have several exciting opportunities to broaden our perspectives on this topic. First, this course will be participating in the interdisciplinary Sustainability Studio in the DMC, through which we will open several of our classes to the public. Second, we will meet multiple times over the semester with Professor Nava’s summative elective course, which approaches many of the issues we will be addressing from a scientific perspective that will deepen our humanistic one.
Marika Preziuso, LA/Literature, LALW-508-01 Imagining Others: from Strangers to Cyborgs
This course invites you to forge connections between the ways in which literature, critical theory, visual arts, and popular culture have produced “others”, from “strangers” to post-human “others”, including androids, cyborgs and AI. In class we will reflect on the ways in which writers, artists and thinkers have challenged the dichotomy Self vs. Other, with its cognate opposites: life vs. death, white vs. black, good vs. evil, male vs. female, animate vs. inanimate, humans vs. the natural world.
Due to its integration of writing, reading, art critiquing and art making, Imagining Others is an ideal course for artists approaching their final projects in their major departments.
Jane Marsching, Studio Foundation, TIME: Ecology and Art
Nature, landscape, earth, environment, climate: so many words for the natural world that surrounds us. This class looks at the current state of the natural world: its beauty and peril, its sublime and polluted aspects. Projects will address the climate crisis through the lens of time. We will create projects that engage sustainability and resilience as creative responses in art and design to our imperiled future. Themes of gardening, recycling, composting, waste, consumerism, growth, visual communication, and design for change will be our focus. We will play with fundamental concepts of time in art including narrative, duration, tempo, and others through projects in a variety of media including sound, video, multiple image sequences, and books. Collaborative, research, and performative practices will be explored.
Jennifer Cole, LA/Science , Eating and the Environment
Eating and the Environment focuses on the impact that our daily food purchases and consumption make on the environment and our health. In the class, we will examine major themes related to both industrialized and sustainable agriculture, including: soil resources and pollution; water and air pollution; pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers; the farm bill; tropical deforestation; food additives and nutritional supplements; food safety and emerging infectious diseases; meat and dairy sustainability ramifications; GMOs; and climate change. This course gives students the tools they need to understand what constitutes environmentally friendly and healthy food. Choosing these leads to a higher quality of life in many ways. There is no bigger impact on Earth than agriculture. And food consumption has the single largest impact on our health.
Kristian Demary, LA/Science, Sustainability Science
What is the nature of sustainability? How can we learn from and with nature, its biological diversity and ecosystems, to become more resilient? Practical examples, field visits, readings, and discussions will give students the opportunity to learn about emerging interdisciplinary sciences and solution-driven technologies based on green chemistry and biomimicry. Through explorations of the water-energy-food nexus, adaptations to climate change, and sea level rise, students can explore how we can become self-sustainable in the era of Anthropocene. The intention of the course is to give students a greater understanding of how science can inform public policies. In addition, attention will be paid to how science relates to art and design making, and vice versa.
Judith Leemann, 3DFB233 Fiber Ecologies Thursday 8:00-1:00
This course offers a paired introduction to the ecological context of fiber, understood as material, and to the disciplinary context of fibers, understood as contemporary art practice. Through hands-on processing of materials, and visits from experts in the field, we build a thick understanding of how fiber materials are grown and produced. Through lectures, independent research, and shared readings, we generate a robust sense of the role fiber plays in contemporary creative practice. Course includes processing wool and plant based fibers, repurposing fibers from existing textiles, and gaining a solid foundation in working with natural dyes.
Jenn Varekamp, EDFD 101 Fashion, Culture, Dress, and Identity
This course will examine the relationship between culture, dress and identity. We will look broadly across the world at how dress and adornment are an extension of one’s culture and identity and compare and contrast this to our own. We will explore the significance of dress through rituals, ceremonies and rites of passages as well as through a social and political lens. We will also examine the effects of globalization on dress and what this means in our contemporary world and how this is leading us into the future.
Another layer to the class is looking at indigenous groups and the techniques and handwork used within the realm of dress and the larger global impact on some of these techniques diminishing and the repercussions on a particular culture and one’s identity. Also, we look at the breakdown of culture into sub-cultures both now and from a historical perspective.
TIME: States of Urgency, Stephanie Cardon, Studio Foundation
State of Urgency asks you to define what is most critically at stake for you, your communities, your generation. The urgency will carry over into our practice in this class, in which speed sometimes will be of the essence. Together, we will develop techniques and working processes that allow us to work fast (experimenting with project proposals and collaborative making, writing short form texts, editing 6 second videos, creating multiples.) Through our exploration of time-based media (sequential art, video, sound), and forms that range from the documentary to the hypothetical, we will consider questions of audience, message, medium and dissemination. We will look at a wide variety of works in the field of art, design, architecture that responds and calls attention to urgent needs. The content of this class will address questions of sustainability: the overlap of society, economy and environment.
This class will encourage a supportive, focused, oftentimes collaborative environment in which to explore critical issues that are meaningful for those in attendance. Reading, writing, field trips and group exercises will be required.
