Studio Art in Athens

Instructor
Colleen Choquette-Raphael and Tannaz Farsi
Course Description
The unique landscape of the Greek islands and the multilayered city of Athens provide the setting for this intensive three-week studio art course. Through a series of lectures, creative work, daily excursions to archaeological sites and museums, contemporary galleries and engagement with land and sea, students will have the opportunity to weave global history and theory into the practice of making art. Our methods will be interdisciplinary and open to various modes of expression, which might include but are not limited to, drawing and painting, text, performance, photography, sound and video. The emphasis is less on a technique or process and more on developing a methodology that creatively articulates your response to your surroundings and experience of travel.An important component the course will be on the study of artists who engage in practices that involve traveling to or otherwise focusing on specific geographic locations. We will look toward these practices to give shape to student’s artistic production during this course. We will examine conventional examples of art dealing with how place forms social, historical and cultural values as well as artists who complicate traditional ways of representing geographic sites, or their activity at those sites.The course is ultimately about heightened sensitivity to our transitory experience of place and the transformation of that experience into images and objects.