Studio Art in Athens

Language Requirement: None
Academic Standing by Program Start: Sophomore or above
Location: Europe, Greece
GPA: 2.5
Program Overview

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, fieldwork, daily excursions to archaeological sites and museums, contemporary galleries and engagement with land and sea, students will have the opportunity to weave their experience of place and consideration of history and art 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. 

In addition to the daily practice of making art, an important component of the course will be 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.

Dates and Deadlines
Term Year Priority Deadline Deadline Arrival Date Departure Date
Summer 2023 2/15/2023 3/15/2023 8/20/2023 9/9/2023

Priority Discounts

If your program has a Priority Deadline, complete all pre-decision application materials by this date to receive a $100 credit toward your program fee. Please note, students participating in multiple summer programs are only eligible to receive the $100 credit once.

Academic Details

ART 488: Studio Art in Athens. 6 quarter credits or 4 semester credits. Upper-division studio coursework.

In Studio Art in Athens, you will apply media, techniques and strategies to create art that interprets objects, images and gestures from the natural world and culture of Greece. Through exploring the notion of travel as a creative activity while gaining an understanding of the traveler’s cultural position, you will fully engage with the environment at hand as well as the process of travelling through creative practice. You will gain a basic understanding of Greek history, culture and art over the course of the program through exposure to museums and contemporary art in Athens from commercial galleries, performance and design studios to alternate creative hubs.

Course Equivalencies

UO students: please refer to the UO Course Equivalency Process and the UO Office of the Registrar Course Equivalency Database.

Non-UO students: Actual credit awarded is determined by the relevant department at your university in consultation with the study abroad office. Check with your study abroad advisor for more information.

Faculty and Staff

Colleen Choquette-Raphael uses text, photography, video and found objects to investigate how artifacts from the natural world and culture act as mediators of experience. Currently her practice includes strategies of repetition and duration to compose a performative narrative around the plight of the elephant as a symbol of matriarchy, grief, and the history of speciesism. As UO faculty, Choquette-Raphael has taught a broad constellation of courses from all aspects of photographic media, experimental book structures and seminars on public art and performance. Her work has been exhibited nationally. She holds degrees in Art History, Art Education, Visual Design, and an MFA in Intermedia Art from the University of Washington. She has also served as the director of study abroad programs in Italy and Greece and has been invited to lead UO alumni tours in Tanzania, the Amalfi Coast and Tuscany.

Tannaz Farsi's configurations of objects and images address the complicated networks around the conception of memory, history, identity and geography. Drawing from cultural objects, feminist histories, and theories of displacement evidenced by long-standing colonialist and authoritarian interventions into daily life, her project-based works propose a different means of representation regarding non-western subjects and objects that obstruct singular and conventional means of identification.

Housing Description

While in Athens, you will live in a shared apartment with a small kitchenette within walking distance of the Athens Centre. Generally, there will be two to four students in each apartment, although some houses will accommodate up to six people. You have the choice of cooking meals in the apartment or eating at one of the inexpensive cafés and restaurants near the Athens Centre.

While traveling during the program, you will share a room with two or three classmates at local hotels in the region. During this time, breakfast is generally included, but students will be responsible for their lunch and dinner.