Art, Film, and Visual Studies
The Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) cultivates skills in both the practice and the critical study of the visual arts. Its components include photography, filmmaking, animation, video art, painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, as well as film and visual studies, critical theory, and the study of the built environment. Undergraduates may pursue a Concentration with Tracks and Secondary Fields in Film/Video Production, Film and Visual Studies, and Studio Arts.
Note that most of the courses offered in AFVS are limited to 10 or 12 students because many are “making” courses, meaning students create artworks or films. The optimal way to conduct these courses is in small groups. Some seminars are also limited-enrollment. Students should visit The AFVS web site's courses page as well as each course’s Canvas site to learn about course admission procedures.
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Matt Saunders
Manager of Academic Programs: Paula Soares
Gateway Courses
Spring 2024
AFVS 12: Drawing 1: Drawing as a Visual Language
Katarina Burin
A studio course to build the skills of drawing incrementally and expand students’ visual vocabulary. Drawings will be made from life, photographs and invention. Emphasis will be placed on enhancing our observational sensibilities through life drawing and the figure, focusing on all aspects of technical development, particularly the importance of line. The aim of this course is to expand drawing skills with intention and purpose.
AFVS 40H: Introduction to Still Photography
Patrice Helmar
This course serves as an introduction to photography. We will concentrate on the contemporary and historic nature of the medium through lectures, discussions, and visiting artists. Tutorials and workshops using programs from the Adobe suite will cover digital workflow and proper camera operation. These sessions will include image capture, file management, image processing, and digital printing. Weekly assignments will include photographic exercises, readings, and written responses. Structure of the course will alternate between technical instruction, lab days, and critique. The culminating assignment will be a final series of photographs akin to a well honed collection of songs.
AFVS 65: Photographic/Cinematic—Introduction to Lens-Based Practices
Joana Pimenta
Introduction to lens-based practices. We will focus on the photographic principles of cinematography for filmmakers (camera, lenses, scale of shots, exposure, composition, lighting, among others), and work with a series of photography-based exercises for moving image, using both still and moving image cameras, and working across film and video. This is a foundations course for work in film/video, with a specific focus on cinematography, where students will learn through practice photographic fundamentals that will be central to their moving image work.
FYSEMR 63W: Vegetal Humanities—Paying Attention to Plants in Contemporary Art
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones. Suddenly, we have plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and botany-based forms of philosophy, architecture, music and more. Following the lead of these culture-makers and their work, we will draw on the new science of plant communication and learning in this class; uncover plant-based histories and renew ancient understandings of human-plant relations. But plants themselves will also be primary sources, as each student follows a sequence of exercises to deepen understanding of a plant "interviewee"—one they'll grow at home from an unidentified seed. At the same time, we will ask critical questions: with climate crisis upon us, in a time of social inequity, poisonous politics, and mass dislocations, why this attraction to plants? Is the vegetal turn a diversion from tough human problems? Or is there reason to think a cultural change could, even now, change the fate of nature?
GENED 1156: Modern Art and Modernity
Maria Gough, David Joselit, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
What role do artistic practices play in the formation of modern culture and society, and how does art foster critical reflection and debate?How has modernity—understood as a socio-economic reality, technological condition, cultural discourse, and set of aesthetic practices—redefined the purpose and function of art over the past three hundred years or so? What role has modern art played in the constitution of the modern experience of subjectivity? Beginning in the early 18thC and concluding in the early 21stC, the course traces art’s transformation from a tool of power elites into an instrument also of broad public instruction and civic debate on controversial topics. By learning about the diversity of ways in which modern artists have contributed to the production and critique of cultural and social life you will acquire the skills to make the most of your experience of art exhibitions and museums. This knowledge of the long history of modern art will help you better navigate a cultural present characterized by the ever-greater importance in everyday life of the production and consumption of images. It will also enable you to gain a deeper awareness of how art participates in critical dissent and aesthetic speculation in today's troubled world.