Director Fall 2009: Professor DeWitt Godfrey, Department of Art and Art History
(Note: London Art and Art History Study Group will not run in 2010-11.)
Course descriptions | Living arrangements | Costs | Deadlines | Further information | Helpful Links
The London Art and Art History Study Group will focus on the city’s rich resources as a center of modern and contemporary culture. We will seek an integrated understanding of the cultural life of the city through its museums, neighborhoods, art galleries, performance spaces, and historical structures.
The courses will be organized around several key aspects of London’s cultural and artistic landscape. First, we will examine London as a center of emerging visual art, with special emphasis on the extraordinary ethnic diversity of this global city and its impact on the contemporary art scene. Second, we will consider London as a premier “museum city,” focusing in particular on the presentation of visual art in the city’s museums. Finally, the spaces of the city will serve as inspiration for creative studio work in the form of a sketchbook consisting of diverse projects done on site. A fourth course offered through the Colgate English Study Group will bring students into the world of contemporary theater in London.
Participants in the Art and Art History program will undertake a capstone final project that integrates all of these aspects of the semester program.
Courses
The program is integrated with Colgate’s concentration in art history and studio art. The two arts courses can count towards either the major or minor concentration.
ARTS 375: Studio Theory and Practice (Professor DeWitt Godfrey)
This will be a studio class held in the city rather than in a studio classroom. The unifying idea for this class can be expressed in the question: “So where are you now?” Students will explore aspects of place, location, site specificity, public art and the ways artists express their engagements directly with the world around them rather than through traditional studio practice; how we articulate our relationships to the aesthetic, social, political and cultural contexts within which we exist. Students will document their experiences in the form of notes, drawings, diagrams, collages and other forms of visual annotation -- a record of their own mapping, analysis and work in public spaces of the city. This record will be the work presented at the end of the term.
ARTS 370: Museums in Theory, Ideology, and Practice (Professor John Reeve, Visiting Professor) When and why were museums invented? How do they make visitors feel virtuous, insecure, proud, or tired? Do the Museum of Transportation and the Tate Modern have anything in common? Who decides which artists’ work belongs on museum walls? This course will explore these questions through controversial readings and on-site study of London museums and galleries hosted by local specialists, museum curators, critics, and gallery designers. Students will learn to interpret and to challenge museums’ underlying ideologies. For the final project of the course, each student will select a museum the class has not yet studied, research and analyze that museum, and guide the class through it.
UNST 3XX: Art in the School, Museum and Community: London (Monika Burczk) (Pending Curriculum Committee Approval) This course will introduce current arts-based pedagogical theory and practice in the school (Teaching Artists/Aesthetic Inquiry, Visual Culture Art Education, Reggio Emilia/Project Approach), the museum (Narrative Inquiry, Visual Thinking Strategies, Interpretive Practices) and the community (Community-Based Art Education, Community Arts Workers, art as social justice, art as therapy). London offers an ideal location for the investigation of this approach: there are numerous schools that feature an arts-integrated curriculum, museum education programs that promote cultural awareness and interpretation, and a diversity of community initiatives that offer collaborative collective practice in public venues. Through encounters with current pedagogical strategies and scholarship, site visits, guest lectures, and fieldwork/participant-observation opportunities, students will gain new understandings of the possibilities of art practice. Coursework will also include an introduction to qualitative methods and arts-based inquiry, and students will be required to keep a creative process journal, a field-log and write a final research paper to present to the class.
ENGL 332: London Theater (Visiting Professor in Theater) This course is built around a series of plays produced in London during the term of the study group. It is arranged to give students experience of all kinds of London theater, from West End to the nationally subsidized companies to neighborhood theater and the fringe. Students will also read several of the plays that they see performed. Actors, critics, set designers, and directors are invited to the classroom discussions. Students in the ARTS program will produce a project that integrates their experiences of contemporary art and theater in the city.
Costs
Costs above Colgate’s tuition include room and board, airfare, and necessary out-of-pocket expenses. On the average students can expect to spend $5,000-$6,000 more than a semester on campus. These increased costs are used in calculating the aid packages of students who receive financial aid, provided this is their first study group experience.
Students who are planning extensive personal travel will need to increase their budget accordingly.
Estimate of student expenses
Living arrangements
Colgate University has made arrangements with ACORN Management in London to provide flats for students on the London Study Groups. The cost of these flats is included in the above estimate.
Field trips
The study group includes required field trips to Edinburgh, Scotland, The Arnolfini Arts Center in Bristol, Ikon Arts Center in Birmingham and to Stonehenge in West Sussex. An additional field trip may be added.
Classrooms and libraries
Classrooms are located in Florida State University’s London Centre in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. The FSU Centre also has computer facilities and a modest library. Privileges can be arranged for use of the British Library and the National Arts Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Prerequisites and selection criteria
Application is open to all students who have completed or plan to complete by the end of spring semester 2008 at least two courses in the Art and Art History department, one in studio and one in art history. Special preferences will be given to arts concentrators. Students admitted to the study group will be required to attend orientations meetings during the spring semester 2009.
Information sessions and deadlines
Information sessions will be held on November 13th and 18th, both sessions will be in 211 Little Hall from 11:30 – 1:00 pm. Deadline for applications is December 12th. Application forms are available in the Art and Art History office, 3rd floor Little Hall, and in the Off-Campus Study office, 2nd floor McGregory. Students admitted to the program will be notified by January 11th, 2009.
Further information
Applications and requests for further information should be directed to Professor DeWitt Godfrey (dgodfrey@mail.colgate.edu) 311 Little Hall.
Helpful links