Art Matters: From Artist to Action
OART-UT 300 / 2 units / First seven weeks only
What subject matters do we discuss through art?
Why does art matter as a cultural enterprise?
What is the artist’s relationship with the community/audience?
How do social, cultural, political ideas influence the artist’s motivation?
This new master class invites Tisch Artists in Residence into the classroom to share insights about their work, including their methods, successes, failures, as well as their relationship with their community, workspace, collaborators, and audiences. Students will explore what motivates the artist and what paths they take to articulate their ideas into creative projects. The visiting artists will be prompted to address what matters to them as artists and scholars and global citizens; questions will be posed, including: what are the ways artists respond to the matters that affect their communities? What role do they play in raising issues of resonance/urgency and what are the challenges to effecting change through artistic research and practice? Each week the visiting artist will engage with a series of questions pertaining to the “matters” of making work and the significance of why their work “matters”.
*Humanities credit for TSOA students
SPRING 2017 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: JILL SIGMAN
Jill Sigman is an artist who choreographs with bodies and materials. Her work exists at the intersection of dance, visual art, and social practice. She has built huts out of trash in places such as The Ringling Museum of Art and a fjord in the Arctic, and used them as sites for performance and community discussion. She has stored seed, cultivated weeds, and created sculptural installations and dances based on them. She has studied permaculture and created movement scores that embody its principles; volunteered on urban farms and planted a field of kale in performance; and danced in a ring of 3,000 broken eggshells containing people’s answers to the questions “what have you broken?”, “what have you lost?” and “how would you like to die?”.