Spring 2025 Courses

Notice to students: We welcome students from other departments and programs to enroll in our classes when space allows. Some of our courses are open to both graduate and undergraduate students, and other courses are graduate only. Please be sure to register for the appropriate course based on your level of studies (ASPP – GT is graduate and ASPP – UT is undergraduate). Non-Tisch students should check with their advisers regarding course allocation.

Conceptual Studio: Transformative Art and Social Change

Professor Karen Finley
ASPP-UT 1029/ GT 2029
Monday 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

How do we create transformative art that activates social change?
How do we create art that expresses the world we see and the world we wish to change to? What concerns do you feel passionate about that you wish to activate artistically? How can emotions, events, policy, loss, grief, hope for peace, end to war, healthcare, gender, race, cultural equity, social justice etc... become art?
Can this work be abstract or diffuse or should it be direct and clear?

Considering the artist as historical recorder we will strive to develop work that witnesses, illustrates and communicates issues about which we wish to foster awareness or change. We will consider art examples, meet with artists, experiment and workshop works in progress. We will have readings, creative assignments, formulate poetic voicing and artistic vision. As we develop our own content we will begin to consider context and concept with our own practice and transformation.

Intentional areas of reflection will be employed for the student to experiment and expand perspective. Units such as Architectural Methods as a Way to Unify, will include activities such as as "making" bridges, creating windows, building foundations, urban wall murals or graffiti art. Sound and color will emerge as a way to express emotion, outrage and cultural shifts. We will consider memorials, monuments and borders. Collaboration, collectives, community practice and public art. Cultural and collaborative manifestos. Through this all we need to find the passion, courage and faith to sustain our practice and heart. Finley may share her own practice, such as with installation, sound, video, poetics, performance, memorials or Art in response to AIDS.

This class aims to facilitate the development and awareness of transformative art with assignments, research, reflections, discussion and creative practice. These undertakings will provide the impetus for deeper inspiration and theories in our artistic development and scholarship. The professor will initiate concepts with readings and artistic examples. We will also consider artists and examine their themes and practices. Students are welcome from a variety of fields and disciplines. Guests working in the field will be visiting the class with their research and experience. Students will create a midterm, a final presentation and paper.

Race & Art: Black Diaspora

Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls
ASPP-GT 2015
Monday 3:15pm - 6:50pm
4 points

Graduate Students Only

This course thinks through the relationship of art and Black Diaspora. Key themes the course will explore are feminism, womanism, sex, gender, sexuality, creativity, time, geography, protest, and other “Black matters.” How is Blackness rendered through gender, sex, and sexuality, and how are gender, sex, and sexuality informed by Blackness? How is Blackness articulated, disarticulated, or unarticulated across the Black Diaspora? How does art in its most expansive terms engage, depict, and reformulate Blackness? How are Black diasporic artists reconfiguring and exploring gender, sex, sexuality, time, place, space, politics, and imagination and their fraught tensions? The course methods will include engagement with visual art, music, performance, film, tv, everyday life, and critical theory.

Some of our course interlocutors will include: art from local gallery and museum exhibitions; thinkers and artists such as Felwine Sarr; bell hooks, Milton Santos; Kiyan Williams; Dionne Brand; Mark Anthony Neal; Frank Wilderson; Tavia Nyong’o; Joāo H Costa Vargas; Denise Ferreira da Silva; Nikita Gale; Kevin Quashie; Biko Mandela Gray; Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí; Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and more.

Students will be encouraged to create, write, perform, collaborate, make, and think alongside, against, and around these issues, methods, and objects.

For All: a short presentation on an art object of your choice
For PhD Students: a final seminar-length paper is expected.
For MA students: the final is a small group or individual presentation/paper/performance/project and an annotated bibliography.

Art and/as Research: Archives and Creativity

Professor Karen Finley
ASPP-UT 1023/ ASPP-GT 2023
Tuesday 10:30am - 2:05 pm
4 points

This dynamic and intimate seminar aims to inspire and deepen our creative practice while gaining research fluency with archival materials. As part of this seminar, we will be holding 3 in- person sessions at the Special Collections at NYU. Joining us will be the Curator of the Arts and Humanities at NYU to guide and facilitate how to utilize an archive to inform our awareness and inspire our creative production.

Together, we will be shown how to review and browse material from the collection, learn how to access and request archive materials and have items we requested retrieved for us to view. Finally, we will be in creative discourse to create presentations from our research. I am very thrilled about this unique opportunity.

For example, one of our assignments from our visit to the NYU Special Collections will be examining the archive of gay artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. A pertinent work is his “Magic Box” which was a box of personal objects, bric-a-brac stored in a wooden box under the artist’s bed. The collection of the artist will be a point of departure to consider creating our own version of a “Magic Box”.

In addition to the above, we will have a parallel inquiry: the 7 stages of creativity as a framework to identify the incremental steps in decisions and direction in artistic practice. These stages include orientation, preparation, analysis, ideation, incubation, synthesis and evaluation.

Through studying and exploring these junctures we hopefully will come to understand the mystery of inspiration, originality and invention. We will examine other related theories such as the relation of symbolism to the unconscious, trauma and creativity, the role of spontaneity and chance as a direction, artistic expression as a voice for empowerment, and the function of freedom and agency in heightening cultural movements. Along the way we
will discover insights together. Individually you will discover what interests and inspires your particular project research.

There will be complementary readings, assignments and individual or group creative exercises. Besides the NYU archives the class may utilize other collections, public art, performances, galleries and libraries for reference. We may have guest artists and scholars. Students will use these resources as they consider furthering the ideas covered in class through the archive, studying a series of stages, to a final project and paper.

All School Seminar: Festive Politics: Carnival, Mutual Aid and Communal Practices

Professor Luis Rincón Alba
ASPP-UT 1000 / ASPP-GT 2000-003
Friday 2:30pm -6:05 pm
4 points

In many political movements, the festive emerges as a powerful force shaping alternative social practices, forms of gathering, and collective movement. These modes of collective existence actively redefine the political landscape, with this sense of collectivity being particularly evident in the aesthetics of the Global South and its Diasporas. Consequently, this course examines the role of festivity in forming political movements, challenging the traditional view that reduces it to a mere byproduct of social life. Using Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics as a foundational case, this seminar offers a detailed interpretation of performances that challenge conventional definitions of both the festive and the political. A diverse range of performance practices—such as carnival celebrations, sound systems, cabaret shows, popular dance styles, artworks, organized slave revolts, and indigenous uprisings—will serve as the basis for students' theoretical and practical engagement.

For this iteration of the course, we will focus on questions surrounding Black and Indigenous relationships to carnival performance, the structures of solidarity and mutual aid inherent in festive practices, and how these practices enact utopian visions of communal life. Additionally, we will explore how these communal modes redefine contemporary understandings of art and politics. The class will include field trips, attendance at various performance events, and discussions with artists and organizers who utilize festivity as a political tool for engagement in NYC.

Questions of race, gender, and class will be examined through philosophical, anthropological, and historical texts, with a keen focus on their roles in the formation of colonial oppression. Methodologies from performance studies will guide our exploration of these critical questions.

Fieldwork Methods and Criticism II

Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls
ASPP-GT 2004 OPEN ONLY TO ARTS POLITICS STUDENTS – NO EXCEPTIONS
Wednesday 3:15 pm - 6:50 pm
2 - 3.5 points

This is the second course in the Methods and Criticism track and an important space of synthesis. The course encourages students to work in self-selected clusters based on shared interests and modes of working. For example, students interested in curating might organize themselves around developing an exhibition. Artists can assemble a critique group for giving in-depth feedback on works in progress. Scholars interested in pursuing publishing or a Ph.D. could workshop chapters and organize panels. These peer-based practice clusters are not mutually exclusive; rather they hold open curricular space for students to further focus and tailor their work together. Students will also develop pathways for their practices after graduation, networking with potential partners, organizations, employers and support systems. Our graduates go on to work as artists and scholars, curators and community organizers, arts administrators, educators and cultural innovators. Our alumni are actively connected to the pulse of social justice, forming a global network of engaged thinkers and doers across six different continents. Methods and Criticism II gives current students the opportunity to tap into the alumni network’s experiences, while crafting their own creative, research and activist projects.

Writing the Artist Statement: Representing your Work for Funding and Beyond

Professor Elizabeth Mikesell
ASPP-UT 1009 (Undergraduate section - sophomores, juniors, seniors)
ASPP-GT 2009 (Graduate section)
Thursdays, 11am - 2:35pm
4 points

In this course, you will develop the skills you need to write about your own work. A series of guided reading, research, and writing exercises will help you think about what your work is, what it means, and why it matters, so that you will be able to craft language that accurately and effectively represents you as an artist and thinker. We will study a variety of personal statements, project descriptions, manifestos, and other artist writings, examining them for their relative strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards gathering effective expressive strategies. You will use the writing you’ve generated in your assignments as the groundwork for several final artist statements that approach and represent your work from different perspectives.

After we explore a variety of public and private sources of funding, fellowships, and residency opportunities in the US, you will identify several opportunities that would be appropriate for your work. You will then prepare applications for two opportunities of your choosing (three for graduate students). You will exit the course with writing that you might revise and reuse for many different purposes in your professional creative life.
This course will count toward elective credit for undergraduate students.

Anatomy of Difference

Professor Sheril Antonio
ASPP-UT 1020 (Undergraduate – Juniors and Seniors)
ASPP-GT 2020 (Graduate Section)
Thursdays, 2pm - 5:35pm
4 points– will count toward Humanities General Education credits for TISCH undergraduates

Prerequisite for undergraduates: One introductory film history/ criticism class.
This course looks at how difference is constructed in film through reading assignments, short and full length features, and critical analysis of the visual form and content seen in mainstream Hollywood, independent, and international films. This inquiry takes note that while some of these films may be conventional in form, in content they challenge accepted notions of differences or stereotypes. Our goal is to catalog films and other media that resist accepted notions of the “other.” To accomplish our goals, we deal primarily with textual analysis that focuses on story and character, as well as cinematic space and time. With the help of articles and texts, we examine socially accepted notions of the “other” and see how they are derived and/or challenged in and by films, thus looking at how an art form can interact with socially accepted forms of “othering.” The objective of the course is to train emerging artists and scholars to engage in critical analysis that can make profound contributions to the individual’s unique creative or analytical process. Another intention of the course is to delineate and occupy the space left for debate between authorship as expressed from a directorial perspective from authorship from the spectator’s point of view.

Contemporary Art from the Americas: Aurality, Sound, and Music

Professor Luis Rincón Alba
ASPP-UT 1000-002 / ASPP-GT 2000-002
Thursday 3:15 - 6:50pm
4 points

In recent years, artists have been exploring the rich, multilayered, and ambiguous qualities of the sonic to challenge the predominance of the visual. These explorations have not only opened paths for new practices but also enabled renewed understandings of ancestral musical and aural practices: in these sonic assemblages, we will listen to Black, Indigenous, and Queer performance. In this course, we will establish a critical dialogue between disciplines such as
sound studies, ethnomusicology, and performance studies and the practice of contemporary sound artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America as a strategy to localize sonic convergences and divergences among their creative approaches and work. This class also takes advantage of the copious artistic offerings available in New York City. We will visit galleries, museums, and institutions exhibiting works that deploy aurality, sound, and music as part of their artistic assemblages. Students will learn strategies, methods, techniques, and approaches to the writing of/with/along sound. Some of the scholars that we will study/listen to include Daphne Brooks, Nathaniel Mackey, Alex Vazquez, Robin D.G. Kelley, Fred Moten, Theodor Adorno. Artists include Guadalupe Maravilla, Kara Walker, Jason Moran, Kevin Beasley, Lucrecia Martel, Wu Tsang, and more.

Imagination and Change: Arts, Culture and Public Policy

Professor Caron Atlas and Professor Gonzalo Casals
ASPP-GT 2048
Friday, 10am - 1:35pm, 181 Mercer room 565
4 points

Artists and cultural workers have always engaged in critical, integral ways in advocacy, organization, resistance & re-imagining the world. Art, the imaginary, the engagement of culture; have informed, supported, translated, transformed, and uplifted movements for social change/justice/rights. This is true throughout the world. In many places, it is understood and assumed that art and politics are intertwined and that art offers ways of understanding, connecting, dreaming, grieving, playing, and building that make even the idea of change possible, make existing conditions survivable. At the same time, when the story is told, or the “leaders” gather to challenge or make policy, artists and art in the broadest sense are still, often considered extra, even if valuable. And, where, in many places, artists have perhaps longer been recognized as central to social change, much has changed in the U.S. in the last 40 years regarding this question. New generations of activists integrate art and imagination into their work at every level, in breathtaking ways. This class will explore models of how artists and cultural workers have worked and continue to work in relation to movements, pressing social challenges, community and policy initiatives, envisioning possibility. We will study examples to understand creative forms of intervention, invention, invitation; looking also at how different initiatives emerged, were evaluated (if they were), what is to be learned, and ways of creative resistance and world building today. Students will be invited to develop a plan for a project that engages art in relation to a social, community, political reality with which they’re seeking to engage. This work will be based on a broad interpretation of the terms “art” and “politics,” opening the possibility for exploration of definitions, methodologies, and collaboration, border crossings and re-shapings. We will read works by organizers, cultural workers, artists, dreamers, theorists and educators who’ve engaged in this wide field, and look at films, exhibitions and performances in relation to the work. This class is open to graduate students and undergraduate seniors and juniors with permission from the professor.

Performing Personal Narratives: One Person Shows

Professor Anna Deavere Smith
ASPP-GT 2013-001
Sundays, 12pm - 5pm, location TBA
Graduate Students Only (with instructor’s permission)
4 points

A studio class in which students will create one person shows. The professor is credited with having created a new form of theater. The methodology shared is based on her real world experiences of make new models and new ways of working. The semester will end with a performance for a curated audience. At the core is a question: What is the story you tell about yourself and the world as you see it?

Guest artists from the dance, music, theater and literary world will conduct sessions alongside the professor and enhance the work. Students will learn to identify elements that make stories compelling, and will be taught performance techniques. They will gain enhanced understanding of how the body and voice can be a more effective tool for communicating to large or small groups.

Following the final performance for a curated audience, a moderated discussion will engage with issues raised in the work.

This is an intensive which meet on Sundays from January 28 – April 21 excluding Sundays that are a part of University declared holidays.

Attendance at each session is required. Admission to the class requires a resume and a one to two minute video in which the student explains what they wish to gain from the class and what they believe they can contribute to making a supportive community.

For more information, contact Anna Deavere Smith - ads2@nyu.edu

The Traveling Gaze: Empire, the Cinema/Media, and the Counter-Archive

Professor Ella Shohat
ASPP-UT 1006–001 (Undergraduate section - seniors)
ASPP-GT 2006-001 (Graduate section)
Wednesday, 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

From their inception in the 19th century, the technologies of representations as embodied in still and moving images were shaped within the imperial imaginary of race, gender, and nation. Circulated across the globe, these representations performed a pivotal role in mediating between distant and different cultural geographies linked to imperial expansionism. The apparatus of the real which manufactured seemingly neutral documentation of race and indigeneity was vital for the construction of a coherent sense of a world order. For over a century, the accumulated images and sounds have generated an archive with a claim to objective historical authority. At the same time, the cinematic archive came to be formative for the narration of anticolonial national histories, entering into the stream of newly formed hegemonic and resistant representations, especially around remembering a time and a place prior to colonial traumas. Over the past few decades, the cinematic archive, meanwhile, has also become a source for creative artistic practices across a wide mediatic spectrum generating varied forms of critical knowledge. They have also actively generated possibilities for counter-archival practices in the form of found-footage documentaries, mockumentaries, hybrid docufictions, music videos, and interactive web projects. In this interdisciplinary course we will study the intricate relationship between the archive and the counter-archive, exploring diverse aesthetic strategies, including deconstructive recontextualizations, satirical montages, performative reenactments, and digital experimentations.
 

Language as Action: The Epistolary

Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-GT 2070 (Graduate only)
Tuesday 3:15 pm - 6:50 pm
4 points

In this class we will explore, reading and writing letters as literature. As long as the written word has existed, as well as in oratory traditions, the letter has been practiced as a powerful form of literature and connection; mysterious, romantic, political, coded, and more. We will look at letters as poems, essays, dramatic addresses/monologues, conversations, as well as mail art. What do letters offer that other forms may not? How do they exist in the world? What is the relationship between intimacy and letter writing and receiving? What are the formalities?
The liberatory possibilities? How has technology changed the tradition of the letter? We’ll explore the intention of the letter, public or private, intimate and/or universal, the letter as narrative, archive, ourstory, as subversive and/or speculative collaboration. Although we will mostly focus on contemporary engagements with the letter, we will also look at earlier manifestations of the epistolary, such as in Edmond Rostand’s widely known Cyrano de Bergerac, and Austrian 19th and early 20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for example. Participants will research and share examples with the class, while also writing letters throughout the semester. We will closely read writings including Lace & Pyrite Letters from Two Gardens by Ross Gay & Aimee Nezhukumatathil, We Eclipse into the Other Side by Miho Kinnas & Ethelbert Miller, A Different Distance by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair, June Jordan’s essay A Letter to my Friend, to name a few.
 

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-UT 1000–001 (Undergraduate section - juniors, seniors)
ASPP-GT 2000-001 (Graduate section)
Wednesday, 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

In this class we will study the meaning and significance of relationship and love as pedagogy, theory, and practice in relation to community, art making, border crossing, vision and world building. Through readings, film, music, organizational models, and other forms, the group will study love and relationship in the context of community, social movement & health.

We will explore love as a verb, as a social and liberatory practice as well as a personal experience and expression – the connection between. We will engage the premise that all work for social change, for equity and liberation is (or must be?) rooted in an active engagement with love as practice, theory, discipline. The poet Ross Gay talks about be loving. We will think about the notion that everything in life has to do with relationship, beginning with oneself, and with an other, an idea, a work, a practice, a place, an object, and on and on. We will explore love as complexity, in relation to wholeness, theories of love, politics of love, expressions (i.e. art, food, gifting, listening etc.) and also taboos and denials of love as a verb and social practice. We will look at questions of invitation, translation, embrace, spirituality, desire in relation to love, in relation to what community is and might be, what a third way might be, and what, for example, writer Grace Paley called love justice.

We’ll read essays, poems, letters, fragments, prayers, explore different creative forms, and create our own, and study projects of community, resistance, world building grounded in what the late Grace Lee Boggs called “growing our souls,” including connectedness, beyond those identified as human. We will look at what indigenous teacher Sherri Mitchell in Sacred Instructions calls the myth of separation.

Love and compassion make us unstoppable. They keep us connected. They remind us, as we navigate these machinations designed to sever our solidarity, that we, are. Family. – Makani Themba

The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb. — Bell Hooks

It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice… Grace Paley, from “Responsibility”

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. ― June Jordan

Every poem is a love poem. Every poem is a political poem. Jericho Brown

Art in/as Politics

Professor Laura Harris
ASPP-UT 1010 (Undergraduates only)
Thursday, 3:30 - 7:05pm
4 points

This seminar aims to give students both a conceptual and practical grounding in the range of issues and approaches by which arts politics can be understood. The course will be framed by the following considerations: What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we call “art?” What are the links between cultural spaces-- the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space-- and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, or study the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of cultural products? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists call upon to get their work into the world? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? “Art” will be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations-- themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational transit of people and ideas. Such issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law-- will all necessarily entail intersectional analyses incorporating the insights of critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, disability and ecological studies. We will read texts that offer theoretical formulations of key concepts and consider case studies that give us an opportunity to revise and/or extend these concepts. Students will also be invited to explore the questions raised in this class in the context of their own artistic and political practices.

Contact the Department:
Emily Bronson
Administrative Director, Department of Art and Public Policy
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
715 Broadway, 12th floor New York, NY 10012
Phone: 212-992-8248
Email:  eb103@nyu.edu