Visual Arts

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Beginning Potter’s Wheel — CER2107.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is an introduction to using the potter’s wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While focusing on the development of throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and will experiment with both functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the whole
Visual Arts

Beginning Wheel Throwing — CER2107.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is an introduction to using the potter’s wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the ceramic process from wet working to
Visual Arts

Beginning Wheel Throwing — CER2107.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Days & Time: TU 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

This class is an introduction to using the potter’s wheel as a tool for generating clay forms, emphasizing pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the ceramic process from wet working to glazing

Ceramics

Beginning Wheel Throwing — CER2107.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is an introduction to using the potter's wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the whole ceramic process from wet working
Visual Arts

Beginning Wheel Throwing — CER2107.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is an introduction to using the potter's wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the whole ceramic process from wet working
Visual Arts

Beginning Wheel Throwing — CER2107.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is an introduction to using the potter's wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the whole ceramic process from wet working
Visual Arts

Beginning-Intermediate Potter's Wheel — CER2107.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Aysha Peltz
Credits: 4
This class is for students new to throwing on the potter’s wheel and for students who would like to expand their skills. The focus will be using the potter’s wheel as a tool for generating clay forms with an emphasis on pottery making. While developing and expanding their throwing skills, students will also explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and
Visual Arts

Bennington Campus: Real and Imagined — ARC2117.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Donald Sherefkin
Credits: 4
Over the span of the past 90 years there have been multiple designs for the Campus and its buildings. This class will combine research into both the existing buildings and the never realized designs. We will look at the architecture of the campus in the context of the larger history of architecture in America and the world. Assignments will include the documentation of these
Visual Arts

Best laid plans: an introduction to design — DES2103.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Farhad Mirza
Credits: 4
The word design is often associated with the standardized, and the mass produced. It might signify tools for what Achille Mbembe calls “the frenzied codification of social life according to…various categories of abstraction that claim to rationalize the world on the basis of corporate logic.” Pier Vittorio Aureli observes the emergence of the English word In the late sixteenth
Visual Arts

Beyond Story — FV2129.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Mariam Ghani
Credits: 2
“Forms are ethical, political, and cultural commitments in their own rights,” as Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow wrote in their 2018 “Beyond Story” manifesto. The documentary form is also known by another name: “non-narrative.” But over the past two decades, documentary has been increasingly dominated by “story,” in the sense popularized by mainstream fiction films. Stories
Visual Arts Society Culture and Thought

Big: Exploring Large Scale Photography — PHO4236.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Jonathan Kline
Credits: 4
Photographically derived imagery is increasingly seen in public spaces in addition to gallery and museum settings. This course offers students an opportunity to work with both digital and traditional means of attaining large scale photographs for installations in and out of doors. Through readings and presentations we will explore the issues of scale in contemporary photography
Visual Arts

Big: Exploring Large Scale Photography — PHO4236.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Jonathan Kline
Credits: 4
Photographically derived imagery is increasingly seen in public spaces in addition to gallery and museum settings. This course offers students an opportunity to work with both digital and traditional means of attaining large scale photographs for installations in and out of doors. Through readings and presentations we will explore the issues of scale in contemporary photography
Visual Arts

Biomimicry in Architecture — ARC4206.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Karolina Kawiaka
Credits: 4
This is an advanced studio class for students who are self-directed and have a proficient understanding of basic architectural concepts, history and theory. Students will develop skills needed to communicate architectural concepts and develop personal approaches to the design process. Such factors as climate, place, orientation, program, cultural ideas about place and space,
Visual Arts

Black Studies: Black Film Division — FV2309.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Karthik Pandian
Credits: 2
This film history course examines the Black American independent cinema of the 1960s-80s. We will screen landmark works by filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Kathleen Collins and Julie Dash along with videos by contemporary artists. Screenings will be followed by discussions exploring the key thematic and formal preoccupations of black filmmakers of the era
CAPA Visual Arts

Black Studies: Black Spring I — FV4318.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Karthik Pandian
Credits: 2
Students who have taken Black Studies courses in the Fall 2016 term will use this course to realize an exhibition in the Usdan Gallery based on their work and research into the past, present and future of black lives at Bennington College. While the centerpiece of the exhibition will be the collaborative video produced in Black Studies: Black Video Division course, it will be
CAPA Visual Arts Music

Black Studies: Black Spring II — FV4320.02

Spring 2017
Instructor: Karthik Pandian
Credits: 2
Students who have taken Black Studies courses in the Fall 2016 term will use this course to realize physical and digital documentation of their work and research into the past, present and future of black lives at Bennington College. Participants in this practical course will archive and disseminate the work of Black Studies engaging technologies of print media, video
CAPA Visual Arts Music

Black Studies: Black Video Division — FV4317.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Karthik Pandian
Credits: 4
This intermediate video production course imagines the past, present and future of black lives at Bennington College. Through archival work on the history of the Black Music Division, research into contemporary issues of race on campus and speculative explorations of the future of these issues and the aesthetic problems they pose, students will work collaboratively to
CAPA Visual Arts

Bodies in Inner and Outer Space — PHO4306.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Terry Boddie
Credits: 4
What are the ways in which the spaces that the human body occupies affects how we view it in a photograph? How does the gendered and racialized body communicate through a photograph made in these spaces? What is communicated when figure and space intertwine? Throughout the history of photography, the human figure has been used to intentionally occupy and alter physical
Visual Arts

Bodies in Inner and Outer Spaces — PHO4361.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Terry Boddie
Credits: 4
What are the ways in which the space the human body occupies affects how we experience it in a photograph? How does the gendered and racialized body communicate through a photograph made in these spaces? What is communicated when figure and space intertwine? Throughout the history of photography, the human figure has been used to intentionally occupy and alter physical spaces.
Visual Arts

Bodies of Sound — MCO4121.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Sergei Tcherepnin
Credits: 2
What is the materiality of sound? Do some combinations of sounds have a shape, have color? How can we identify and work with these characteristics? How does sound affect the body and brain? This is an installation class that focuses on ways of working with Sound in the context of Visual Art. You will learn all the tools necessary to create an electronic sound installation -
Music Visual Arts

Boundaries — SCU2309.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: John Umphlett
Credits: 4
This class will participate in a deep investigation of the body. In the beginning, we will work from a live model to produce life size clay representations for understanding the body as a form as well as entertain complicated questions that pertain to the space between the observer and the reference model. In the beginning the goal is for each student to clone this body
Visual Arts

Building Materials/Woodshop — SCU2109.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: John Umphlett
Credits: 2
This seven-week course is recommended for students interested in developing their technical skills in making sculpture and building methods. There will be a fundamental introduction to working with wood and general shop safety, with a focus on design. Processes such as joinery, scraping, and laminating will be covered, among others. The course is project-based. Students will be
Visual Arts

Call and Response: A Practical Storytelling Method to Build Food Based Community — VA4320.03

Spring 2023
Instructor: Yoko Inoue
Credits: 2
For the past 4 decades Gillian Goddard has been exploring the relationship between Land, food and community. These interests have led to an intense collective praxis utilizing cacao and chocolate to empower ex-colonial countries in their process of economic decoloniality. Over 3 weekends in April, Goddard will lead an intimate group of students in a call and response process
Visual Arts