Spring 2026 Course Search

Viewed from the outside, the French-speaking world offers enticing images of beauty, pleasure, and freedom. From the inside, however, it is a complicated, often contradictory world where implicit codes and values shape the most basic aspects of daily life. This course will give you an insiderʹs perspective on a cultural and communicative system whose ideas, customs, and belief systems are surprisingly different from your own.

In this course, films are used as textbooks to learn the French language and explore the French-speaking world. In order to hone their language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), students will listen to selected film dialogues to improve their listening comprehension, read and analyze excerpts from scenarios and reviews to strengthen their understanding of syntax and widen their vocabulary, mimic the pronunciation of actors and write on film to improve their spoken and written French.

This course asks each student to work in a self-directed way among a community of critical thinkers. Finding one’s voice, as a maker, requires research sources of influence and inspiration. Students are expected to undertake a significant amount of work outside of regular class meetings. At this point in your Visual Arts Education you must be able to represent serious attention and dedication to your work, and prove that you can manage your time and energy towards advanced inquiry.

This course focuses on the additive construction methods essential to contemporary sculpture. Students will embark on independent projects that hone their skills in constructing armatures and exploring innovative skinning techniques. Throughout the term, participants will learn to build and manipulate forms using primarily additive processes, developing their own sculptural vocabulary in a studio environment. There will be two personal independent projects in this class that will ultimately converge into a dynamic, large-scale collaborative sculpture.

In this course we will focus on cutting and welding non-ferrous metals. Hand cutting and CNC assisted plasma cutting will be the methods in which stock will be cut. The fabrication processes will begin through brazing methods (acetylene) for connecting non-similar metals. There will also be instruction on pinpoint forging as well as the safe use of the blacksmithing forge in the Sculpture department. We will then advance to learning the skills involved in using the GTAW welders for non-ferrous welding.

This course will examine movement–travel, migration, and transition–in the French-speaking world. We’ll examine the travel tale as philosophical form (Candide), the sonnet, Orientalism, the graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi, films of Josephine Baker, queer movement in the work of Abdellah Taïa, the North Atlantic Triangle (Maboula Soumahoro), and the gender transition of Océan. Students will write a variety of critical and creative texts, make individual and group presentations, and develop their reading skills. Conducted in French. Intermediate-high level.

This course will examine the comic in French theatre, literature, politics, and film in order to answer a deceptively simple question: What makes us laugh? In theoretical readings we will consider whether laughter is a universal, cross-cultural function. Additionally, we will look at special, sub-genres of the comic, such as satire and parody, in order to question the relationship between comic genres and the real world. Does comedy seek to change the world or does it merely want to point to its foibles? Is it a progressive or conservative mode?

This discussion-animated, readings-based seminar provides art historical, cultural, and critical contexts for the Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS). In addition to our ongoing interrogation of the public lecture as such, students present their own work (in any field) and analyze the technical and stylistic aspects of structuring an effective and engaging ‘talk.’ The course provides unique opportunities for interaction with visiting artists, curators, critics, and historians.

Each term, Bennington Visual Arts offers a program of 4-5 lectures by visiting arts professionals: artists, curators, historians and critics, selected to showcase the diversity of contemporary art practices. Designed to enhance a broader and deeper knowledge of various disciplines and issues in the Visual Arts and to stimulate campus dialogue around topical issues in contemporary art and culture, these thematically curated presentations offer students the opportunity to engage with art by emerging and internationally-known artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

These technical applications, can lead you to a concept due to the design/practicality of said application.

Conducted through research focusing on the development of Japanese subcultures in the Post World War II period, this course poses various critical inquiries about the effects of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on contemporary global consumer society, visual culture and the production of art.

This class will investigate various pedagogical approaches to food studies by examining curriculums, topics and discourses being taught at some academic institutions. More importantly, we will put focus on researching art collectives, contemporary civic engagement practices, and other non-institutional models developed by creative practitioners and activists, which engage with food as a conduit to undertake social, political and cultural identity issues and to enhance their community cohesion.

In this course, we will examine French culture’s engagement with questions of sexuality and gender, with a focus on authors, artists, theorists, and others who have questioned ideas of normative sexuality from the Middle Ages through the 21st century. Authors and texts to be studied may include Marie de France, Gabrielle d’Estrées et l'une de ses soeurs, Montaigne, l’Abbé de Choisy, Charles Perrault (La Belle au bois dormant), le Chevalier d’Eon, Virginie Despentes, Paul Preciado, Wendy Delorme, Abdellah Taïa, Edouard Louis, Bambi (Sebastian Lifshitz), and Parole de King (Chriss Lag).

What forces and individuals contribute to shaping an artist’s legacy? What happens to all of the objects, materials, and correspondence that artists create during their lifetime? What is a catalogue raisonné? This one-credit remote module will introduce students to legacy work and to the nascent field of artist-endowed foundations, inviting the consideration of philosophical and creative questions, while simultaneously offering practical knowledge applicable to future professional opportunities.