We are living in the archive. The 21st century, age of the digital and of infinite information horizons, offers particularly fertile conditions for future artists, writers, curators, and educators to meet, collaborate, and reinvent their identities as cultural workers, memory agents, and experimental pedagogues. This program is designed to support students in the arts and humanities in combining creative and critical approaches to questions of memory and the ownership of history, the history of exhibition and display, documents and objects, and museums and archives.
We will investigate the ways that cultural institutions, including museums, ethnographic films, and documentary photography have written "official" histories; we'll learn about artists and critics who confront and redress the erasures and silences in these institutions; and we'll direct our own creative experiments toward critiquing and intervening in dominant institutional narratives by working with archival materials. Our studios and laboratories will sometimes be museums and archives; we will visit museums in Seattle as well as more local archives, getting to know the Washington State Archives here in Olympia as artist-researchers.
This program is designed for students who are capable of successfully completing small-scale individual or collaborative projects within the context of a program structured around supporting that work through lecture/screenings, presentations, weekly creative workshops and project critiques, and seminars on readings and films. As they plan individual projects with faculty and peer guidance, students will be supported in scaling projects to their level of experience; the program can support students at varying levels of experience. Students will share in leading class sessions that may include regular work-in-progress presentations, seminar facilitation, and other presentations of research related to program themes. Projects supported: time-based arts--including video, film, and performance--photography, 2D/3D visual arts, critical/creative writing (we will do our best to blur the line between these), and non-traditional writing for the moving image and performance.
Registration
Students will be expected to have successfully completed at least 2 quarters in an interdisciplinary arts and/or humanities Evergreen program or its equivalent (coursework in art history and studio art/media). This program will not include instruction in specific art techniques or skills, so students will be expected to have prior college-level experience in the creative approach they use in their projects. Students will be expected to have intermediate academic writing, reading and critical thinking skills.
Course Reference Numbers
Academic Details
Studies in: arts and humanities, including visual and media arts, art history, museum studies. Careers in: visual art, museums, galleries, archives, and collections, including curation and education and community outreach.
In addition to a 16 credit option, this program is also offered for 8 or 12 credits. Students enrolling for 8 or 12 credits will participate in fewer class activities and scale their individual projects accordingly, and need to contact the faculty for permission to register.
$75 total fee: $25 for museum entrance fees, $50 required media fee.
Students who have already secured an internship or who are researching internships in areas related to this program are welcome to do an in-program internship. Students should register first, then contact faculty once they have researched their internship options. Please go to Individual Study for more information.