This course will explore the role of the art exhibition and its effect on the discourse and practice of art. Course content will focus on contemporary and historical exhibition studies, individual and group projects. Students will also conduct site visitations and evaluation, and critique work in the context of exhibition.

This course will explore the role of the art exhibition and its effect on the discourse and practice of art. Course content will focus on: contemporary and historical exhibition studies, individual and group projects. Student will also conduct site visitations and evaluation, and critique work in the context of exhibition.

This course provides an introduction to Visual Culture studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that explores the ways in which our lives are shaped through contact with, and consumption of, images, designed objects and visual forms of media, communication, and information. Students will develop a critical understanding of different aspects of contemporary visual culture as well as an awareness of its recent historical development.

Visual Culture studies recognize the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the contemporary world, investigating both “high" cultural forms such as fine art, design, and architecture and popular cultural forms associated with mass media and communications. Visual Culture studies represents a turn in the discourse of the visual, which had focused on content-based, critical readings of images, and has since broadened its approach to additionally question the ways in which our consumption and production of images and image- based technologies are structured. Analyzing images from a social-historical and cultural perspective, visual culture asks: what are the effects of images? Can the visual be properly investigated with traditional methodologies, which have been based on language, not imagery? How do images visualize social difference? How are images viewed by varied audiences? How are images created in a culture and how do they circulate?