Art and Media GH (ARTMD-GH)

This seminar is dedicated to the artistic creation, presentation, discussion and critique of graduate student artwork. Students will be introduced to a diverse range of theoretical and philosophical positions and approaches. Students will be required to present their studio work, articulating the ideas and processes within their practices through visual presentations, group critiques and ongoing peer-to-peer dialogue while developing a robust artistic research agenda which will result in the creation of a thorough and personalized annotated bibliography. Also in this course students will be introduced to the broader, global art context into and from which they will be creating their works. Through the direct experience of visiting the most prominent art institutions in the Emirates, students will have the opportunity to understand the particular inflections, concerns and practices of local and regional artists, the institutions that support them, and how this may inform their own practices and research agendas.

There is no one formula that spells success in the art world, and there are a multiplicity of ways that artists organize themselves and their studios. Through examining critical texts about studio practice and studio management, students in this course will learn about, engage, and make interventions into the critical discourses around the following topics: the ethics of the outsourcing of fabrication, labor, authorship, and conceptual and material practices that problematize these aspects of being/becoming a working artist. Additionally, and similarly to GCS I, the heart of this course is dedicated to the artistic creation, presentation, discussion and critique of graduate student artwork.

This course is designed to help third semester MFA candidates to focus their work on what they will present for their thesis show. The work in this class can be a culmination of work from the previous two Grad Critique Seminars with the additional focus of curating a final works list for the thesis exhibition, and also to focus on drafting the critical paper that accompanies the exhibit. Students will be required to design their exhibition scenarios and begin fabrication of the final works, and draft appropriate accompanying exhibition documents. Therefore, and similarly to GCS I and II, the heart of this course is dedicated to the artistic creation, presentation, discussion and critique of graduate student artwork.

This course is composed of one-on-one weekly studio critiques with the core MFA faculty. Students will meet regularly with their faculty advisor and this class will provide a platform for the MFA student to present their work and the aesthetic, technical, and expressive concepts underlying it. Critiques offer constructive assessment of the graduate students' work-in-progress in relation to contemporary and historical practice, social and cultural issues, technical and formal concerns and related interdisciplinary interests.

This course is composed of one-on-one weekly studio critiques with faculty and visiting artists. Studio critiques will engage the larger NYUAD/NYU arts community with visitors comprised of arts faculty and scholars from across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and beyond. This class will provide a platform for the MFA student to present their work and the aesthetic, technical, and expressive concepts underlying it. Critiques offer constructive assessment of the graduate students' work-in-progress in relation to contemporary and historical practice, social and cultural issues, technical and formal concerns and related interdisciplinary interests.

This course is composed of one-on-one weekly studio critiques with visiting artists, scholars, curators, and critics. This class will focus on external networking and will provide a platform for the MFA student to present their work to arts professionals and engage directly with the UAE professional art world. Studio visitors will include arts professionals working in the museum and gallery sector, along with established artists and arts faculty from other UAE institutions and beyond.

This seminar will focus on writing for artists. It is a workshop-based course in which students are introduced to and practice skills of argumentation, research, clarity of expression, as well as the range of innovative writing practices available to them. Basically, we will treat language as material in itself: sometimes transparent, pointing toward objects of art and inquiry, and sometimes opaque, pointing towards language itself. Through weekly writing assignments students will learn the craft of not only writing about art, but the possibility that writing is a tool to expand one's studio practice and may be considered an art in itself. The first half of the semester is dedicated to sections in experimenting with description, analysis and critique, and personal chronicles. Students will also be expected to produce an artist's statement. The second part of the semester is devoted to putting these skills into professional practice, as students write reviews of current work and exhibitions, personal essays, curatorial proposals, creative pieces, and use writing as a tool to expand their studio practice.

The course focuses on the development of advanced skills in analog and digital photograph particularly in professional use of technology, equipment, and digital workflows. Students study the approaches of successful schools, artists, methods, and directions in photographic mediums outlined below to inform the development of their own practice underpinned by conceptual thinking. Students develop their use of skills and technologies in the expanded field of photography to include: video techniques, video installation, staged photography, research-based and investigative photography and AI. In so doing students familiarize themselves with the latest applications and developments, use technologies to work out new visual methods and aesthetics and place their own working methods in the context of the latest technological and media developments

This course is for MFA students interested in teaching as a professional path for the development of their artistic practice. The course is also designed for students who are interested in a TA position during their time at NYUAD, for which it is mandatory to take this course. focuses on four main areas: thinkers on art pedagogy, critique techniques, teaching observation, and professional development. We ask questions about the traditions of teaching studio art practice and what can be learned from these to be applied to interdisciplinary programming in diversity, equity, and inclusion in art-making. The class explores diverse perspectives and actively builds their toolkits of pedagogies, they will use, share, combine, and discuss texts from teachers that made an essential contribution to art education, e.g., Mike Bal, bell hooks, Joseph Albers, and Paulo Freire. The students explore the multiplicity of visions and existing formats of teaching art practice and how to stimulate art-making in a diverse student body. This is a studio course with the emphasis placed on practice.

This graduate studio course is intended to familiarize students with several casting techniques involving plaster, alginate, slip, wax, and metal. In parallel to this studio work, we will examine artists who use casting, the concept of the multiple, and/or mass production in their work - artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Ai Wei Wei, Antony Gormley, Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Seth Price, Karin Sander, Jane Alexander, Judith Shea, The Fluxus Group, and others, all toward developing strategies for producing bodies of work and work in multiple. The class will also work with a local foundry (Al Jaber, Mussaffah) to see industrial production techniques and cast their own projects.

This studio-based course explores questions of time and memory in several mediums including photography and video, public art, time- based media, fiber arts, 2D and 3D. The representation of time and memory has been a theme that artists across centuries and cultures have engaged with and continues to be addressed in contemporary art practice, Students explore various questions in relation to time and memory, including collective and personal memory; memory, place, and architecture; documentation of time; deterioration and decay; archives; and time and process in art making using theoretical texts and examples of artists’ practices to the inform their different projects. Students’ engage with the approaches, processes and methods in the different mediums to explore aspects of time and memory that are in dialogue with their art practice. Students further develop advanced skills various techniques enabling them to give form to their research- based art practice. Students advance their ability to place their own work in the context of different advanced processes and conceptual approaches in relation to the subject of the course. The course is taught by several faculty members as well guest artists.

"...you discover the art through the place and the place through the art". Most African cities have been independent from colonial rule for less than 7 decades. African cities are "multi-synchronicity". "Documenting the African city", acknowledges the creative skills and expertise of students in the arts and media and builds upon that by introducing additional skills of documentary filmmaking, to allow students further explore their talents and crafts. The setting of an African city which is rapidly developing, yet slowly changing, gives students access to a cultural tapestry, an infinite visual and aural experience, the African experience, to give new meaning to students’ individual practices. This course encourages students to harness their skills of constant editing in their lives, consciously or unconsciously, by employing, this time around, a very technical tool (editing software) to tell their audio-visual stories in more compelling ways. Students are introduced to the video camera, the basic science of its operations in capturing images in different ways, the tools and tricks needed to execute basic and slightly complex visual styles, forms and movements. Students are also introduced to location sound recording using professional equipment to enhance their storytelling capabilities. The course fosters deep and meaningful interactions with the locals and deeper insight into cultural practices through research of themes, ideas and topics for productions. This course is open to NYUAD MFA students only.

This course explores advanced topics of special interest Fine Arts and New Media. The topics are designed to aid students in gaining extra knowledge in an emerging topic. The course may be repeated for credit if offered under a different topic title. The course is open for NYUAD MFA students. Topics of each course can be found on the syllabus. NOTE: This course can also be used toward either Special Topics or Studio Electives.

This course explores advanced topics of special interest Fine Arts and New Media. The topics are designed to aid students in gaining extra knowledge in an emerging topic. The course may be repeated for credit if offered under a different topic title. The course is open for NYUAD MFA students. Topics of each course can be found on the syllabus.

This studio course focuses on practice-led research and research-led practice as methodologies for thinking about art and media in relation to archives and screens. Its central argument is that making and studying are not separate activities that corrupt one another, but instead entwined and mutually constitutive activities that augment creativity and curiosity. Assignments encourages students to understand differences between making and studying in non-hierarchical and non-sequential ways. By emphasizing feminist, postcolonial, transnational, indigenous, and posthuman approaches, the course shifts attention from dominant modes, such as flat-on-the-screen, time-based commercial films as entertainment to immersive, interactive, locative, auto-generative, mobile, nonlinear, and tactical modes for producing research through arts practice and producing arts practice through research.

The Mid-Program Review consists of a presentation of the student's work, a verbal and written presentation by the student, and a question and answer session led by a critique committee. The Mid-Program review is considered a candidacy review, which a student is required to pass in order to progress to the second and final year of the program.

During the spring semester of their second year, MFA students will mount a public presentation of artworks, demonstrating the achievements in the student's area of specialization. The candidate, in consultation with their Graduate Faculty Advisor and Thesis Review Committee, is responsible for selecting the content and curating the exhibition. Students will produce an extensive (ca. 5,000-word) written exposition describing the specific artistic problems that generated the body of work. This statement will include a discussion of the methods, media, and format used, the relationship of the student's work to the influences of other artists and styles, and other issues (such as social or psychological questions) of relevance to the work.

The MFA Thesis experience will culminate with a 90-minute oral defense in the gallery before a faculty panel. The Oral Examination is conducted while the candidate's exhibition is hanging. This examination has three purposes: one, to assess the extent to which technical and expressive objectives of graduate study have been met; two, to assess the candidate's ability to communicate and explore the means and meanings of the graduate exhibition in light of aesthetic goals, expressive intent and contemporary art concepts; and three, to engage in positive critical dialogue about the presented work.

This course begins with the premise that text and image are not necessarily in opposition or competition. In the discourse of fine art in the west, reconciling text and image has often been the terrain of the avant-garde or the conceptual. Elsewhere and in the pre-modern and ''outlier'' west, however, the decorated word, the unwritten verbal, and the collaboration of painter and poet has been and is foundational to art. As a studio elective, the course instigates four projects that begin with theoretical readings, looking at various artists, as well as sketching and writing sessions. The projects are to be interpreted broadly with regard to medium, and students are encouraged to bring a favorite medium of theirs to bear on their projects. At the same time, students are encouraged to engage in a brand new medium in order to experience the energy of the naïve gesture, imprint, or utterance, and to facilitate risk-taking. Situated in a visual arts master's program and taught by a faculty member who is also a published poet, students of the course will have the unique opportunity to think extra carefully about the words they use.

In principle, any material can be used to create sculpture. The aim of the course is to elicit an ongoing exploration of a variety of materials. The sculptural approach to a given material relates to its common uses. This approach does not alter the material itself, but instead its perception, i.e. by incorporating it into an unforeseen situation. Class activities address the question of how a sculptural setup can give viewers the sense of participating in a situation. Possible approaches may include an emphasis on bodily experience and behavior, the initiation of field perception, or sculptural interventions into otherwise familiar situations. Course exercises and discussions combine approaches to materials with approaches to situations. In the process, the grammar of such practices may be developed and extended in the process. The exercises are only starting points, and may be shifted into many new directions. Such a grammar is not dependent upon any specific material or sculptural situation, but instead proposes approaches to initiating situations and to analyzing them on a structural level.