Blog post #5: Preliminary proposals for final projects

We are now about halfway through the semester—which means it’s time to start thinking about final projects. For your final projects, you will make a work of art. You have a lot of freedom, here, but here are the mandatory elements to consider before jumping in:

  • You will be working with a group of between 2 and 5 people. You may choose your own groups, but I reserve the right to do some integrating/re-shuffling. (Ie, if two tiny groups were proposing similar projects, I might ask them to work together).
  • Each member of the group must have a defined role and set of tasks. You’re a unified team, but you aren’t all necessarily doing the same thing. Dividing up the labor is a huge part of the task, here.
  • Your work of art must in some way be related to what we’ve read and what we’ve experienced this semester, and you should be able to articulate what that relationship is.
  • Your work of art must be displayable—since it will be on display at the STEAM festival. So, if you’re, say, creating a series of lion paintings in different styles, your task is pretty easy here! But if you’re doing, instead, a handmade chapbook or an illustrated anthology of poems (which are also totally acceptable projects), you’ll want to think about how to display this—possibly including a reading of certain poems at key points in the festival.
  • Your work of art will be the basis of your own final piece of writing for the class: a reflective essay due at the end of term.

As a reminder, here are some topics we’ve thought about this semester, and that we WILL think about

  • New York City – as the subject matter of art, and as a space of displaying and consuming art
  • Lions, and the representational strategies artists use in creating them
  • The spaces of display: museums vs galleries vs public art. (So, let’s say you now love public art. You could create an artwork meant to be engage audiences moving through public spaces—a portable mural, or a sculpture. Or, let’s say you love galleries. You could create a 3-D model of your own gallery—your own white cube!–and hang it with photos from the class Instagram, or with other (tiny!) works of art)
  • Photography
  • Opera and performance – you might write a scene to be sung in recitative, ending in an aria! Or you might play around with the idea of using noumenal and phenomenal music in a performance in other ways.
  • Writing the city – we’ll be turning to poetry next week, and to Teju Cole’s NYC novel, Open City, after that
  • Political art – art that seeks to change people’s minds.

For next week’s blog post I am asking you to write up and post a preliminary proposal. (This is a CHANGE to the syllabus, and the website will be updated to reflect this shortly)

Your preliminary proposal will be a relatively short (500-600 words) document consisting of

1. The names of the group members
2. Your preliminary idea for a work of art you might create for your final project/the STEAM festival. For each one, describe:

– What you might make
– How it relates to the themes and readings of the semester
– How you imagine (at this point) displaying it at the STEAM festival

NOTE 1: This assignment is all about brainstorming. You may include several ideas, rather than committing to just one, if that’s more productive for you. But for each one, tell us what you might make, how it relates to the themes and readings of the semester, and how you imagine displaying it at the STEAM festival.

NOTE 2: You may at this stage post a proposal solo (though you are encouraged to find a group). We will work on integrating you into a group—either of other solo folk or a group that matches your interests. Groups are in part necessary because of the structure of the STEAM festival, as designed by Macaulay, but within those groups members may have very different tasks. (So, for example, if you’re continuing to explore lions in art: one of you might paint a series of lion pictures; another might write and perform music inspired by lions; a third might create a lion graffiti wall.)

Due on the blog Sunday at 9, with category Blog Post 5. Your title should contain group members’ first names plus a description (suggestive or factual, clever or straightforward) of your project idea.