Spring 2020 Electives, Advanced Practice: Mining the Museum – Mira Schor

Advanced Practice: Mining the Museum

PGFA: 5300 (CRN: 1944)

Friday 12:10pm – 2:50pm

What makes your pupils dilate when you look at an art work or artifact? This course will be a laboratory or workshop to develop such instantaneous experiences of visual excitement: looking at artworks, objects, and artifacts in comprehensive museums in New York City like the Metropolitan, Brooklyn Museums, MoMA and the Whitney, as well as smaller more specialized museums like the Museum of the Moving Image, as sources for something that could be useful to art work in unexpected way: thus a filmmaker might find inspiration in the glaze of a Sung Dynasty bowl, a painter might snatch some bit of visual information from an Assyrian stone carving, a photographer could get information from a Rajput painting, a video artist could learn from Charlie Chaplin’s early two-reelers or from a Courbet. This course will engage and extend students in what potential sources for art can be – what may provide surprising passions for life long art making.. The course will be conducted both through faculty-led visits to museums and in-class discussions and presentations.

Faculty Bio:

Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. Schor’s work balances political and theoretical concerns with formalist and material passions. Her work has included major periods in which gendered narrative and representation of the body have been featured; in other periods the focus of her work has been representation of language in drawing and painting. Schor received her MFA in painting from CalArts in 1973. She is the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations and of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism. Schor’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, P.S.1, The Neuberger Museum, The Jewish Museum, and The Aldrich Museum. She is represented by Lyles & King Gallery in New York City. In 2017 Mira Schor was elected to the National Academy.