history of art iii
Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night", my inspiration for the corset pictured below
Art History III is an honors course offered through UC’s design school DAAP. A typical art history course is probably a lecture style course with occasional exams to gage the student’s ability to memorize facts the night before only to forget them the moment they leave the exam. This course was anything but that. Honors Art History is a discussion-based course with about 25 students where we were required to converse our ideas about the material. Memorization was not a key factor rather developing a concrete knowledge about the material and how it pertained to each of us individually as artists. Basically, this course allowed us to develop our own ideas about art by talking to our piers rather than memorize a list of dates. As an artist, it is important to know where you come from to help steer where you are going. In my case, I frequently have to reproduce historical garments. This class gave me a general understanding of clothing history that I was then able to build on in later classes.
Our final in this class was different than in the first two segments of the course. We were required to pick a piece of art from the sixteenth century to modern day and transform it to something pertaining to our various art aesthetics. Everybody in my class was an art school student except for me and one other person, both of us were theater design students. We decided to take The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh and recreate it into a character, much like we would do for a show. I decided to make a corset using Gogh’s post-impressionistic approach where color and line blur together to create a nightscape. This is a very common thing asked of theatrical designers- to create a look based on a director’s vision. This class gave me the opportunity to begin practicing these skills. Art is meant to be experienced, not memorized. This class allowed me to do just that.
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Above is the link to the second part of our final. We had to create jeopardy style questions over art in the 20th century. This was the segment of the course we didn't get to in class so we were required to go through the material and create questions for ourselves that could be used on a final. It was a way to make sure we all read the material and thought about it in a way that allowed us to draw the important information from the chapters.
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