35 General Art Resources

Art and Visual Culture: Prehistory to Renaissance

Author: Alena Buis

Art History I

Author: Associate Professor Emeritus Bruce Schwabach

Description: History of Art Survey course covering from prehistoric art to the Italian Renaissance.

Art History II

Author: Associate Professor Emeritus Bruce Schwabach

The Creative Process

Authors:  ART480 Art Honors Fall 2020

Description: This chapbook is result of the collective efforts of nineteen students in ART480: Art Honors at the University of Washington Seattle. In the fall of 2020, each of these students is beginning senior year, and with that a journey of artistic transformation. This journey takes each individual on an exploration of their own artistic modus operandi. Throughout the quarter, these young artists are thinking with heightened scrutiny about the creative process in visual arts, and doing so from a position of self-reflection.

This fall is also a painful and complicated time during a globally raging corona virus pandemic that has stretched resources and patience, forced us off campus, out of the studios of the art building and into a permanent position of waiting. So much of our personal interactions has become confined to the computer screen, while our societies are coming to a reckoning with intertwined legacies of colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism. This fall is also the near-conclusion of a drawn-out national election that has severely challenged the democratic state, while signs of an impending climate catastrophe continue to press forward unchecked, irreversibly destroying our natural environment.

This is the backdrop for a class full of visual artists to have a conversation about why we make, how we work, and how the creative process unfolds. What makes each of us get up in the morning and push forward with generating new images, objects, and experiences. Yes, for ourselves, but also, and most importantly, for others. What inspires us, what excites us, and how to begin understanding one’s creative habits deeper. For 11 weeks, we would come together in class as a community to discuss, to share, to make, to talk with artist guests, and to ask difficult questions from ourselves. As a record of these dialogues, as an artifact of the ongoing self-exploration, each student created a chapter for this chapbook by journaling their way through the quarter, using past and current artwork examples, while also candidly reflecting on personal inspirations, studio habits, and on the individual challenges and rewards of engaging with art making.

The sum of these first person accounts is a wholesome picture of the contemporary art making process, in all its conviction and its uncertainty. In all of its sacred solitude, but also in its very communal nature. No matter if one is just starting out, or has been on this professional path for decades. We can’t help but to be part of the moment, and we contribute to this moment by sharing not only what we made, but also what we are thinking.

Free Architecture Courses from MIT

FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence

Introduction to Art Concepts

Author: Ed Fosmire, Santa Ana College

Description: This is a community course developed by an Achieving the Dream grantee. They have either curated or created a collection of faculty resources for this course. Since the resources are openly licensed, you may use them as is or adapt them to your needs.

Make Work Use Art

Authors: HON211 UW 2021

Description: Twenty students from a wide variety of majors, including the sciences, humanities, health and medicine, as well as engineering, architecture, and design comprised our vibrant and engaged learning community. We started the quarter by imaginary visits to two important art schools, the German Bauhaus (1919-1933) and the Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, North Carolina (1933-1957). The students co-created participatory collaborative exercises based on the experiential learning principles developed by and practiced at these schools.

Throughout the course, we considered craft and art not as nouns, but as verbs, related the practiced maker’s hand to the process aided by technological tools, and focused on the language of the materials, and the personal, cultural, historical narratives that they help to reveal. We contemplated how individual threads hold the fabric together and transform that, and how individual narratives coalesce into larger histories that signify and hold together communities.  We strived to explore and understand both the historical past and the innovative present and future by specifically focusing on needlework (sewing, embroidery, and quilts) during the 1920 and ‘30s (women suffrage movement), the 1970s and ‘80s (second wave of feminism, LGBTQ rights and HIV/AIDS crisis), and in the present. We also considered how new technologies, such as parametric design and 3D printing, introduce new paradigms for solving problems, designing, producing, and using objects. Of course, the effect of technology was inescapable for us in the class too, as it was for billions around the world during this global pandemic.

We made two projects. One, using needlework techniques and textile processes to tell a personal story of Waiting, and a second one, using Computer Aided Design (CAD) to create a Time Capsule which would be opened one hundred years from now. Throughout the quarter, the students researched a Bauhaus or Black Mountain College artist they had picked with the goal of reflecting on the artist’s work, biography, creative process, and ideas about making by drawing parallels to those of their own.

OER Commons: Art

OpenStax-CNX (aka Connexions) Art History

Visual Arts OERs by Grade Level

License

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