Curricular Design

As an Associate Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and Interim Chair of Fine Arts (2023-2024) I have developed new courses for the Fine Arts Department and had the opportunity to revise existing courses. Research for my courses informs my studio practice. Within Fine Arts, we have a unique series of courses called Fine Arts Studio that combine liberal arts methodologies for writing, research and critical thinking with studio processes and techniques. All are 3000-level courses for Juniors or Seniors. Below are new courses and existing courses that I recently revised or cooked up from scratch.

Painting as Object (Fall 2025):
This course examines the relationship between images and objects broadly, and specifically the art historical points of connection and divergence between painting and sculpture. We are studying through our practice and through research of local exhibitions how we experience images and objects differently and how our expectations differ for either medium.

Working with the Collection (Spring 2025):
This class was last taught in 2019 and had been specifically tied to one external institutional partner in the past. I broadened the scope of the course to have two tracks: 1) researching, curating and responding to one artwork in the MCAD collection and 2) researching how other local collections of plants, books, prints, objects are curated and organized. The students in the class were all avid collectors, so I wanted them to spend more time thinking about collection as an Artistic Practice, this idea was really solidified by our field trips to see “Ways of Knowing” at the Walker Art Center and our visit to the Tretter Collection at the UMN Andersen Library.

Artists Envisioning Ecological Futures (Fall 2022):
What role will artists play in envisioning our future environment, both locally and globally? This cross-disciplinary course combines studio work with research and writing about the current phase of the climate crisis. We will examine the intersection between the rhetoric surrounding the “end of Art” and the “end of Nature” in the late 20th century. What does it mean for us as makers that these categories have imploded and/or expanded? How do artists construct and alter environments through their work? Students research an ecological issue or question that informs their vision of the future and then explore these implications through writing and creating artwork. This work is done from an informed perspective that acknowledges the past and present inequities surrounding land use, water use, and ecological damage in Minneapolis, particularly along the nearby Mississippi River.

REMIX // Quotation and Appropriation (Spring 2023):
I created all new projects, content and revised course outcomes for this class such as “Quilting as Collage” and a sound project on “How Hip Hop Sampling Impacted Art in 1980s." In this class I included several new image-modifying techniques: Monoprinting with Water-based Inks, Image Transfers with Acrylic, Scanograms, Tape Transfers and Large-scale Collage Techniques.