Jewelry & Metalsmithing Program Description
Philosophy
The Jewelry & Metalsmithing area encourages critical thinking, research, and experimentation with a wide range of processes, working methodologies, and formal strategies. Topical courses that address a wide range of processes are offered including: alternative materials, forming, casting, enameling, and construction and fabrication. The objec
tive of the program is to inform students of the history and contemporary issues and trajectories in the field, and assist students in locating their practice within the field and larger cultural context. Through studio work, students work toward visual literacy as they examine how meaning is constructed and deconstructed within visual and material culture. The program integrates critical discourse on craft, art, and contemporary material culture, and emphasizes the importance of scholarship in craft disciplines. In the program, we examine the significance of craft in a multivalent culture with expanding modes of production, and students experiment with both analogue and digital processes. As part of the curriculum, we examine emergent modes of production in the context of art and craft. We examine the depth of the field and how students can mine the signals, subjects and formats embedded in craft to exploit its potentials for constructing meaning. Simultaneously, we look at how craft can enable breadth, and synthesize with other disciplines in interdisciplinary endeavors. With the increasing prevalence of multi-centered practice, the program examines the agency of craft as a kind of working methodology, and looks at ideas on making as an opportunity or strategy toward relaying ideas. BFA/MFA
At the fifth year BFA and graduate level, students examine current issues in contemporary art, and locate their practice within this evolving context. Through their studio practice and research, students are responsible for understanding, synthesizing, and articulating a critical perspective within contemporary discourse. The conversation includes a critical and contextual approach to both craft and art. Students consider craft as a kind of methodology or mode of production, and examine its history, associations, and the cultural conditions of objects that are central and tangential to craft. Students both, mine craft and its formats strategically as content, and consider the periphery of this dialogue. They examine the contingency of objects, and work to locate their practice between object, context and situation. Through individual studio meetings with faculty, art history courses, and seminars that include reading, writing, presentations, collaborative projects, conversation and critique, BFA and graduate students develop an informed perspective that enables their practice to demonstrate critical, independent thinking. The BFA and MFA programs culminate in a written thesis and exhibition. Facilities
Jewelry & Metalsmithing facilities are located in the Northsite, a complex of studio spaces that also house ceramics, fibers, sculpture, photography, painting and digital arts. The studio is well equipped with hand tools, hammers, stakes, rolling mills, hydraulic press, production casting equipment, spray and bubble etchers, acetylene and oxy-acetylene torch systems, and a Roland 3D mill. The recently renovated studio ventilation is comprehensive for all areas including soldering benches, production casting, chemical and acid hoods, alternative materials (plastics, rubber, silicones, etc), enameling area, electro-forming, and aluminum anodizing equipment. Students also have access to the department’s laser cutter, large flat bed CNC router, and a range of digital and video equipment. A periodical collection and small field-specific library are available in the studio. Advanced students at the BFA level are provided with individual studio spaces. Graduate students are located in an adjoining studio space with its own ventilation, soldering and work areas. Faculty
Area Head of Jewelry & Metalsmithing, Anya Kivarkis is represented in both national and international gallery and exhibition venues. She is strongly invested in shifting pedagogy within the field and is establishing exciting new directions for the program. Recent visiting artists, scholars and critics include Glenn Adamson, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Iris Eichenberg, Lauren Fensterstock, Namita Gupta-Wiggers, Ben Lignel, Josiah McElheny, Lynne Cooke, Amanda Ross-Ho, Yevgeniya Kaganovich, and Suzanne Ramljak
