Professional Immersion Projects
Professional Immersion includes study abroad and visiting artists, designers, and scholars to campus.
Past Immersion Projects
NYPOP: NEW YORK PROFESSIONAL OUTREACH PROGRAM
NYPOP is about making connections that lead to a career in the visual arts. The program brings university students to the work places of contemporary professionals in New York City. The experience encourages students to believe in the possibility of a career for themselves. On-site sessions examine contemporary aesthetics in concert with an insider's perspective on the current professional scene. We seek answers to the many practical questions that stem from a student's desire to become an artist, curator, art writer and museum or gallery worker. Students visit artist's studios in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn; visits to contemporary galleries in Chelsea, and trips to MoMA, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim and the Met.
The Frostic School of Art NYPOP course, in its first collaborative project with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst groundbreaking outreach program, was created for the fall 2011 semester by our Founding Exhibitions Director emeritus, Don Desmett.
Trace+Gestures: Kalamazoo<>Granada
Trace+Gestures: Kalamazoo<>Granada was a collaborative project between students from the Frostic School of Art (FSoA) at Western Michigan University and artists from EspIRA. The participants of EspIRA also included residence artists of RAPACES, which is an artist residency in Nicaragua. http://tracegestures.blogspot.com
During the fall 2012 semester, a small group of students participated in the course titled Trace+Gestures. During this course the students traveled to Nicaragua for a one-week intensive learning experience that you lead by three professors: Patricia Belli from the association EspIRA, and Nichole Maury and Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, from the Frostic School of Art.
The participants explored notions of location, translation, cultural dialogues, and the traces that these may leave upon an individual, and those that the individual leaves behind. Projects were be generated using an expanded approach to art making, which can included public interventions, installations, artist's books, actions, sound, video, and other less tangible forms.
This course and international exchange was partially funded by a College of Fine Arts Teaching Fellowship.
Photography NOW: London, Paris, Berlin
Photography NOW: London, Paris, Berlin was a 2013 summer course lead by professors Ginger Owen-Murakami and Adriane Little.
This course introduced students to early photographic histories and contemporary photographic practices in London, Paris and Berlin. Immersion into this subject included visits to museums, landmarks, galleries and artist studios that relate to the development of photography and it’s relationship to current artistic practices. Having stood in front of the window at Lacock Abbey where the first photographic negative was created, being so close to physically handle and examine ground breaking historical photographs and portfolios at the Victoria Albert Museum, taking witness to Mona Lisa with new perspectives, seeing the inventions of photography in various physical forms at the French Photographic Society or visiting the Bauhaus from where our contemporary studio art classroom has evolved; the students brought these new experiences back to the classroom.
Returning to Kalamazoo, course instruction emphasized developing hybrid methods of creating photographic work by merging digital and historic photographic technologies and approaches to the art making process. Together, we created 36 accordion books of the historical photographic process of cyanotype using new technologies of digital cameras, cell phones in particular, to gather imagery for the basis of the project.
This course and international exchange was partially funded by a College of Fine Arts Teaching Fellowship.