This course will broaden the student's awareness of the object-based world while developing conceptual skills through exercises in observation, writing, collection and presentation. Students will use drawing and rendering as a generative source and critical thinking tool in the design process and to facilitate discussion.

The inflection of Seminar I is Ways of Seeing. Every image embodies a way of seeing, wrote the critic John Berger. In Seminar I students will engage with canonical texts that have provided the cultural ground for particular ways of looking at works of art. In addition, the course will introduce students to new writings that embody the urgent concerns and perspectives of our artistic moment. The course hopes to attune students to the ways meaning is constructed and reconstructed in works of art and help them to develop strategies to continue this tradition of rupture and repair.

This course will engage students in the theoretical and critical examination of seminal works by some of the most notable artist-jewelers from the last 75 years, along with related examples of painting, sculpture, architecture, domestic objects and costume. By studying contemporary jewelry from the mid-20th century origins to the present, students will be able to trace historic and cultural influences in present-day metal work, and a variety of other mediums.

Seminar II, Modes of Critique, builds on the knowledge and experience acquired in Seminar I, engaging with new readings and discussions with a particular focus on the concept of critique. What is the role of critique in the creative practitioner's practice? Does the work of art itself have a role as a form of critique of the world at large? Not only will this course reflect on the nature of criticism, it will also apply these reflections to the practice itself; and through a process of constructive critique students will learn to situate their own work within contemporary cultural contexts, gaining deeper awareness of the discursive elements and histories that shape individual artistic choices.

The Fine Arts Seminars explore ideas and issues relevant to the Fine Arts curriculum. They address concerns of the studio arising from the social, historical and intellectual conditions of the time. These concerns are formal and philosophical as well as practical. Class discussions include topics such as personalities, events, exhibitions, writing of critics and artists, values and studio practice. The seminars are required coursework from the sophomore through the senior years. Prerequisites: FAU-241 and FAU-242.

Students in Seminar III will have honed their craft as creative practitioners through studio classes, and have learned many of the aspects involved in pursuing a career in the arts through the Professional Practices course. But what does it mean to live a life as a creative practitioner? And in particular what will it take to live your life in the arts once you leave the space of an academic program? In this course you will consider theoretically and conscientiously what it means to sustain a life in the arts.

This course is a professional practices workshop for senior majors in jewelry and other students whose studio practice is object-based. The objectives of the course are for participants to be able to effectively document their work, develop presentation skills, understand pricing and marketing appropriate to their object-based medium, and how to prepare for an exhibition.