Course Description

This course is meant to be a space for you to examine and deepen your relationship to the field and your own practice through readings, discussions, and presentations.  The readings are meant to expand your perspective on the field of jewelry and metalsmithing, to define its particularities and concerns in relation to the discourses of the contemporary art world.

Together we will explore a series of seminal theoretical texts, seeking ways to relate them to our own practice.  Through these texts we will encounter a series of themes and historical perspectives that are crucial to the field of jewelry, while also delving into fields and areas of inquiry, that have not commonly been related to our field, but perhaps should or could be.  Our aim is to get a historical and interdisciplinary perspective on where we are as artists/makers today, how we got here and where we could go from here. The course aims to bring up critical questions on why we make, whom we make for and the meaning of our practice beyond the studio and the jewelry and metals world.

This is a chance to practice your skills in connecting theory, reading and writing to your work and to build a vocabulary and ground of reference around your ideas, interests and intentions. It’s a chance to take part in an intense discourse around your field, which you might be asked to do many times in the future of your career.

The Wednesday meetings will adopt the form of a reading/talking circle. Your role in the group is important and the success of our conversations will be based on your participation and engagement. We will all take turns in presenting and leading the discussion and also examine what “research through practice” might mean for us, by exploring some ways of connecting theory and making. 

Oct 29, 2009

Museum Highlights


A still from Andrea Fraser's video "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk" (1989) in which Fraser portrays fictional docent Jane Castleton leading unsuspecting museum visitors on a subversively scripted tour of galleries as well as restrooms and water fountains.


In the article One Place After Another, Kwon describes Meirle Laderman Ukeles scrubbing the floors of a museum to discuss the complex class relationships (upper for funding lower for cleaning) museums are dependent upon. This immediately reminded me of Andrea Fraser (who is actually mentioned in a list of artists near the end of the article) who impersonated a museum docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In her docent tour she tackles the role of the museum through her elaborate and humorously twisted descriptions.


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