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DEGREE REQUIREMENTS,

Since 2019, ATP is excited to offer the opportunity to declare a minor. If you have any questions about the minor please contact our advisor for the minor, Sherwin Ovid.

DEADLINE TO DECLARE MINOR: A student can email a completed form to declare the minor to the ATP office as early as the first day of classes in the student’s first year. This is a popular minor and class sizes are limited so it is important to declare as early as possible. As such, we strongly advise any student interested in the minor to submit the form to declare by end of junior year and plan to have completed at least three of the six courses required of the minor by this point. 

The final deadline in which the ATP office will accept the form to declare the minor is also the deadline in which a student must submit the petition to graduate, which occurs several months before a student’s graduation date. The petition to graduate deadline occurs a few months before a student’s graduation date. Consult this link for the list of petition to graduate deadlines for graduating in each of the coming quarters.

If a student has already submitted the petition to graduate well before the petition to graduate deadline but prior to declaring the ATP minor, the student can still declare the minor by emailing a completed supplemental petition to graduate form for the minor along with a completed form to declare the minor to both the ATP office and the ATP Director of Undergraduate Studies. These two forms must be received by the petition to graduate deadline. 

MINOR,

TWO 200 LEVEL COURSES
 210-0, 220-0, 230-0, 240-0, or 250-0 

ONE HISTORY AND/OR THEORY COURSE
270-0 Contemporary Art Survey or 272-0 Critical Methods for Contemporary Art or 260-0 Studio Practice

THREE ADDITIONAL COURSES IN DEPARTMENT at the 300 level
372, 382, and 390 may be taken more than once and counted more than once if each course is a different topic

101 First-Year Seminar course may not be counted to fulfill any of the Minor Requirements



MAJOR,

THREE 200 LEVEL COURSES 
210-0 Introduction to Drawing, 230-0 Introduction to Time-Based Art, and 240-0 Introduction to Sculpture

THREE HISTORY AND/OR THEORY COURSES
270-0 Contemporary Art Survey or ART HIST 260-0 Introduction to Contemporary Art, and two of the following: 272 Critical Methods in Contemporary Art, 372 Seminar, or 382 Studio/Seminar

ONE 260 STUDIO PRACTICE IN JUNIOR YEAR
pre-requisite for Studio Critique

ONE 360 SENIOR CRITIQUE IN SENIOR YEAR

SEVEN ADDITIONAL COURSES
Five must be at the 300 level, four must be studio art courses including at least two 382-0 Studio/Seminar or 390-0 Studio
A course may count toward both of these categories, but the total number of courses must be at least seven

372, 382, and 390 may be taken more than once and counted more than once if each course is a different topic

101 First-Year Seminar course may not be counted to fulfill any of the Major Requirements.

MAJOR LEARNING OBJECTIVES

WHAT WILL A STUDENT WHO COMPLETES THE MAJOR IN ART THEORY AND PRACTICE LEARN? 

The goal of an undergraduate education in Art Theory and Practice is to prepare students to contribute forcefully to contemporary art and culture—in its reception and interpretation, its presentation and distribution, and, most of all, its production.  For a work of art to be meaningful to today’s audiences, it must engage with contemporary issues and with the larger cultural context.  Therefore, the students in Art Theory and Practice consider current issues alongside historical traditions, interpretation and analysis alongside technical skills, and theory alongside practice.  Students experiment with a wide range of artistic strategies and modes of exploration and become familiar with diverse theoretical perspectives and discourses.  Understanding how to effectively use art to ask questions and create meaning positions students to become conscientious and influential cultural producers of the future. 

Objectives – students acquire skills in: 

  • Visual analysis 
  • Creative problem solving 
  • Technical abilities 
  • Critical thinking 

Through the completion of the degree, students learn to: 

  • Effectively convey thoughts, ideas and questions in artistic form 
  • Develop the ability to interpret and articulate the often-multiple meanings that are conveyed through images, and parse out the mechanisms through which those meanings are conveyed 
  • Locate contemporary art practices within historical contexts and lineages, and use these shared histories as tools in the making of contemporary works 
  • Employ multiple theoretical frameworks that draw on a variety of other disciples in the sciences and the humanities 
  • Identify and solve problems within a variety of physical, technological, social and cultural contexts 
  • Establish a self-motivated and self-directed artistic practice centered around particular themes, issues or questions relevant to both the student’s interests and contemporary culture. 

↳ COURSES

ABOUT,

Our department believes in the inherent unity between the practice and theory of art. Beyond the development of skills and training in techniques, the study of art involves gaining both an understanding of visual thinking and an awareness of the histories, issues and concepts that bear on the direction and role of the visual arts in our culture today.

Most of our courses are designed to serve all students regardless of their major area of study. A,T,P, enrolls about 40-60 undergraduate art majors and 70+ art minors, while approximately 1,000 non-majors/minors take our classes every year. Our undergraduate courses cover both traditional approaches and newer media and alternative strategies. Painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography form the core of the undergraduate curriculum, giving students the opportunity to develop a solid foundation in the field’s traditions and established media. The department also looks forward to experimental approaches and future developments in visual art making.

We incorporate digital technology, video and conceptual art practice into our curriculum, thus blending newer trends with established practices. Also integral to our program are seminars in art theory, as well as critique classes in which enrolled students present new work for prolonged, in-depth analysis by the class. By the senior year, each department major is encouraged to elaborate their own self-motivated, individual studio practice in which artworks are produced independently of classroom assignments.

Please note a portfolio is not not needed for prospective undergraduate students, and the department is unable to conduct portfolio reviews. If admission is granted to Northwestern, then a student can declare either the major or minor as early as their first quarter at the University. A portfolio is not needed in order to declare the major or minor. Questions about the undergraduate program and the major may be sent to our Director of Undergraduate Studies, Zach Buchner. Questions about the minor may be sent to the advisor to the minor, Sherwin Ovid.

Cauleen Smith,
2012

Cauleen Smith (born 1967) is a filmmaker whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the black imagination. Smith’s films have been featured in group exhibitions at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and the New Museum, New York. Beginning in 1994, she wrote, directed, and produced her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998), which was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, and won best feature film at both the Urbanworld Film Festival and the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.Recent exhibitions include Chicago's threewalls and at the MCA Chicago.



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Deb Sokolow,
Associate Professor of Instruction,

Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer whose semi-fictitious drawings and artist books speculate both comically and critically on a number of subjects including architecture, artists, world leaders, politics and intelligence organizations.

Her work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale (Athens, Greece) and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Drawing Center (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis), Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City) and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford) in which her 2013 MATRIX exhibition, Some Concerns About the Candidate, was reviewed in the New York Times.

Sokolow’s drawings have been reproduced for BOMB Magazine, Creative Time’s Comics project, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Comics and in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Sokolow is a recipient of an Artadia award and residencies at Art Omi in Ghent, New York and Nordic Artists’ Centre in Dale, Norway. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004.

debsokolow.com,
+ Contact, Email, (847) 491-7079,


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Lane Relyea,
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies,

Lane Relyea's essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Artforum, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, Frieze, Modern Painters, Art in America and Flash Art. He has written monographs on Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Vija Celmins, Toba Khedoori, Monique Prieto and Wolfgang Tillmans among others, and contributed to such exhibition catalogs as Helter Skelter and Public Offerings (both Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992 and 2001 respectively), and, more recently, Ordinary Pictures (Walker Art Museum, 2016). He has delivered lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, and the Art Institute of Chicago among other venues. After teaching for a decade at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he joined the faculty in 1991, in the summer of 2001 he was appointed director of the Core Program and Art History at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas. His book Your Everyday Art World, on the effects of communication networks on artistic practice and its contexts, was published by MIT Press in 2013.


+ Contact, Email, (847) 467-6584,


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