NEW ART AND ENVIRONMENT COURSE OFFERED AT WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

This post is written by guest blogger Erika Osborne

NEW ART AND ENVIRONMENT COURSE OFFERED AT WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

This fall Erika Osborne is offering a course titled Art and Environment through the Division of Art and Design at West Virginia University. Erika previously worked with Bill Gilbert at the University of New Mexico as the Assistant Director of Land Arts of the American West, and also taught a summer field course at UNM titled Wilderness Studio with her husband Tracy Stuckey. She is now teaching in West Virginia and has been eager to launch similar field programs to those she taught at UNM in the very different cultural and environmental climate of the Appalachian mountain region.

Art and Environment functions simultaneously as a studio and seminar course. The three course topics – Earth and Sky: The Micro and the Macro, Contemporary Environmental Issues: People and Place, and Sustainability: A Holistic Approach to Art Making – will provide the context for participants to gain knowledge from experts in various fields and apply that to their art making practices. Students will participate in a series of field trips with a botanist, an astronomer, a mountain top removal mining activist, water scientists, a landscape architect, and a family of organic farmers. In addition to the hands-on experience these field trips will provide, participants in the course will read and discuss a broad range of texts and will gain exposure to artists who work within the genre through a series of artist presentations - all of this, giving the students a broad range of knowledge to create work in the field and studio.

This course will be followed by a two week summer field program titled Place:Appalachia that Erika is currently working on. More will be posted on Place:Appalachia as it develops.

For more information on the course visit…

http://artanddesign.wvu.edu/environment/art_and_environment