ITALIC
I am the Associate Director of ITALIC, an interdisciplinary arts program for first-year students at Stanford University. Students live together and take a year-long course from the program’s teaching team, whose areas of expertise include music visual art, poetry, performance, dance, and film.
Talking Pictures: Visual Art and Audio
What if pictures could talk? What if they made sound and music? What if we could speak for the pictures? This class did just that. Over the course of the quarter, we explored collaborations between visual artists and musicians; we listen to historic recordings and sought out found sound; we studied radio plays, podcasts, and audioguides; we made music and noise; we were sometimes quiet and let the pictures do the talking; we talked to each other about the pictures. Ultimately, we made a wide variety of audio interventions, an unconventional audio guide, to accompany the Cantor’s exhibition “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941.”
One Thing, Then Another: The Photobook
This course approached the photobook as a medium in itself, distinct from both photographs and books. Editing, pacing, and layout all shape the viewer’s interaction with the book, while paper, cover, and binding choices allow the photobook maker to craft a uniquely tactile experience of the image sequence.
Drawing on the Stanford Art Library’s rich collection of photobooks, as well as Special Collections resources, such as the Arthur Tress archive, students studied a wide range of books, from classics of the modern era to books published just this year. Established photographers and photobook publishers, including Endia Beal, Arthur Tress, Odette England, and Nelson Chan, visited the class to reflect on their experiences and guided students towards making their own books.
Art Writing
This course, for Art and Art History majors, explored writing about art, both as a means to making art known to the wider world and to knowing it better yourself. Seven Bay Area-based artists visited the class and led the students on tours of their favorite artworks in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center and the Anderson Collection. Students then transcribed these conversations and wrote essays on the visiting artists’ work by referencing their discussions of other artworks. Here, the photographer Erica Deeman talks about Frank Stella’s “Zeltweg” (1981).
Photography and Truth
In 2017, the concept of truth was suddenly newsworthy. Just as it proved remarkably difficult to pin down in national politics, it’s surprisingly difficult to judge in photographs. This class studied the many ways that writing has been used to shape interpretation of photographs since the nineteenth century. Students produced writing that defined their own ideas about the relationship between photography and truth.
The Image of Time
This course traced the history of representing time in the visual arts, with an emphasis on photography. We considered photography’s role in producing a mechanized and standardized time in the nineteenth century, as well as attempts to use photography to destabilize such objective temporalities. In the twentieth century, we studied the dominant theorization of photography as an art that addresses time, history, and memory through study of critical texts by Benjamin, Barthes, and Bazin, among others. The course concluded by interrogating the applicability of these analogue theories to contemporary photographic practices.
Notes to a Young Artist
This course partnered with a local high school, allowing university students the opportunity to reflect on their learning in the arts and to pass it on. Students created an online magazine of essays, virtual museum tours, and video art assignments that are accessible to all artists—young and old.
Mail Art
In a series of artist-led workshops, students made 5x7” artworks to mail to each other, bridging the distance enforced by remote learning through the wonders of the USPS. Read more about it in an article from the Stanford Report and the Postal Record, the official magazine of the Letter Carriers’ Union.