Annalise Flynn

This course explores the rich genre of vernacular-built environments - where personal spaces like homes, studios, and gardens have been fully transformed into continually evolving, site-specific, and life-encompassing endeavours. Frequently such spaces are understood as works or art because they include strong visual and crafted elements. Such structures include mosaic-covered homes, painted mountains, found object gardens, hand-built concrete compounds, and much more. In this course, we will explore the expansive ways that those creating environments push the canonical limits of artmaking and the idea of who the artist is through their interactions with material, landscape, and community. We will examine historical and contemporary art environments within their social, political, and cultural contexts, consider the ¿lives¿ of ephemeral sites via preservation initiatives, and discuss where these artists and their work intersect (and do not intersect) with the mainstream art world. The artists included in this class present a demographic and geographic cross-section of America (and elsewhere), and readings, lectures, and class discussion will support the development of a more inclusive understanding of artmaking and placemaking in the United States. Artists¿ sites examined range from Sabato Rodia¿s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, California to L.V. Hull¿s home in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Students are expected to attend in-person class, complete a variety of readings and research-based projects, and participate in class discussion. Sign up for this class requires instructor consent and is by application to Professor Annalise Flynn. If you would like more information about this class, please email Annalise at aflynn2@saic.edu.

This course explores the rich genre of vernacular art environments' combinations of art, architecture and/or landscape architecture, including religious grottos, spiritual, devotional and mystical sites, gardens, ephemeral yard shows, architectural inventions, expressions of loneliness and survival, artist-built sites of conscience, homes fully transformed, artist's museums, and other created spaces that are site and life specific. The course examines historical and contemporary art environments and issues impacting art from beyond the academic mainstream and its evolving definitions, environments in their social, political and cultural contexts, home and landscape as studios, the viability and longevity of specific sites, and site preservation. Artists explored in this class include women, people of color, economically disadvantaged makers, farmers/rural dwellers, urban dwellers, and immigrants, among others. Artists' sites examined range from Sam Rodia's Watts Towers, Emery Blagdon's Healing Machine, Kea Tawana's Ark, to Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Ideal, and many more. Lectures are supported by video, audio, and a broad range of readings. Developing an awareness and appreciation for vernacular expressions in architecture, architectural cladding and ornament, garden ornament and yard shows, and other ordinary or beyond-ordinary visual arrangements in our shared, adorned environment is a subtext. Students complete readings and exploration and research projects.
Add: Sign up for this class requires instructor consent and is by application to Professor Nicholas Lowe. For more details please email nlowe1@saic.edu.