Larry Lee

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

In this course we will explore, employ, and experiment with text, to reference, translate and/or connect to your sense of self and larger community within or without the mainstream. We will consider words in any language as image, object or action, moving or static, to confront or maybe reconcile difference, originating from street as the raw energy of spoken word to the supposed lawless power of graffiti. Voices that are often marginalized seeking to incorporate the concreteness of the written and/or spoken in relationship to the visual.
Some of the scholar/artists who will serve as inspiration, if not role models for this course, include Yoko Ono, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Steiner, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Xu Bing, Wenda Gu, I was Born With Two Tongues, Edgar Heap of Birds, Edward Ruscha, Christopher Wool, to name a few. Students should expect to produce a body of work consisting of 3-5 finished pieces during the semester, to be presented in a culminating course critique.

This course examines the emergence, growth and evolution of art by Asian Pacific Islander Americans throughout the twentieth century especially in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement that also spawned a genesis of Asian American identity, culture and activism to the late 1980?s during the apex of multiculturalism and the politics of representation to the transnationalism of the new millennium and beyond.

Through readings, field trips, and film screenings, our class will consider the ongoing debate of what constitutes Asian American art by looking at artists including Isamu Noguchi, Roger Shimomura, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Maya Lin, Tseng Kwong Chi and others within these historical, cultural and political contexts to discuss how questions related to stereotype, cultural difference, gender politics, and identity construction affected and shaped its development and meaning.

Course work will include in-class presentation, two research papers as well as a mid-term and final exam.