Sarah Bastress

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.

This class is about being EXTRA. It is about adding all of the sequins and showing all the warts and having all of the feelings. Our editing process will be to add MORE. We will look at work that is maximalist in aesthetics and maximalist in content. This class will explore how notions of simplicity, purity, and perfection have been used to uphold a cis white male status quo in the art world. Using the idea that taking up space and time is a form of agency, this class will join in with the abundance and lushness of maximalist artists who have come before us to find ourselves messy alternatives. Occasionally, this work will be explicit, with care taken to talk about our needs and boundaries. This class will help us engage with different strategies to discuss and (only if you want to) make work with difficult content.

We will be too loud, too angry, too big, too pretty, too dramatic, too raunchy, too ornate, too much.

Over the course of the semester, students will search for their own gluttonous icons, develop their own over-the-top persona, create an alternate Western art history where minimalism became maximalism, create one semester-long piece they work on every class, create a drawing a day (we hope!), and build a grotto, among many other artworks.

Ideas of STUFF, Immigrant Maximalism, excess, the radicality of doubt, duration, decoration, the pornographic sublime, the explicit, shock value, the grotesque, sustainability, and how to make work with an abundance of 'trash' will also be discussed.

Field trips will include The Leather Archives, the Roger Brown House, and Tweet/Big Chicks.

Other artists and art movements included in discussion will be Persian Miniatures, Caitlin Cherry, Kerry James Marshall, Dynasty Handbags, Nick Cave, Lari Pittman, Sun Ra, Yvette Mayorga, Agnes Martin, Horace Pippin, Ivan Albright, Danez Smith, Julie Mehretu, Virginia Woolf, Howard Finster, Florine Stettheimer, James Ensor, Gravy Train!!!!, and John Waters.

We will also eat cake in class.