Writing and the Visual: The Art of Art Writing

This course explores some approaches and techniques for writing about visual art and material culture. As a Writing in the Major (WIM) course, it is intended to be helpful to your academic writing for projects such as presentations, reports, essays, research papers, and theses. We will consider forms, practices, and problems of writing about art and visual culture of the sort encountered both in scholarly and professional settings - including research papers, gallery texts, and art criticism. The course will be structured in part as a writing workshop, with a series of writing exercises, brief presentations, discussions, and critiques. We will also discuss some readings, including examples of various genres and modes of art writing as well as methodological or theoretical accounts of relationships between language/texts and images/objects. We will also consider some critical issues surrounding art writing.