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Can’t get enough of gel printing or just want to indulge yourself and experiment with techniques and materials? This intensive two-day class provides an opportunity to use a plethora of tools and materials for creating patterns and texture.
Discover the power of reflective writing guided by teaching artist and museum educator, Mary Hall Surface. Inspired by works of art by Hudson River landscape painter Jasper Francis Cropsey and poetry by Mary Oliver, explore the lessons that the season of autumn offers when we slow down, look closely, and reflect. Designed for writers of all levels, the workshop invites participants to look outward at paintings and poetry and to look inward through writing.
Historians view the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 as a turning point, igniting northern resistance to the expansion of slavery. Far less noted is the crucial role of political maps, which visualized that threat in meetings, newspapers, and pamphlets, helping forge the anti-slavery coalition that elected Lincoln. Historian Susan Schulten shows how these maps reshaped perceptions of the American West—and the nation itself.
The universe is far stranger than science fiction ... and it’s all real. Kimberly Arcand of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory leads a journey through weird and wild places in the cosmos, from merely mind-bending to truly extreme. Along the way meet quasars powered by supermassive black holes, city-sized neutron stars, and pulsars that keep time more precisely than atomic clocks, plus some wild worlds orbiting distant suns.
During the Civil War, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers endured brutal conditions in prison camps such as Belle Isle in Richmond. Yet many prisoners found creative ways to preserve their humanity: they sketched, carved, wrote, and crafted objects from whatever materials they could find. Kelly Hancock of the American Civil War Museum highlights works from its POW art collection. These deeply personal pieces reveal not only suffering but also endurance, resourcefulness, and the human need to create even in the darkest of circumstances.
In the 19th century, European artists looked to North Africa for exotic inspiration and new artistic experience. Eugène Delacroix spent six months in Morocco, filling sketchbooks that helped shape Orientalism. His example inspired Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Paul Klee, and August Macke. In a four-session series, art historian Joseph Paul Cassar examines how travel to North Africa reshaped their artistic ideas. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)
Working small can open things up in surprising ways. In this six-session mixed-media class, create a series of miniature artworks using a range of materials—both wet and dry—like paint, collage, and simple sculptural elements.
The story of the 1692 Salem witch trials is well known, but Salem actually marked the end of a long, widespread witch craze. Historian Kate E. Bush traces witch trials back to their origins in Europe during the 15th century. Bush explores how new beliefs about certain people, most often women, working in league with the Devil took hold during that time and led to witch hunts. She also examines the enduring stereotypes that defined the witch in popular imagination.
Built from scratch in the 1950s, the Modernist city of Brasilia was designed to express new ideas about urban living and city planning while relocating the national capital from the coast to a more central site in the Brazilian highlands. Historian Justin M. Jacobs surveys Brasilia’s carefully designed downtown landscapes and creative solutions to urban housing, all meant to synchronize with one another and provide a progressive model for a better world.
The World’s Fairs of the 1930s offered visions of a world in flux—attempting to chart a future at a moment when nothing felt stable. As the Great Depression reshaped daily life and global tensions mounted, fairs in Chicago, Paris, and New York became spectacular stages where nations expressed optimism, power, and unease through architecture, technology, and performance. In a 3-part series, art historian Jennie Hirsh examines this trio of landmark fairs, revealing how they transformed crisis into dazzling displays that captured both the aspirations and anxieties of their era. This session focuses on the World's Fair of Paris 1937.
