The purpose of this studio course is to provide a practice-based learning environment with a focus on Art & Text. Students will explore how text operates within contemporary visual culture and their own art practices. The course offers a framework for examining diverse approaches to text in art, including text-as-image, artworks utilizing the book form, and projects that employ alternative methods of distribution, such as libraries, online databases, hypertext experiments, sound, and writing-based art practices. Through independent text-based art projects, students will engage deeply with text in their work while critically considering current discourse and production within the field.

In this course students will explore and expand the definition of the book as an expressive medium. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between form, content, materiality, and distribution. The course will develop intermediate techniques and methods for printing, binding and editioning artists’ books. Students will develop, design, produce and publish self-directed artists’ books. Through lectures, studio demonstrations, field trips, readings, and research, students will learn the contemporary and historical contexts for artists’ book publishing, distribution, and discourse.