The schedule for eight-part and five-part summer courses is now available.

MoMA courses offer adults the rare opportunity to study modern and contemporary art with leading art specialists during and after public hours in the Museum's galleries and multimedia classrooms. These discussion-oriented classes are taught by university professors, artists, and Museum staff. Enrollment is limited to twenty per course, so sign up today.

Eight-part courses are $410; $350 for members. Five-part courses are $255; $215 for members. There is an additional materials fee of $50 for the painting class. Sign up for Museum membership starting at $75 and receive free admission to the Museum for a year and the discounted course prices.

Fall courses will begin in late September. The course schedule will be posted online on July 23 and registration will begin at 1:00 p.m. on August 6.

FM headsets and neck loops for sound amplification are available for all courses.

Course guidelines and frequently asked questions

For more information on MoMA Courses, e-mail courses@moma.org or call (212) 408-8441.

SUMMER 2008 COURSE LIST

EIGHT-WEEK COURSES

Modern Art, 1880–1945   SOLD OUT
Eight Mondays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 6/9, 6/16, 6/23, 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28
Instructor: Diana Bush

This course introduces students to key works and ideas of modern art, from late Impressionism to the beginnings of the New York School. Moving chronologically through the Museum's collection, students encounter an array of renowned and provocative objects, from paintings that challenged the official Academy and revolutionized the conventions of representation to photographs that capture the dynamism of modern life to modernist buildings that fill city skylines. Artists covered include Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

Diana Bush (MPhil, Columbia University) is completing her dissertation on Weimar photomontage and is a lecturer on modern art, aesthetics, and criticism at Stevens Institute of Technology. She is also a lecturer at MoMA.

The Legacy of Marcel Duchamp
Eight Mondays, 6:00–7:50 p.m., 6/9, 6/16, 6/23, 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28
Instructor: Claudia Calirman

This course takes Marcel Duchamp's artistic practices as a starting point and explores his legacy as a role model for contemporary artists. Looking at his work since its insertion on Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada, the course analyzes how Duchamp became the most provocative artist of the twentieth century. The readymade and its complex relationship to the market, institutional critique, the challenge of aesthetic values, and the dematerialization of the work of art are some of the issues discussed, as well as the fundamental question posed by Duchamp: What is art? Works by Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst are also discussed.

Claudia Calirman (PhD, The Graduate Center, City University of New York) is adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design and a lecturer at MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Modern and Contemporary Art, 1945–Today   SOLD OUT
Eight Thursdays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 6/5, 6/12, 6/19, 6/26, 7/3, 7/10, 7/17,7/24
Instructor: Anna Mecugni

This course examines major artists, artworks, and movements after World War II. Students explore the emergence of the New York School and its links to a new global economy centered in New York, Dada's revival and Pop's flowering in mass consumer society, Minimalism's formal refinement and emphasis on spatial context, Conceptual art's fundamental questioning of art, the development of multimedia artistic practices, and works made since the 1970s that are still being debated and defined.

Anna Mecugni (PhD candidate, CUNY's Graduate Center) is an art historian specializing in contemporary art. She is a lecturer at MoMA and is also working on a series of video interviews entitled "Everyday Matters" for MUSEO Magazine.

Drawing and Perception   SOLD OUT
Eight Wednesdays, 7:00–9:30 p.m., 6/4, 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2, 7/9, 7/16, 7/23
Instructor: Ethan Greenbaum
Class size is limited to twelve students

This studio course builds observational and interpretive skills through a focus on drawing from life. The course teaches drawing fundamentals through an emphasis on perceptual inquiry. As the course advances, we progress through a series of drawing exercises such as contour drawing, measuring proportion, and creating the illusion of light. These assignments are designed to strengthen visual acuity and develop a facility with drawing materials including pencil, charcoal, and ink. Primary emphasis is placed on drawing as a perceptual and kinesthetic activity, one that involves the full use of one's faculties and is learned through action and practice. In-class exercises are interspersed with lecture tours of relevant works in MoMA's collection. Artists discussed include Georges Seurat, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Giacometti, Catherine Murphy, Marlene Dumas, and many others.

Ethan Greenbaum (MFA in painting, Yale University) is an artist, teacher, and critic who regularly exhibits his work in New York and abroad. He is an art instructor at the Pratt Institute and visiting lecturer at a variety of schools, including Mica and Tyler School of Art.

The Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting   SOLD OUT
Eight Thursdays, 7:00–9:30 p.m., 6/5, 6/12, 6/19, 6/26, 7/3, 7/10, 7/17, 7/24
Instructor: Corey D'Augustine
Class size is limited to ten students. Extra studio fee of $50 includes all materials.

This class teaches students about postwar abstract painting from the perspective of the artist by teaching the materials and techniques used in paintings of this period. After two introductory classes covering the basics of stretching and preparing a canvas, as well as mixing and applying paint, subsequent classes each focus on one artist who is well represented in MoMA's collection. Each class begins with a brief slide lecture to introduce the artist's work, their materials and techniques will be explained, and students prepare small mock-up paintings, which they will keep. At the conclusion of the class, students visit the galleries and/or conservation lab to share their insights into the role of material and technique in abstract painting. More

Corey D'Augustine is an artist and painting conservator at The Museum of Modern Art and has previously worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Matthew Barney studio. He has exhibited his own work at the Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts in Shanghai, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning.

FIVE-WEEK COURSES

Contemporary Art: What Is Now? Art of This Decade, 1998–2008    SOLD OUT
Five Mondays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 6/2, 6/9, 6/16, 6/23, 6/30
Instructor: Haley Mellin

This course examines the development of contemporary art during the past decade, looking at the current global artscape in a modern, historical, and social context. The course untangles the threads of ideas and aesthetics that run through the past decade, showing the persistence of some and the momentary significance of others. This course provides an introduction to the wide variety of art-historical movements that have developed in contemporary art over the past decade. Major movements in painting, photography, sculpture, and performance are examined, particularly in relationship to the New York art world. Among the topics discussed in relation to current art are globalism, the new art economy, relational aesthetics, recent political work, and the artist as nomadic producer. This course introduces students to the key works and ideas of late modern art—moving chronologically through the Museum's collection and recent shows—and is a thorough guide to understanding the current art market and the dramatic shifts in visual production over the past decade. Artists considered include Rirkrit Tiravanija, The Atlas Group, Thomas Hirschhorn, Takashi Murakami, Prada Marfa, Rudolph Stingel, Cai Guo-Qiang, Luc Tuymans, John Currin, The Wrong Gallery, and Reena Spaulings, with historical references to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, the Situationist International, Dada, Mondrian, and Malevich.

Haley Mellin (PhD candidate, Visual Culture, New York University) is an artist and an adjunct instructor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory in NYU's Department of Art. Her recent curatorial projects include Compulsive at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Art Basel.

The New York School, 1945–1960   SOLD OUT
Five Mondays, 8:10–10:00 p.m., 6/2, 6/9, 6/16, 6/23, 6/30
Instructor: Kelly Sidley

This course considers how the center of the international art world shifted from Paris to New York in the years after World War II, with a focus on artists of the New York School, who are often called Abstract Expressionists. From the "action painting" of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning to the color-field techniques of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, students question why these artists turned toward abstraction through very personal, visually distinct formal and philosophical languages. Other artists to be discussed include Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Clifford Still, and Mark Tobey. The course also looks at where these artists were exhibited, who championed and criticized them, and why the New York School is arguably the first significant American art movement.

Kelly Sidley (Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) specializes in postwar and contemporary art. She is a curatorial assistant for MoMA's upcoming Aernout Mik exhibition, as well as a lecturer at the Museum. She has worked as an independent curator and taught at NYU and Pace University

Postwar Performance
Five Mondays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4
Instructor: Mari Dumett

Beginning in the 1950s, performance art practices arose that seemed to fly in the face of Clement Greenberg's by-then-dominant paradigm of modern art. Whereas Greenberg called for medium purity and emphasized opticality above all other means of reception, a wide array of international artists began exploring performance in ways that not only broke down traditional media boundaries but also decentered the relationship between art, artist, and viewer. Performance— in which objects often continued to play an important role— offered a means to develop a greater open-endedness in art, and thus a way to let "experience" in. The artists who undertook these practices drew from the old avant-garde notion of an art/life continuum, but updated it in terms of the changed cultural and economic circumstances of the postwar period.

The variety and multiplicity of works associated with this general explosion of performances from the 1950s to the 1970s are often flattened through umbrella terms, such as "performance" itself. Close examination reveals that, despite a shared prioritizing of experience, the works and the kinds of experiences they advocated were also very different. Looking at key case studies each week, including some of the major artists and movements that are represented in The Museum of Modern Art's collection, we study the various types of performance of the period, discerning their unique aesthetics, motivations, and broader cultural implications.

Mari Dumett (PhD Candidate, Boston University) is completing her dissertation on the international art collective known as Fluxus. She is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design and recently co-curated From Futurism to Fluxus, the inaugural exhibition at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Take Five   SOLD OUT
Five Wednesdays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 6/4, 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2
Instructor: Ágnes Berecz

The course focuses on five works represented in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art: Paul Cézanne's The Bather, Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Cy Twombly's Leda and the Swan, Andy Warhol's Orange Car Crash, and Louise Bourgeois's Articulated Lair. Based on the close readings of these works, their artistic, political, and social contexts, and the history of their critical reception, the course explores the formation of art-historical canons, the interactions of writing and painting, autobiographical discourse and memory, and the transformations of spectatorship.

Ágnes Berecz (PhD, Université Paris/Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris) teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and is a lecturer at MoMA.

Soundwalk Studio: Making Environmental Sound Art
Five Wednesdays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 6/4, 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2
Instructor: Spencer Kiser

By focusing on the soundscape in which we are immersed, we can find new appreciation of our surroundings and discover a palette of material from which to create art. The soundwalk is an excellent method for exploring a space and collecting material for sound-based works. Students learn audio fundamentals and recording and editing techniques, and participate in listening and field-recording exercises. We also create a digital sound map using the recordings from our field trips. It is recommended, but not required, that students bring their own recording device and microphone. Audio editing techniques are taught using free or low-cost software.

Spencer Kiser (MPS Interactive Telecommunications, New York University) is a media technology developer at MoMA and an adjunct professor at NYU. He has presented his own work in interactive audio at various international art festivals and conferences.

Understanding European Modernism (1905–1917) and Its Influence   SOLD OUT
Five Wednesdays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 7/2, 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30
Instructor: Matthew Israel

This course seeks to go back to art-historical "basics," providing a greater understanding of the canonical artists and movements of European modernism between 1907 and 1917. Among the artists and movements to be discussed are Cubism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Futurism, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Suprematism, Vladimir Tatlin, and Constructivism. Expectedly, the extensive collection of The Museum of Modern Art serves as a constant reference point. Additionally, the historical influence of this work is a consistent subject of discussion, for much of this work served as the impetus for modern and contemporary art internationally after 1917.

Matthew Israel (PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is an adjunct instructor at NYU's undergraduate department of Art History. His writing has appeared in Artnews, Artforum, and Art in America.

Highlights of Modern Sculpture: From Brancusi's Birds to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates
Five Wednesdays, 6:30–8:20 p.m., 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30, 8/6
Instructor: Veronica Roberts

This course examines the diversity and vitality of modern and contemporary sculptural practice. The course covers a wide range of works, including Brancusi's birds in space, Calder's mobiles, Eva Hesse's enigmatic forms, Richard Serra's massive plates of bent and curved steel, James Turrell's skyspaces, Rachel Whiteread's ghostly evocations, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude's recent installation in Central Park, The Gates. We take advantage of MoMA's Sculpture Garden and spend considerable time looking at sculptures in the Museum galleries.

Veronica Roberts (MA, University of California, Santa Barbara) is a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.

1913: That Year, This Day
One Saturday, 6:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m., 6/21
Conceived and ignited by Amir Parsa, taught by various instructors
Cost for this class is $130; $100 for members

This course takes place in one day, from 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. We explore works created across mediums in 1913 and utilize various strategies and techniques to bring artworks, movements, and artistic creative processes to light. Students analyze the works from a formal standpoint; read from literary works, notebooks, and artists' correspondences; watch films; re-enact conversations; sketch; and delve into theoretical, historical, and critical literature on the works. At the intersection of educational interaction and performative event, the class utilizes the galleries in unique ways, allowing access to the collection in innovative manners. The course is taught by a group of lecturers, artists, poets, and performers. Refreshments are provided.

DAYTIME COURSES

Drawing from the Collection: Foundation Drawing
Five Mondays, 11:00 a.m.–12:50 p.m., 6/9, 6/16, 6/23, 6/30, 7/7
Instructor: Ricky Sears
Class size is limited to twelve students

This introduction to drawing course combines visits to the Museum's galleries with individualized drawing instruction in the classroom. Students explore drawing fundamentals like contour line drawing, perspective drawing, and positive and negative space after looking at works of art in MoMA's collection. Working from sketches to finished drawings, students have an opportunity to discuss working methods during a group critique during the last class. Materials are be provided and include pencils, conte crayon, charcoal, and paper. Previous drawing experience is not required.

Ricky Sears (MFA, School of Visual Arts) is a New York–based artist who works in drawing, painting, and sculpture. He has previously exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Most recently, Sears participated in EAF07: Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, and he had a solo exhibit at Tarryn Taresa Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.

Modern Art, 1880–1945    SOLD OUT
Eight Tuesdays, 11:00 a.m.–12:50 p.m., 6/10, 6/17, 6/24, 7/1, 7/8, 7/15, 7/22, 7/29
Instructor: Heather Cotter

This course introduces students to the key works and ideas of modern art, from late Impressionism to the beginnings of the New York School. Moving chronologically through the Museum's collection, students encounter an array of renowned and provocative objects, from paintings that challenged the official Academy and revolutionized the conventions of representation, to photographs that capture the dynamism of modern life, to modernist buildings that fill city skylines. Artists covered include Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

Heather Cotter (MA, Boston University; MEd with a specialization in art education, Harvard University) has worked in various museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Gallery, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She currently serves as a lecturer at The Museum of Modern Art.