Ph.D. with Creative Dissertation Pathway

This course is grounded in the belief that curiosity about one's work and world are valuable and related to each other--and it provides you the chance to engage inquiry as a discrete act (a way to ask specific questions) and a way to probe larger contexts. Through readings, class visits with guest artists, interdisciplinary exercises, and/or arts activities, we'll ask: What environments allow a question to thrive and become the working matrix for your art? Which questions arise for you in the context of what art or arts practices? In what ways do your questions, art and world correspond with each other and how can you be responsive to, articulate about, and assessing of that correspondence?

What do I make and why? What is my relationship to art and art-making? How do I name myself as artist and why? In this course, you'll learn to articulate your artistic heritages and the social, cultural, political, historical, spiritual, psychological, and/or contemporary influences on your work. You'll learn to talk about yourself as art maker and place yourself within an art lineage and current generation of artists. You'll also seek out potential new influences that will initiate the future of your work. Through reading, discussion, art-making, inquiry, and research, you'll create and present the context that holds your work.

The word research has origins in the Middle French verb recercher, meaning to "seek out, search closely." In this class, we'll seek out imaginative, intellectual, sensory/sensual, and methodological habits and processes that artists engage, searching them closely for the ways they allow us to acquire and integrate new knowledge and contribute generously to the world through art practice. Applying learning from Creative Inquiry for Interdisciplinary Arts and Arts in Context, students will engage as participants and observers of their artmaking. As preparation for their art practice dissertations, they'll (1) work on an art project, (2) keep an exegetical or research journal of their art-making process, and (3) prepare an integrative reflection.