Download the full list of eligible minor courses here.
Use the semester “Search” feature at courses.wustl.edu to find courses that will count each semester. Set the SCHOOL field to either Art OR Architecture and select ATTRIBUTE (Art) CPSC – Creative Practice Minor.
Upcoming Courses for the Minor—Spring 2021
F20 ART 108A You Are Here: Engaging St. Louis’s Racial History Through Site + Story
Taught by Heidi Kolk, Patricia Heyda and Penina Acayo
Fridays, 1-4pm
Acknowledging the pressures and pains of our political moment—a time of crisis for many in our city and nation, but also a long-awaited reckoning with issues of social justice—this course engages the complex history of race and racial injustice in St. Louis through site and story-based exploration. It offers an opportunity to learn about the city’s landscape, history, systems, culture, form and identity while wrestling with fundamental questions of power, positionality and perspective.”You are Here” references orientation, discovery, otherness and place, but it also serves as a provocation for reconsidering how designers, artists and architects engage St. Louis.
F20 ART108B Engaging Community: Understanding the Basics
Taught by Liz Kramer
Fridays, 1-4pm
What does it mean to engage in community as a creative practitioner? Community engagement must be grounded in authentic relationship building, and an ability to understand and act within the historic context and systems that impact communities. We will practice the skills of listening, observation, reflection, and improvisation. We will cultivate mindsets that focus on community assets and self-determination. Workshops will teach facilitation and power analysis, with the intention of upending the power dynamics between community and creators.
F20 ART 236P Design in Social Systems
Taught by Penina Acayo
M/W, 8:30-11:30am
This multidisciplinary seminar course will cover historical and contemporary contexts of socially engaged work within art and design disciplines. Students will explore various processes that artists and designers use to address, influence, and inspire change around systemic social issues. This course will also include a final group project completed in partnership with a local community-based organization in which students will apply creative-problem solving processes such as human-centered design, equity-centered design, , design activism, and social justice to arrive at collective impact. Models of social change from other disciplines such as social entrepreneurship and innovation, non-profit models, and public-interest design will be featured through guest lectures, field trips to community-based organizations, case studies, readings and written reflections.
F20 ART 178 Contemporary Discourses: Art + Feminism
Taught by Heather Bennett
M/W, 11:30-1pm
This course investigates the impact of feminism on contemporary art focusing on artwork produced between the 1960s and the present day. Through an examination of global practices in a wide range of media, including artworks in the university’s Kemper Museum collection, students will delve into innovative aesthetic strategies which criticize assumptions of gender, race and social class and consider the intricate tie between the identity of the author and the content of the work.
F20 ART 228E Making Documentaries in the Time of Covid
Taught by Denise Ward-Brown
M/W 4-7PM
Documentary video is a powerful tool to spotlight the frustrations and triumphs of our daily lives. Many filmmakers discover unexpected answers, reveal hidden histories, humanize previously one-dimensional characters and spotlight even more in-depth questions. The global pandemic offers a unique opportunity to create videos that acknowledge this moment with the potential to become a significant part of an international conversation. With urgency, even beginning filmmakers, like you, can give voice to issues that will be included in the historical record. Learn or improve your cinematic aesthetics and professional video editing skills by making three short videos.
F20 ART 457C Radical Mapping
Taught by Patricia Heyda
Tuesdays, 1-4pm
Maps are instruments of power. We have seen this, for example, in the racially-motivated ‘redlined’ maps that legitimized urban clearings of entire neighborhoods in American cities in the 1930s. But maps are also instruments of resistance, for visualizing lived experiences and critiquing political systems and relationships of power. This class will introduce students to the agency and potential of maps and mapping, a skillset all designers need in the face of our current moment of social and environmental justice collapse-a moment that has long been occurring. The course will cover interdisciplinary theories of mapping, critical cartography and visualizing power, as students build an ‘atlas of spatial politics’ centered on Ferguson, Missouri and surrounding St. Louis region.
F20 ART 436A Interaction Design: Understanding Health and Well-Being
Taught by Enrique Von Rohr
Fridays, 8:30-11:30am
Through a blend of presentations from practitioners, classroom lectures, readings, discussion and hands-on exercises, this class will engage principles and methods of interaction design within the context of health challenges. We will take on an in-depth challenge in the area of health and well-being and work in cross-disciplinary design teams with an external partner organization. Students will gain experience in planning and executing a human centered design process featuring research, ideation, synthesis, concept development, prototypes and a final presentation, which may include visual design, animation, and sound.