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California Institute of the Arts

Beyond the Classroom

School of Art

Get ready to step outside the studio!

While most classes at the School of Art focus on work done in the classroom, occasionally a faculty member will lead students out beyond the campus to explore opportunities and projects in the larger world.

  • This class, occasionally in conjunction with students in Mexico City, explores specific ways to transform real-world research into multiform artworks. The research at the core of the class focuses on the problems of water scarcity in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and considers various histories, politics, technologies, and plans. Mexico City is built on a dried out lake, back-filled and paved over. As the city grows, the water disappears and the city sinks; drinking water must be transported into the megapolis. Los Angeles is built on dry chaparral and is irrigated by a seasonal river and vast aqueduct system bringing water from the north. Both cities are huge and growing; neither is sustainable. Artists cannot solve these problems, but by understanding them and considering them together, artists may open a discussion that will lead to solutions. 

  • LA Urbanscape and Public Persona are two courses that allow students to traverse the various neighborhoods that make up Los Angeles’ vast urban topography. Specific sites of historical significance/obscurity coexist with the constant restructuring of social and physical pathways between actual and mythical locations. Some course sessions involve extended walking tours while others incorporate public transportation (buses, shuttles, light rail trains, and the subway available subway system). The notion of “public space” is set against a backdrop of privatization that oftentimes restricts and/or denies entry for people to view previously accessible sites containing public art, notable architectural structures, locations of historical significance, or places where a view can produce a transformative experience. The synthesis of creative, intellectual, and instinctual responsiveness to preexisting physical and social structures allows for the development of an enhanced sense of student readiness and command of personal interaction with urban space.

  • Freeway Joyride

    Freeway Joyride is a course that involves driving personal automotive vehicles across the expanse of Los Angeles County, including the inner city, desert areas, mountain, and coastline communities. The course is designed to introduce students to experience the ready flow of traffic, unexpected detours, incalculable distance, and extended duration of arrival timed to physical barriers and traffic jams. The various meeting points are not possible to reach from the starting point via walking and/or public transportation. “Car culture” is experienced while en route along streets, thoroughfares, highways, and freeways. Many lessons regarding space, social/cultural history, and changing demographics are incorporated into this course. Potholes, asphalt, missing freeway off-ramps, bridges, tunnels, cul-de-sacs, misspelled signage, and the absence of guardrails is integrated into ongoing discussion of self vs. constructed space. Students experience the subjective horizon from which to direct their creative drive while picking up speed or applying the brakes to avoid unnecessary cultural collisions.

    Freeway Joyride class at CalArts, featuring students seated on a large rocky hill

  • During this course, students explore the relationships between walking and drawing and painting. There can be a subtle balance between getting lost (in looking), and keeping your bearings in both your practice and on the trail. In this class, experimentation is encouraged in order to gain familiarity with the physical properties of liquid media, dirt, and rocks. Expansive Fields looks closely at what constitutes these landscapes through readings on geology, natural patterns, and artists who implement critical wandering in their work (e.g. Robert Smithson, Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins, and Michelangelo Antonioni). This technical and conceptual exploration involves studio work, readings, image presentations, and, indeed, long walks in natural areas.

  • This class is centered on an engagement with the photography archive of the Tejon Indian Tribe of Southern California. Taking photo history and archive conversations out into the field, students have the generous opportunity to engage with members of the Tejon Tribe and work with elements of their archive that need research, appraisal, and organization. More than a mere grouping of images from the past, students consider the relationship of photographs to the making of history, memory, identity, authorship, and sovereignty. In addition to in-class time on the CalArts campus, Photo History in the Field may include visits to the Tejon Tribal Headquarters in Bakersfield. Transportation will be arranged for those without cars. Beginning with historical images that have recently been returned from the Smithsonian, First Nations histories of Southern California, and the politics of ownership of Indigenous materials, students observe where this work takes them, with the possibility of a collaborative project at the end.