The Integrated Fine Arts (IFA) Program at the University of Vermont brings together energetic and motivated first-year students to foster creativity and excellence in both academic and artistic pursuits. IFA students live and work in an interdisciplinary community where they learn about the creative process from differing perspectives. During their first two semesters at UVM, participants collaborate in six vital art forms: music, the visual arts, film, theatre, dance, and creative writing.
IFA students enroll in a special "suite" of four courses - two in the fall and two in the spring semester. At least three of these courses are small classes exclusively for IFA students where they work closely with their professors. Participants also may receive reserved seating in one more general IFA course. The courses, though crafted separately, dynamically complement one another and relate to an overarching annual theme. Course work is both studio-based and scholarly, giving students hands-on experience as well as the opportunity to examine the history, practice, theory, criticism, integration, social relevance, and connectivity of varied creative forms.
Participants share living space in a Fine Arts-focused suite in the Living/Learning Complex at UVM. Here they can expand their artistic interests through collaborative projects and by taking advantage of the resident arts cooperatives. IFA students will become leaders in creating, showcasing, and cultivating the arts-within the university between the arts, humanities, and sciences, and within the greater community through exhibits, performances, and other events. Community outlets may include Burlington City Arts, local museums, the Flynn Center, Waterfront Theater, the Vermont International Film Festival, Vermont Stage Company, local music groups, and other arts organizations and venues.
In addition to the four IFA courses, during spring semester IFA students may elect to design their own creative and scholarly projects. These capstone projects, which can vary from one to three credits, allow students to work with an IFA faculty mentor independently or in small groups.
The IFA program accepts 15 to 18 exceptionally motivated students each year. Effort is made to select a balanced number of students who represent each discipline (i.e., several from each of six areas: music, theatre, dance, film, creative writing, and visual arts). A strong background in at least one of these arts is beneficial, but not required. Successful applicants will be able to demonstrate creative initiative and a commitment to collaborative projects.
Admission is by application.
For further information, contact Alex Stewart, 802-656-7766, Alexander.Stewart@uvm.edu.
Many artists, particularly since the latter half of the twentieth century, have attempted to break down barriers between genres, disciplines, cultures, and social categories. Students will explore these creative efforts in both "high art" and in popular culture from a variety of disciplinary vantage points. Through responses to historical and contemporary works as well as their own creative projects, participants will experiment individually and collaboratively. Because the term "experimental" implies both the possibility of success and failure, students will evaluate their own and each other's work to explore what makes artistic experiments "successful" from historical, political, social, philosophical, and other points of view.
Can a line provoke a dance, music inform a painting? An active and participatory course, rooted in the visual arts and movement, this class will examine the threads and messages that run through and between creative art forms. The course will be a lively combination of historical examination, active art making, and reflective critique.
Requirements Satisfied: Fine Arts
Meets: Monday, Wednesday 8:30-10:20
Contact: 802-656-0547, Lynda.Mcintyre@uvm.edu
Lynda Reeves McIntyre: Professor of Art, regularly teaches courses in drawing, graphic design, and art education. She trained as a painter and a dancer at the University of Massachusetts, Hunter College, and Yale University and holds a Doctorate in Aesthetics. McIntyre weaves her training in painting, dance, Buddhist study, and aesthetics into her teaching. Her acrylic and watercolor works find their sources in personal, visceral, and visual experiences. She often works outside, backpacking to sites in all weather conditions, taking notes from ocean, desert, mountain, and built environments. McIntyre has received awards from the NEA, the MacDowell Foundation, the JFK Center, the ICCE, the VCCA, and the Getty Foundation and has been awarded art fellowships abroad to Australia, the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Bhutan, and Italy. Her work is shown throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Pacific Rim.
Why have some composers created musical works that leave many decisions to the performers? If a composer abandons musical notation or other prescriptive means of fixing a musical text, what are some ways that musical actions can be communicated to and coordinated among the performers? If a composer's directions are sufficiently open or "indeterminate," different performances of the same composition may not even sound like the same work. Taking avant-garde approaches primarily from jazz and classical music as starting points, students will devise their own musical experiments.
Requirements Satisfied: Fine Arts
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-12:45
Contact: 802-656-7766, Alexander.Stewart@uvm.edu
Alex Stewart: Associate Professor of Music and a saxophonist and scholar, has toured, performed, and recorded with many well-known jazz artists. His book on social networks involved in jazz composition and performance, Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Jazz, was published in 2007 by University of California Press. He has also performed and written about Latin, popular, and "world" music genres. His articles and entries appear in Popular Music, Ethnomusicology, Yearbook of Traditional Music, Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Annual Review of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Perspectives. During 2006-7, he was a Fulbright Scholar researching Afro-Mexican music and culture in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Participants in this course will study the tradition of experimentation in poetry by twentieth-century writers from across the globe. From the Surrealist and Concrete poets to the Beat and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, students will explore the rich inheritance and legacy of avant-garde poetry but also delve into the ways such acts of literary resistance transform the genre of poetry itself and eventually create communities of readers. They will also attempt to theorize and create a poetic movement that matches in vitality and creativity the global examples.
Requirements Satisfied: Literature
Meets: TBD
Contact: 802-656-2221, Major.Jackson@uvm.edu
Major Jackson: Associate Professor of English, is the author of two volumes of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature-Poetry. Jackson is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont, a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.
This course traces the development of film (including experimental, documentary, and narrative forms) from the beginning of sound cinema until about 1960 in the United States, Japan, France, Britain, and Italy. Students will read about and discuss the aesthetic, theoretical, technological, social, and economic considerations surrounding this period in the history of cinema. The primary objective of the course is to provide an introductory understanding of film history as well as to sharpen skills in film analysis. Students will be given opportunities to work more closely with the professor outside regular classroom meetings.
Requirements Satisfied: Fine Arts
Meets: TBD
Contact: 802-656-1356, Hilary.Neroni@uvm.edu
Hilary Neroni: Associate Professor of English, teaches courses in film theory, history, and production. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and a book, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema, on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema.
Last modified September 10 2009 05:23 PM
