VES Faculty, Students Express Thoughts on Teaching Art

A BRIEF HISTORY OF VES

The Visual and Environmental Studies found its home in Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in 1963. The mission of the department has changed over the years. Currently, its express aim is to give its students an understanding of the structure and meaning of the visual arts through practical and theoretical explorations. The arts expressly defined include painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, design, film, video, and photography.

HEARD AROUND VES

“Breaking through habitual patterns of seeing and thinking is an essential element in my foundation drawing course. Therefore, I emphasize drawing as process rather than a product.”

Paul Stopforth, Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies, from “The Role of the TA in Drawing”

“One of the luxuries of teaching film and video in an undergraduate liberal arts setting is that our curriculum is not pre-professional. While many students go on to careers in film, our courses do not reflect the commercial filmmaking world’s ravenous need for specialty workers. While we do value and teach technique, we do not offer stand-alone courses in, for example, cinematography and editing as do most film schools. At the core of what we teach is a belief that, like writers writing or painters painting, film authorship can also be derived through the act of handling the expressive tools of production oneself.”

Robb Moss, Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking, from “The Role of the TA in the Film/Video Area”

“The age of teaching technique for technique’s sake is over. We need to ask what is the pedagogy of the 21st century, not the 20th…I don’t want to create a pond of mini-me’s”

Stephen Prina, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies

“I think what is hard about working in VES is that in the broader Harvard context, you are constantly having to justify yourself, even while you’re creating and before you’ve figured out what you’re trying to do.”

Noah C.Waxman’05

VES concentrator

“I undoubtedly work hardest in my VES classes. Unlike my pre-med work, where rankings basically come out of a bubble-reader, a VES critique is a far more personal and constructive assessment of my efficacy of expression.”

Lindsey W. Alpert ’06

VES concentrator

“If you write a bad paper, you write a bad paper. But if you make bad art, you’re a bad artist.”

Matt C. Boch ’06

VES concentrator

“The experience of a VES course depends one two things: the professor and on you. A lot boils down to how you approach the class and what you hope to get from it. You can fall into ruts of doing assignments just to get by, but if you put yourself into the work then you stand so that you might learn a lot about yourself and gain from the overall experience of making art.”

Piyush Tiwari ’05

VES concentrator