First Year Program Overview
The Museum School's First Year Program provides an opportunity for burgeoning artists to enrichtheir own art practice by engaging new and different perspectives on creativity – through reading, discussion, lectures, writing, and occasionally a trip to a local art site. Helping students develop a wider critical-philosophical vocabulary for thinking about their own work, the First Year Program introduces a set of culturally canonical ideas and thematically organized texts relevant to art making today but also provides a basis for a liberal arts education more broadly; texts will primarily be drawn from literature, philosophy, and theory. This course introduces students to the intellectual work of reading and responding to demanding texts and ideas at a college level, both in discussion and in writing, and also introduces resources that will support students in their academic continued endeavors.Participation in the First Year Program alsoenables many students to become more proactively involved in defining their own interests and designing their own course of study at SMFA, all the while developing a close set of cohorts and friends who can speak to one another's work.

First Year Program Logistics
The First Year Program is a three-hour class offered first semester and required for all first year students. Class time will be broken into a two-hour lecture with discussion for all students together, followed by a one-hour small group discussion. The lectures will be delivered on Friday between 10 am and 11:50 am. in Alfond Auditorium at the MFA. Most small group discussions will be held at SMFA from 12–1 and 1–2 pm.

2013 First Year Program Course Offering
Making Art, Making Meaning: the History and Future of the Image
How do you think about what you are doing when you make art? Is your art driven by self-expression, political ideology, aesthetic wonder, spiritual inspiration, or something else? In one sense, this hardly matters so long as you are making art! In another sense, however, art is an intellectual discourse, one with a long and fascinating history, some knowledge of which is valuable for all artists today, those working both within and outside of "the art world." In this class, we will revisit some of the ways previous thinkers have theorized the relationship between the image and reality. What does each of these theories suggest or imply about how art and meaning have been understood? And perhaps most crucially, how do these histories help us to understand contemporary ideas about the image and reality and thus about our role as artists and thinkers in contemporary, increasingly global society?

We will begin with Plato's theory of images as "ideal forms" and consider its relation to the shaping of meaning as divine that characterized the middle ages, as depicted in Augustine's fifth century writings. Next we will consider the ideas about the image that fueled the destruction of so much art during the Renaissance: how did the iconoclasts' urge to distinguish a realm of divine meaningfrom the image itself underscore particular ideas about images as dangerous portals of the devil... or imagination. Building on this historical perspective, we will spend most of the term studying the gradual reimagining of both "image" and "reality" as these are reworked by the romantic poets and through the emergence of what would eventually be called modernism, as seen in the work of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Walter Benjamin. This historical approach will provide the ground for the class's ongoing inquiry into our own "postmodern" ideas about images and reality, an inquiry that will begin on day one with Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" and continue throughout the semester, incorporating fiction and poetry as well as visual art that resonates with the philosophical texts. Throughout the course, we will develop an ability to understand the philosophies of the image as relevant to current ideas aboutnationalism, race, and sexuality, and we will be helped by contemporary articulations of these issues by philosophers of the image, including W.E.B. Dubois, Jean Baudrillard, Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, José Muñoz, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Jacques Ranciére.

For more information about the SMFA's First Year Program, please contact the director, Hilary Binda.