art [crit DEPARTMENT OF ART + ART HISTORY SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA 2018 art[crit STUDENT WRITINGS ON ART 2018 Department of Art + Art History Saint Mary’s College of California Supervising Faculty: Peter Freund
[email protected] contents Fault Lines of Preservation :: Sierra Nguyen 7 Kate Bonner’s Bending Back :: Jamie Trunnell 11 Prussian Blue: Dachau :: Wendy Melendez 15 Spring Cleaning: The Forgotten Photography of Ellsworth Kelly :: Alexa Oliveira 21 Rauschenberg: Order of Chaos :: Desiree Harris 25 Untitled by Sam Francis :: Claire Challancin 31 Before and After Commodities :: Kevin Reynolds 35 Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral :: Shyista Ahmed 41 preface The selected writings included in this booklet pro- vide a glimpse into the work being done by students in the Spring 2018 Art Criticism (ATC 117) course at Saint Mary’s College of California. The majority of the student authors represented here contribute their first formal endeavor to write about contemporary art. Written only six weeks into the semester, the work clearly demonstrates an emerging passion and facility for art criticism on the part of the students. The participants in the course come from various dis- ciplines, including Art and Art History, English, Sociol- ogy, Philosophy, Ethnic Studies, History, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Business, and other fields across the Schools of Liberal Arts, Science, and Business. Their writings address a variety of themes: the aes- thetics of preservation and loss, the representation of traumatic historical memory, the cultural archive, the conceptual delineation of the work of art, the dialec- tics of order and chaos, immanence and transcen- dence in the politics of art, and many others.