TYPE AS IMAGE: SP 25
Prof. Mary Banas
School of the Museum of Fine Arts at
Tufts University

When contacting me, use my tufts email and copy my personal email for best results:
mary.banas(at)gmail.com

Office Hours:
Fridays from 12–1pm, on zoom

How to make an appointment:
https://calendly.com/mary-banas/office-hours
please book this by 9am on Fridays.

Graphic Arts Area Instagram
Permissions doc for GRA IG is here

Syllabus
01 Description
02 Learning Outcomes
03 Assignments
04 How We Work
05 Studio Culture
Tufts University Policies

Briefs
01 Weekly Images02 Alphabet Book
03 Studio Experiments
04 Poster
05 Sequence

Readings

Tutorials (including how to print!)

Review Boards: Advice

Drive

Index

01

Weekly Images

An on-going project throughout the semester; you will complete and upload one image each week to Google Drive

Is this you?

Project Description

Consider your daily exposure to media and how you process it. Our contemporary visual landscape, both on a personal and macro level, deals in the currency of attention. You are constantly absorbing (mostly passively) visual and moving images through your feeds. As opposed to this passive scrolling, your process images will demand that you actively record the world around you. The composite images will be a record of your life during Spring 2024.

Start by reading about artist and designer Ben Denzer’s project “2011–Present”. Denzer describes: “ ‘2011–present‘ is an ongoing daily archive of one composite image (photographs and screenshots taken that day) and one quote (heard or read that day). I’ve added an image and a quote for every day since December 23, 2011, and I plan to continue until I’m dead.”

Discussion of Ben Denzer’s work: what aesthetic qualities do different images have? What aesthetic qualities do the images share?

Using Ben Denzer’s practice as a direct example, develop a weekly practice to document what you have been observing.

At the end of the semester, we will take a look at what you have for Weekly Images. A path of breadcrumbs from where you are now to where you want to be as an artist may be revealed. Start paying attention to what interests you and put those things together all in one place. What threads will emerge? What themes will you see? What have you been paying attention to?

How to do this work / further considerations

Each week you will catalog your life. What do you observe? What materials did you work with? Where did you go? Who did you see or hang out with? What did you eat?

Your evidence may present as digital and analog photographs, drawings, doodles, written notes, scraps of material, impressions or rubbings, self-portraits, screenshots, salient quotations, inspiration, reference materials, bits of trash.

Experiment with these images to come up with new ways to express your week. Your images need not look like Ben Denzer’s work, but rather you can develop your own style. Perhaps you will draw your findings like Kate Bingaman Burt’s Daily Drawings. Perhaps you will place them in a specific grid each week like Daniel Eatock’s collection of Car Batteries.

Each entry should include an intentional composition and a line of text. Use this as an opportunity to experiment with different approaches to composition.

What is an intentional composition? Discuss.

School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University

smfa.tufts.edu