Collaborator Pilot Courses

Materials from courses taught by Project collaborators, some using resources from this Sandbox or developed in consultation with M&K.

Spring 2023: BioArt Workshop as part of VIZA 689: Global Histories of Materials, Techniques and Skilled Making

Spring 2023

Texas A&M University

Professor Tianna Uchacz, Assistant Professor, School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts

with Dr. Donna Janes (Biology, Texas A&M) and Naomi Rosenkranz (Making and Knowing Project, Columbia University)

See:

• BioArt Workshop: Dyeing with Cochineal Bugs for materials used during this workshop for dyeing textiles with cochineal following historical recipes and techniques.
• Texas A&M News: ‘Bio-Art’ Workshops To Show Creative Process Using Cochineal Insects, Bacteria

Spring 2022: ARTH 295 (OC): Ingenious Making in the Early Modern World

Syllabus: [PDF] [DOCX]

Spring 2022

Oberlin College

Professor Christina Neilson, Associate Professor of Art History

• Course description: This course investigates what it meant to make things and work with materials, including featherwork, imitation gems, color making, and metal casting, in Europe and colonial Latin America between around 1350 and 1650. We will follow historical descriptions and recipes to reconstruct methods of making, and learn from expert practitioners who are holders of traditional techniques and meanings, including indigenous makers. We will consider how a wide range of practitioners developed hands-on knowledge in workshops, laboratories, marketplaces, gardens, etc. and we will explore how making was and is a form of knowledge, how there are different systems of knowledge, and the intersections between art making and science.
• Sample student portfolio reports: Similar to M&K’s Fieldnotes, these portfolios document the students’ hands-on activities, which included Stucco for Molding, “Keeping Dry Flowers in the Same State all Year” from the bottom of folio 120v in BnF Ms. Fr. 640, and making and painting cochineal lake and verdigris pigments.
  • Audrey Libatique
  • Ava Chessum
  • Sien McFalls

Spring 2017: The Thinking and Experiencing ‘Techne’: Cultures of Making and Knowing

Course and Workshop Descriptions

Spring 2017

V&A/RCA History of Design MA

Dr. Simona Valeriani, Acting Head of History of Design, & Dr. Spike Bucklow, Director of Research, Cambridge’s Hamilton Kerr institute and the 2017 V&A’s Robert H. Smith scholar in residence.

A lab/seminar course with a series of workshops for students from the V&A/RCA History of Design MA program as a satellite of the Making and Knowing Project. The hands-on workshops included azurite paint, varnishes (including those with amber, copal, and spike lavendar oil), and imitation marbling techniques. were preceded by a series of seminars led by Dr Simona Valeriani, Acting Head of History of Design and Dr Spike Bucklow, a conservationist and colour specialist based at Cambridge’s Hamilton Kerr institute and also currently the V&A’s Robert H. Smith scholar in residence. Insights into varnish making were gained through the help of V&A conservators Dana Melchar and Nigel Bamforth.

All blog posts about the hands-on sessions.