Education Programs

This studio research lab invited students to move their toolkits, studio, and lens of production to the Sierra Nevada and work through their own experiences of being on the land. Through guided walks, and meetings with local artists, community groups, herbalists and trackers students focused on understanding the complex relationships between their art practices and a sense of indwelling.

Taking Robert Smithson’s concept of site/non-site as a framework within which to engage the land in and around Nevada City, this class focussed on three major subject areas that have affected—and will continue to affect—the region in the past, present, and future.

This class examined the complex and exploitive relationship between the human species and the natural world with a focus on the Nevada County territory and history. Engaging in discussion on the ecology of the man-made world, and the scars left on and under the landscape, students questioned, challenged, and reimagined humanity’s complicated but magical relationship to the natural world.

This seminar considered the Sierra Nevada landscape as a witness to personal and cultural narratives of loss. Locating historical and traditional practices as gestures of resistance and continuity, students contemplated how things speak without speaking, acquire meaning as they dissipate, and assert their presence in absence.

This project explored the history of gold mining and narratives of westward expansion in the region of Nevada City. Taking on dual roles as both guests and hosts, students in CCA’s Social Practice Workshop responded to these legacies through a processional series of works enacted on site.

After Nature, a 2008 New Museum exhibition titled after a book by W. G. Sebald, sought to illuminate a future landscape of wilderness and ruins and to tell a story of “humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters.” Taking the exhibition as a starting point, students embarked on an expedition toward new ground in nature art.

A lone figure, dwarfed by the immensity of nature, confronted and challenged by the ferocious splendor and magnificence of the surroundings in which s/he is engulfed, is a common theme in many 19th-century Romantic landscape paintings. This provides a point of departure for a class examining the relationship between landscape, figure, and the representation of experience.

This studio explored the land as a site for work. The class focused on the human and natural histories of two disparate sites — the FOR-SITE Foundation and the Headlands Center for the Arts — and created original works that engage the complex cultural mesh of each site.

This course explored the complex relationships between rural and urban, natural and man-made. Using the Presidio of San Francisco as a case study, students researched the design and history of the park and how it reflects cultural concepts of nature.

This project-based study examined how the art, history, and natural environment of a region are mediated and represented by an urban museum. Graduate Curatorial Practice (CURP) students immersed themselves in the history, landscape, art, and culture of Nevada City and in the collections, history, and programs of the Oakland Museum of California.

This course was an exploration of how one responds to a particular place; how one speaks of that response and the place itself when no longer there; and the methods used to describe a place to those who will never see it.

This interdisciplinary, field-based seminar focused on earthworks, land use, and ecological interventions. Students took several trips to the residency site to camp, study, experiment, and explore.

This interdisciplinary course focused on earthworks, land use, and ecological interventions. Guest artist Ursula von Rydingsvard worked with the students.

This graduate-level course focused on the Northern California landscape as a site and source for art and design work.

This two-semester project connected students to nature and place in the context of a full exploration of the architectural design process.

Students in this course designed the perfect artist’s studio. By interviewing two prominent Bay Area artists, John Zurier and Mildred Howard, students gained firsthand knowledge of what a working artist needs in order to create, then translated these guidelines into working design models.

This five-week “real-world” project afforded students the opportunity to research and design wayfinding systems (maps and signage) for the FOR-SITE Foundation.

The Trails Forever project took place within a Media Theory and Practice course. The project examined the use of wireless technologies as non-intrusive interpretation systems.

This project asked “What happens if we take the approach of Robert Smithson’s Nonsite?” Students critiqued and worked within the context of the Nonsite.

This studio introduced students to tectonics in architecture through an investigation of site and ground. The focus was on the understanding of particularities that site lends to architecture, and learning to think about buildings in the landscape.

Fortescue, along with three other faculty and fifteen students from the Wood/Furniture Program at the California College of the Arts, trekked to FOR-SITE’s residency site for three days of exploration, learning, and creativity.