Active Listening/Connection Sculpture and Architecture

This assignment has two main purposes: to allow you to demonstrate your active engagement with the week’s course material and to give you the opportunity to use this engagement as a way to encounter something new.  

The assignment has several specific prompts—listed below—that must be addressed.  Below you will find each prompt and what it is worth in terms of how the assignment is graded, so you may think of this as both an essay prompt and a rubric for how the final essay will be graded. 

Be sure that your finished submission addresses each prompt fully and with engagement and/or creativity.  Also, be sure that your final submission is written in complete sentences (no bullet points) and flows together as a whole document.

Each essay must be a total of 600 words minimum and will be assessed on the scale listed below based on its formal clarity, the quality of the writing and editing, its degree of engagement with its topic, its creativity/inventiveness/originality of ideas, and the sophistication of thought it expresses. 

Part 1: Active Listening from the Previous Week’s Classes: Architecture or Sculpture

Select one specific sculpture or building (architecture) discussed from the week’s classes and give a description of the piece, paying attention to the specific details.  Be sure to list all essential aspects like title and artist and date, but go beyond this and also be sure to talk about what it depicts/says, and about what it seems to mean more broadly (use the first week’s lesson on interpretation as a guide for how to do this).  Next, make some connection between your chosen artifact and something you already are familiar with; this could be another artwork, or perhaps some idea or experience.  The connection can be anything at all, even something personal and quirky, but be sure and explain to me what it is and how you formed the connection in your mind.  Finally, offer up one or more questions about the artifact.  These shouldn’t be simplistic or closed questions such as “how was this made?”  Nor should they be conversation-starters like, “what is your favorite example of this artform?”  Instead, they should be questions that could lead to further research on the topic, thus they should be the kind of questions that might guide you when writing a longer paper.

  Scoring for Part 1:

• Description/analysis of artifact: 20
• Outside connection: 5
• Question for further research: 10

Part 2: Connecting your Analysis to Something New: Architecture or Sculpture

Taking the “meaning” or “theme” from the work you analyzed above search the web to find another artifact of a different medium (in other words, if you analyzed a sculpture from class your second work must be a building or vice versa).  Once you have found a work that is of the opposite medium but on a similar theme or meaning, describes the piece as you did above.  Be sure to include a link to the work or embed it within your response and also indicate the website it came from.  Be sure to include all relevant detail about the piece like medium, artist, date, title, etc.  Finally, speak about how the work embodies or conveys the theme you’ve chosen.  How does it join up to the piece you describe above?  What are the connections, if any?  Think hard on this and try to use the two pieces on each other to think about how art communicates meaning or makes us ask questions about ourselves and our realities. Lastly, make a wild connection to this second piece and something you’re already familiar with, as you did in the first part of the prompt.  Because architecture is functional, this may require some imagination to create connections of meaning, but that is allowed. Just be clear in explaining your thoughts. 

    Scoring for Part 2:

• Relevance of choice of artifact/quality of research: 5
• Description/analysis of artifact: 20
• Outside connection: 5

Scoring on writing for entire essay:

• Spelling/editing: 10
• Punctuation/capitalization: 10
• Flow/diction/grammar: 10
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