Category: Freshman Seminar

Carley Byers: “A Blank Space. It’s all I felt and all I saw…”

Writes Carley Byers (’21):

“You must have your eyes open. The habit of looking at things with curiosity should carry through in everything you do. Marvel is all around you.” – Enrique Martinez Celaya

I originally made this short film for my Creativity & Difference freshman seminar taught by Professor Preziuso. We were asked to create a project in any medium that reflected a subject we had covered in the class. My story stemmed from the changes, doubts, and questions I was having throughout my first semester. I felt very connected to one of our readings entitled, “Being an Artist” by Enrique Martinez Celaya and wanted to use that as my main source of inspiration.

I created this film to express that making art is so much more than just putting marks on canvas, molding clay, or piecing together clips for a film. An artist needs the courage to create, the strength to accept self-criticism and the criticism of others. Many times creators are stifled due to their own fears. I wanted this film to empathize with artists while also conveying to others the rewards and struggles of creating. There is a constant undiscussed pressure in art making which is so challenging yet beautiful. It’s that story I wanted to tell.

Spring 2017 Freshman Seminar: Dogs & Their Humans

Dog drawings by Monica Souza, Tomomi Yoshida, Sam Elwood, and Nicholas Leonce. Excerpts from texts by Sam Elwood and Finn Duffy. Song is “Old Blue.” Singer is Dave Van Ronk. Video by Gerst.

Writes Professor Norrie Epstein:

The dog is a product of intelligent design, only the intelligence is human rather than divine. Today’s breeds are cultural artifacts, products of aesthetic choices. For a final project, students designed their own ideal dog breed. There was one caveat: it had be grounded in reality. Thus, no flying or talking dogs!

Reading-Poetry-Like-We-Mean-It Freshman Seminar

“My thighs say thunderous. My thighs say too fat for skinny jeans. My thighs say wide, say open. My thighs say cellulite, say tattoo, say stretch marks, say pockmarks, say ingrown hair. My thighs feel upset that you only offered one bite of your Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia,” begins Desireé Dallagiacomo’s poem, “Thighs.”

Dallagiacomo  performed  “Thighs” at the Last Chance Slam at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam in Austin. Texas.

Reading-Poetry-Like-We-Mean-It students Austin Kimmell, Sara Manfredi, Julie Martin, and Morgan Metcalf  visualized Dallagiacomo’s poem in the video below, setting it on the Mass Art campus.

“Thighs” Film Adapation (2016). Video by Austin Kimmell, Sara Manfredi, Julie Martin, and Morgan Metcalf.

What You May Learn in a Freshman Seminar

…is to read  as if your life depended on it (which it does)…to hear the unsaid in the said…to see the invisible. Think Global, Act Local, Dogs and their Humans, Russian Short Story, Memoir: Word and Image, World Music, Presence, Utopias, Dystopias, and Lens for the Past are the Spring 2017 freshman seminars.

Reading-Poetry-Like-We-Mean-It: “Ad-Verse-Tisements”

Writes Professor Cheryl Clark:

“When I asked my Freshman Seminar Reading-Poetry-Like-We-Mean-It students to  ‘spread poetry and a conversation about poetry on campus and enliven spaces, places, and people with poetry,’ they created all kinds of amazing, inventive interactions and things —for instance, these wonderful ‘ad-verse-tisements’ that student Eliza Mecklenburg created to ‘advertise’ poems by William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson.”