Florence Summer Program

Tavolo Vivente: Architectures of the Culinary Imaginary (6 Credits)
Faculty: Constance Vale

Food is a well-recognized aspect of Italy’s cultural identity. Local histories inform recipes, transferring the past to the present via gustatory tradition. This is not a static cultural narrative but one informed by a vast immigrant population that brings their own culinary traditions, transforming the city’s identity. Food is a part of the everyday; it sustains human life as we cyclically cook, eat, and digest. Food can also take on the status of cuisine, elevating cooking and eating beyond the everyday by virtue of an excess of time and effort and insistence on creativity and novelty. This renders dining an aesthetic experience wherein the gastronomic image is as vital as taste.

Tavolo Vivente, translated as “living table,” alludes to our studio’s vested interest in the gastronomic image. In this studio, we will look to the culinary arts as a starting point to design a restaurant, starting at the intimate scale of a utensil, then increasing in scale to a place setting, a dining table, a room, a building, and garden that relates out to the city. On the one hand, your project will focus on the interior’s object, spaces, color, and atmosphere, while also acting as a microcosm that allows us to explore the role of food in the city at a macro level.

Throughout our travels, you will document your design, observations, and collected artifacts in a coherent fiction. To build up this fiction, you will hybridize past and future by combining media, including printmaking, cyanotypes, photography, photogrammetry, and 3D scanning technology. Gathering, resituating, and analyzing architecture, landscapes, paintings, sculptures, and culinary art from Florence and across Italy, you’ll encapsulate your narrative in a container made to position your discoveries in relation to one another and carry them back with you on your departure.

The Moving Canvas: Adventures in Plein Air (6 Credits)
Faculty: Joe deVera

Students will explore and utilize gouache and watercolor to document their experiences via Plein Air (Open-air/landscape painting) in the historic city of Florence, Italy. The class will undertake the challenges of adaptive painting and create a series of works through direct observation.

Initial studio work will introduce foundational lessons on familiarizing students with gouache and watercolor mediums, along with introducing elements of composition, variations in light/value, abstracting forms, and simplifying/building space. Later, the course will also look toward expanded variations of the medium by utilizing local pigments/earth matter to create added texture, as well as conducting experiments with alternative surfaces and various image transfer methods.

To inform their painting processes, students will heavily utilize site visits, group excursions, and local immersion to provide context and content. Most site visits will be conducted as a class, but students will also be encouraged to conduct their own safe explorations to further personalize their work.

Workshops and guest lectures from visiting artists/scholars may also be included.

Prerequisites: none