Indigenous Arts Studio is a series of post-secondary courses housed in the department of Art Studio in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge, with cross-listed classes offered with the department of Indigenous Studies. These courses reflect our commitment to indigenization and decolonized curriculum at our post-secondary institution, where Indigenous creative and cultural practices are integral to new knowledge formation, and inform new approaches to instruction and education.

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Currently we offer foundation (2000) and advanced (3000) level courses in Indigenous Art Studio, with a capstone course entitled LandMarks offered at the advanced/ senior level.  These courses provide students with a unique learning environment—one that promotes collective learning, collaborative interaction, and the freedom to express their creative ideas in any artistic discipline. These courses introduce students to a wide-range of studio art practices, where skills in critical thinking and analysis are developed through in-class discussions, readings, and production. In our studio courses, students apply conceptual, technical and creative skills in the research and production of artistic projects in a range of art-media. Understanding that art practices are interlinked with academic explorations, students examine and analyze their work in relation to significant areas of contemporary thought, and within certain social, political and cultural contexts. Work with students in our programs is often interconnected with faculty research, and often involves embedded forms of community engagement, which contribute to a creative effort to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing into our pedagogical practices. In these Indigenous Art Studio classes, we often work collaboratively on larger projects; for instance, most recently our students were creating new artworks for University Art Gallery collection, in collaboration with the Blackfoot Digital Library. This past semester our students also contributed to a new exhibition of works related to the Concepts that Bite through Time project, which involved working alongside elders from the community and researchers at U of L and the University of London (UK). Students in our LandMarks—Spatial Storytelling: Land, Art, Place and Community course also work alongside elders and knowledge keepers from community when making new site-specific artworks for a major public exhibition in Lethbridge at the end of the semester, where we strive to creatively explore and deepen our connection to the land through a series of contemporary art projects.

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Within all of our Indigenous classes, we promote academic success among Indigenous students. In these courses, students are not bound by certain (Euro-centric) categorizations and definitions of art, artifact, craft, or fine arts that ultimately restrict artistic expression. Rather, we recognize all forms of creative practice as important and valid expressions of our culture, our communities, and ourselves, whether ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, ‘ceremonial’ or ‘contemporary’. Housed within our world-class studio facilities, our programs support all forms of disciplinary and interdisciplinary studio practice, such as ceramics, fibres, intermedia (video, performance, and electronic arts), painting, drawing, photography, print media, and sculpture. We further support and promote all forms, actions or instances of creative expression, such as carving, beading, basket weaving, jewelry making, drumming, singing, dancing, sound creation and production, and storytelling in all its diverse forms. Importantly, these studio courses are open to all students, and feature an integrated learning approach, within a hands-on, practical environment. In Fine Arts, our aim is to celebrate Indigenous culture, focusing on the ways that art, music, and critical studio praxis can support the transmission, transformation, innovation and expression of Indigenous creative and cultural practices, in its many changing, and evolving forms.

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