student excursions, orvieto city and convent

Academics in Orvieto

CALENDAR Academic Year 2021 – 2022

Fall 2021 Semester
August 28–December 18

1st-month class:
August 30–September 23

2nd-month class:
September 27–October 21

3rd-month class:
October 25–November 18

4th-month class:
November 22–December 16

Fall Curriculum

Spring 2022 Semester
February 26–Monday June 20

1st-month class:
February 28–March 24

2nd-month class:
March 28–April 21

3rd-month class:
April 25–May 19

4th-month class:
May 23–June 16

Spring Curriculum

The curriculum in Orvieto hinges upon the dialogue between the verbal and the visual. For millennia, words and images have been the primary means of narrative and representation. Italy remains an origin point for this history as a crossroads of the arts and humanities. For this reason, our location in Orvieto is vital, providing the opportunity to study design, poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, and history from original sources in their original context. By being in this place, we hope to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration and cultivate a model of learning that is place-specific.

During the first month, all students take Disegno, the course that orients us to the city by challenging us to look at, listen to, draw and write about Orvieto. Through these first encounters, the class prepares students to engage deeply with their surroundings and lays the foundation for a semester of intentionality.

Following Disegno, students are free to choose one studio art or humanities course each month. These courses are taught by Gordon College faculty, faculty from associated colleges and universities, and professional artists and writers. Working closely with teachers in a workshop setting provides unparalleled opportunities for our students. This echoes the relationships used throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance of forming sustained conversation and development of the work. This course model between teachers and students has been a gift to everyone involved since the beginning of the program.

Though the curriculum is based in the arts and humanities, Gordon in Orvieto is open to all majors. Talk to your academic advisor to determine if this program fulfills your respective degree requirements.

Read about Program Director Matt Doll ➔

"I loved that there was no such thing as working solely in the studio. The whole program is built around the idea of enjoying the wonderful resource of Italy. There's no way you're going to stay inside. The best place to draw is out in the city, drawing the architecture that you see, the church facades, the people—taking all you can from the life that's around you."
— Emily Friesen, Gordon in Orvieto

FALL 2021 CURRICULUM

Throughout the semester, students without previous Italian language study will take ORV101: Italian Language Studies, a course in conversational Italian with the central purpose of assisting students' full participation in the life of the Orvieto community. [2 credits]

1st Month All students take:

ORV270: Disegno in Orvieto (Instructor: Matthew Doll) This drawing-based course is taken during the first month of the semester by all students, art majors and non-art majors together. The course prepares each student to engage deeply with his or her surroundings, giving the visual language of description a lead role in forming our relationship to the landscape and townscape. [4 credits]

2nd Month Students choose between:

ORV310: Oil Painting Studio at Orvieto - Landscape Painting (Instructor: Philippe Fretz) As a studio in the methods and materials of oil painting, this course will consider the landscape as a way to ground our connection to the exterior geography through representation of Italy and the local setting. Utilizing field studies and studio work, we will work toward specific views of the territory to expand our vision for Orvieto. [4 credits].

ORV375A: (Special Topics in Literature) Italy in Film and Fiction (Instructor: Mark Sargent) This course will explore landmark works of Italian cinema and fiction, focusing on the nineteenth century to the present. We will endeavor to see the works in multiple contexts, considering how literature and film open windows on Italian history, culture, religion, and society. We will pay special attention to how the works draw upon artistic predecessors, including classic authors such Dante and Boccaccio as well as Italy's rich traditions in painting. Another focal point will be the relationship between art and place. You will be able to reflect on how fiction and film shape our own encounters with cities and landscapes. [4 credits]

3rd Month Students choose between:

ORV372: Sculpture Studio at Orvieto (Instructor: Emily Fussner) This course will focus on creating site-specific sculpture that addresses the artist and viewer in the broader context of the city and countryside. We will consider with care what it means to create and dwell in a space, even temporarily—exploring what light, touch and time reveal about our surroundings and examining the tactile, functional, and symbolic qualities of the local materials and structures that define both the natural setting and urban context of Orvieto. [4 credits]

ORV350: Poetry and Ekphrasis (Instructor: Paul Willis) This creative writing class, fundamental to the core identity of the program, continue the lively conversation between words and pictures that have been occurring for almost three thousand years: what is the relation between poetry and the pictorial arts? By encouraging the practice of ekphrasis—that is, of verbal representation of visual stimuli—we will engage with local artworks as well as those encountered in other parts of Italy, becoming better listeners while sharing in the dialogue of the past for our present moment. [4 credits]

4th Month Students choose between:

ORV375B: (Special Topics in Literature) Reading, Attention, and Technology (Instructor: John Mirisola) This course will investigate the role of current technologies such as smartphones and social media in shaping our habits of attention, and how this dynamic affects our interactions with literature. Drawing on insights from visual artists, musicians, philosophers, and cultural critics, we will examine the ways in which literary reading challenges the urgency and immediacy we’ve become accustomed to in our current technological moment. As we explore works of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that make particular demands on the reader’s attention—to look more closely, to look again, to have patience, to embrace uncertainty—we will ask how these qualities influence both the interpretation of the text and the experience of reading. [4 credits]

ORV322: Text and Image (Instructor: TBD) Text and Image consider questions of design through mapping in ways that link art with architecture, text with image, meaning with materials and the body attentive to space. Aided by the local setting and associated texts, this course will engage the mapping of space through projects utilizing 2-D and 3-D elements as well as video and sound recordings. With typography, color, physical design and other media, we will produce new interpretations of familiar spaces in and around Orvieto. [4 credits]

SPRING 2022 CURRICULUM

1st Month All students take:

2nd Month Students choose between:

ORV372: Sculpture Studio at Orvieto (Instructor: Patrick Marold) Recognizing the functional and symbolic qualities of local materials that define and articulate the natural setting and the urban context of Orvieto, this course will focus on creating sculpture that addresses the viewer in the broader context of the city and countryside. [4 credits]

ORV350: Poetry and Ekphrasis (Instructor: TBD) This creative writing class, fundamental to the core identity of the program, continue the lively conversation between words and pictures that have been occurring for almost three thousand years: what is the relation between poetry and the pictorial arts? By encouraging the practice of ekphrasis—that is, of verbal representation of visual stimuli—we will engage with local artworks as well as those encountered in other parts of Italy, becoming better listeners while sharing in the dialogue of the past for our present moment. [4 credits]

3rd Month Students choose between:

ORV322: Text & Image (Instructor: Dave Kasparek) Referencing Orvieto as the main content and context, students will create a body of work that explores and represents their experience in Orvieto. Students will engage in creative problem solving and the practice of design to develop and make this body of work. The class will explore various ideation and visual research techniques in the preliminary stages of assigned projects (individual and collaborative) that will creatively probe such questions and concepts as: representation, memory, identity, and place. Projects will take the form of various artifacts that address relating elements of typography, images, writing, formats/ structures, and site-specific contexts. [4 credits]

ORV370: (Special Topics) Rhetoric of the Body (Instructor: TBD) This course will consider the human body as a rhetorical argument. We will examine representations of the body—the gendered body, the able body, the alien body, and the virtual body—in art, film, theatre, and public address and consider the enthymematic and metonymic power of corporeality. Our work will be grounded in rhetorical theory, performance studies, and a theology of the body. We will consider larger implications of representations of the body, public and private, and make use of the available resources from art history in Orvieto, Rome and Florence. [4 credits]

4th Month - Sharing the Cinematic Image

Taking the opportunity to collaborate between classes, the final month will enjoy a combined focus upon the real and projected landscape as seen and imagined through the history of post-WW2 Italian cinema. Through shared viewing of films, overlapping texts and location-specific excursions, these two courses will have a common focus on the iconography of a place that has descended from the cinematic tradition. Employing rich source material for visual representation as well as research into historic contexts, both classes will come to terms with new and expanded understandings of the imagery in the collective imagination.

Our month will conclude with a gathering of our friends and neighbors for an outdoor series of films projected in our courtyard. By welcoming others to participate in making meaningful connections with the poignant images on screen, we will be connecting them to our own present-day and sharing interpretations that can form new cultural contexts.

Students choose between:

ORV315: Printmaking (Instructor: Brenton Good) A printmaking studio utilizing a variety of printing processes such as relief, drypoint, and collagraph. The architecture and landscape that defines our subject matter, as well as the local setting of Orvieto, will be used to investigate formal issues of color theory and larger themes of "memory" and "place." The course will conclude with a printed portfolio that reflects the time learning in the semester and joined with the source material taken from our focus upon imagery in the cinematic context. [4 credits]

ORV379: (Special Topics in History) History of Italian Cinema 1945-Present (Instructor: Fabrizio Cilento) While exploring cinematic locations on-site, this course provides an introduction to several important tendencies in Italian cinema from the end of World War II to the present. Readings, discussions, and screenings will explore the following topics: the rise of neorealism, the cinema of the economic miracle, high modernism, stars and stardom, globalization, heritage films, and the relationship between cinema and other visual arts (e.g.; Christian iconography; arte povera; informal painting; and pop art). [4 credits]

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