About the Course
This course is designed to provide students with a working knowledge of digital art that will inform their creative process, projects and goals.
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The software program students will be working with primarily is Adobe Photoshop CC2024. Specific assignments will help students to use this program and learn many of its components. The assignments are designed to approach artistic ideas from a fine arts perspective, drawing upon formal elements in art as well as conceptual issues related to art and technology.
The semester is divided into two main areas of study. The first half will be an in-depth study of Adobe Photoshop using the classroom-in-a-book tutorials supplemented by additional assignments. Students will also create “study” works as part of your digital sketchbook. These works will assist students in gaining more experience with the program and in developing ideas for their final portfolio project.
The second half of the semester will focus on a more in-depth project that will become part of each student's online portfolio. These works will be output as a website for which they choose the platform. Each portfolio site will then be linked to a class page, which in turn will become part of the archive of the Scripps College Digital Art class websites
Instructor
Nancy Macko
A member of the faculty at Scripps College since 1986, Professor Nancy Macko, former Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Scripps College from 1998-2003 and chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Department since 2004, has been Director of the Scripps Digital Art Program since 1990.
Originally from New York, Macko received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and her graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley with a concentration in painting and printmaking. She has been a practicing artist since the early 1980’s, producing over 20 solo exhibitions and participating in over 150 exhibitions both nationally and abroad. She has received more than 30 research and achievement awards for her art. She has traveled extensively and has had highly productive artist residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Musee d’Pont Aven in Brittany, France.
She is currently represented by AIR Gallery in New York. She has been active in the broader field of the fine arts including museum work and curating, and has held state and national leadership positions in the Women's Caucus for Art (Northern California Chapter Chair, 1980-81), the California Society of Printmakers (President, 1984-85), the Exhibitions Advisory Committee for LACPS (Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies) (1994-6); the Art Advisory Committee for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1996-8); the National Board of Directors of the College Art Association (1994-8) and ArtTable (2002-6); and the Advisory Board of the Southern California Women's Caucus for Art (2003-6). In the summer of 2010, she was an invited participant to the HERS Summer Institute at Bryn Mawr College.
Since the early nineties, Nancy Macko has drawn upon images of the honeybee society to explore the relationships between art, science, technology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Today, she combines elements of painting, printmaking, digital media, photography, video, and installation to create a unique visual language. This combination of media allows her to examine and respond to issues related to eco-feminism, nature, and the importance of ancient matriarchal cultures, as well as to explore her interest in mathematics, and prime numbers in particular, in which she attempts to make explicit the implicit connections between nature and technology.
Macko’s mid-career survey show, Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994-2006, was exhibited at the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006-7 and was accompanied by a full color catalog. This was the most substantive and comprehensive examination of her work to date and included over 60 pieces spanning various media—traditional and digital prints, video, and mixed media works on wood panels. As part of the national Feminist Art Project, Hive Universe was the forerunning exhibition in Los Angeles to recognize the achievements of the feminist art movement. Her work has been reviewed and written about in Artweek, ArtScene, Artillery, Coast, exposure, Daily Serving, LA Weekly and the LA Times among other publications and journals.
Her most recent explorations have addressed issues of memory loss, dementia and cognitive decline –changes she witnessed as they affected her mother’s mental health. Uniting a life long commitment to incorporate a spiritual respect for the world with her subject matter, Macko integrates aspects of aging and decline with notions of the spirit of life regardless of what point on the continuum we find ourselves.
Her work is in numerous public collections including: Denison Library and the Samella Lewis Collection of Contemporary Art at Scripps College; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Bell Gallery at Brown University; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art; the New York Public Library; the North Dakota Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art; Gilkey Center for Graphic Art, Portland Art Museum; RISD Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.