feminizing Magritte

Masters’s Projects

Traditionally, a “Master’s” Project is when an art student attempts to duplicate, exactly, an artwork by one of the great “Old Masters”, (think Rembrandt, Michelangelo, etc). For my class’ purposes, a “Master” artist was any artist or specific art movement of a student’s choice whom we studied in Art History from 1826 through 2004. What made these projects so unique were the choices students made to take on more conceptual or contemporary artists like Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, or Yayoi Kusama.

Students could choose to do this in a traditional manner (i.e. duplicate, line for line, “Breathe” by Bridget Riley), or to use the style of an artist to make their own new artwork (“My Confiscated Cellphone”, by Vincent Van Gogh), or use their own style to reproduce an iconic artwork (“Guernica”, the student zine).