Course Content:
• Hands-on participation and demonstration in workshops.
• Lectures, presentations and discussions.
• Field trips to important cultural and historical sites and museum visits.
• Cultural activities including period music, dance performances and culinary experiences.
Painted Ceiling Workshop:
Students will actively participate in preparation of the panels with traditional gesso, reviewing the archival documentation of the original Gwozdziec ceiling, layout and transfer of the researched images to the panels, preparation of paints and pigments, painting with traditional distemper paints made of pigment and rabbit skin glue, participating in lectures, demonstrations and all stages necessary to complete their painting section.
Course Objective:
• To demonstrate what can be learned about the world of Polish Jews from the process of rebuilding a wooden synagogue, a quintessential expression of Polish-Jewish symbiosis during the early modern period.
• To enlarge the scope of sources and methods for studying the history of Polish Jews and demonstrate how built form is a material expression of social processes shaping the relationship of Jews to people among whom they lived.
• To provide a rare opportunity to participate in a historically significant replication project that will become part of a major museum exhibition.
• To provide a rare opportunity for students to dialogue with the public as active participants in the reconstruction of a significant historic object.
• To engage students in a process of reasoning from material culture, by reverse engineering and rebuilding, as a way to understand how core values, concepts, and social relationships are literally crafted into built form.
• To develop understanding of the relationship between technology and culture.
• To learn a wide range of hands on skills.
• To show how architectural form materializes the knowledge required to make it.
• To learn values of teamwork and group participation.
• To learn about: history of Jews in Poland, history of Poland, material culture, wooden cultural heritage and architecture.
How to Apply
Download 2013 Application(PDF)Download, print, and send by mail
Contact Rick Brown rick@handshouse.org
$150 per undergraduate credit
$195 per graduate credit
Participation
This Handshouse Studio / MassArt travel program accepts applications from undergraduate and graduate students and adult education programs at all levels and in all majors. It is a Studio Course open to beginning and advanced students from all disciplines but particularly students of art, architecture, history, anthropology, Jewish studies, material culture, building arts, international studies, and Polish language.
Credit
This course is a 3-credit undergraduate or graduate studio elective through the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Students who want to earn credit must register for Making/History: The Wooden Synagogue Project Poland Travel Program - 3DTD 302 through the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with the Cooperating Institution Program