Lyon will offer a study abroad opportunity for students interested in art on location in Latvia in June of 2022. The program will focus on the art and the unique culture of Latvia with a partnership with the Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils, Latvia. The Center’s website can be seen here. Art majors and students interested in art will be allowed the opportunity to interact with the rich cultural heritage in Latvia, a Baltic Country, that gained its independence as a former Soviet country in 1991. Students will have the opportunity to paint and study Baltic art history in an immersive and expressive environment. Students will stay in a former military citadel used during the early nineteenth century toward the end of the Napoleonic wars later converted into a Soviet era military base and now restored as an art museum and residency program. Classes will be offered on site at the Mark Rothko Art Center, where we will be inspired by the modern tradition of Color Field Abstraction that Rothko popularizes.
Students are encouraged to have had the prerequisite of ART 101, ART 120, or ART 232 before traveling on the trip and can creatively and loosely approach the theme of color field painting gaining inspiration from Rothko’s work, where abstraction is the predominant subject matter but could also incorporate landscape and/ or figurative elements depending on the interests of the individual student.
The art history course will center on the unique comprehension history of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, as we navigate individualistic art movements of these countries from their very beginnings to the 20th through contemporary art. Topics will include Art Nouveau architecture (we will study first hand in the capital Riga), social realism during the Soviet era, revolutionary art in the liberation of Latvia first in the early twentieth century and again in the 1990’s.
Here is a tentative list of the classes to be offered for Latvia art program:
ART 282: Special Topics: Painting Color Field
ART 382: Special Topics: Baltic Art History
Students will be expected to pay for meals (billed by Lyon College), optional excursions, and incidentals. The combined basic estimated cost for 2022 is approximately $2500 with most students being eligible for a $2000 grant based on the length of the program. The program will last four weeks and carry at least six credits, which should be covered by institutional and governmental financial for eligible students.
For cost of living information for the area, you are welcome to check out this site.
Lyon College has established its first study center at the Vesuvian Institute in Southern Italy. The Institute offers accommodations and meals, has its own classrooms, and is connected with a UNESCO World Heritage site where students will have a chance to gain practical experience among some of the best-preserved Roman villas in the Mediterranean. Their website is here.
The Institute will offer its first round of courses in July of 2022, if circumstances allow. The first program to be implemented at the Institute will be for computer science majors and will feature extensive onsite practical work in GIS based on data from the archeological site supplemented by classes taught by Lyon faculty. Italian language will be offered as part of the orientation. This is a tentative list of the classes to be offered for computer science program:
CSC 482: Database for Interdisciplinary Research
CSC 482: GIS for Archaeology
CSC 482: Special Topics - Web Development
Students will be expected to pay for meals (billed by Lyon College), optional excursions, and incidentals. The combined basic estimated cost for 2021 is approximately $3000 with most students being eligible for a $2000 grant based on the length of the program.
The plan for the Vesuvian Institute is to later add other courses, such as art restoration, which would follow the same model of combining onsite and online classes with practical experience.
