Dean’s Circle Visits Berlin

Over NYU's winter recess, the students in Dean's Circle, the University Scholars program and sophomore honors society of Liberal Studies, traveled to Berlin. The field study complemented their coursework in the year-long Dean's Circle seminar, titled The Global Art Collective. The students and their professor Robert Fitterman, were accompanied by Associate Dean of Students Jonathon White, Assistant Director of Student Affairs Hannah Pingelton,  and Assistant Direct of Advising and Diversity Candace Sumner-Robinson on the trip to visit the cultural sites, local galleries, and artists' studios of Berlin.

Throughout the spring semester, each Dean's Circle student will develop a project inspired by the collective work of the fall semester. Below, Professor Fitterman recaps their enlightening visit to Berlin.

What makes this year's Dean Circle unique is that the class has been organized around the theme of Art Collectives. In fact, the class itself is an art collective named by the students 'The Dean's Circus.' As an art collective, the idea is that each month every student responds to a prompt or task assigned by the class. My initial idea was that students can respond more scholarly or creatively, and all of the responses would be collected together through the context of the art collective. To my happy astonishment, all of the students so far have been responding more creatively.

That's a bit of background to frame what we did in Berlin and why. Our trip to Berlin was twofold: to be inspired by the city of Berlin for our next and final task-prompt; to learn directly from artists who participate in art collectives. Our first activities were more historical: we visited the ancient art of the Pergamon Museum and took a tour of the Reichstag Building. These historical sites gave us some foundation for the contemporary art and culture that was to follow. In the next few days we visited contemporary art museums and visited an especially important exhibit of the German Women's Artists Association (or collective). This is a collective that was founded for German women artists in the 19th century and continues today. The exhibit was in the Zitadelle fortress—one of the few Medieval structures still standing in Berlin. Also, for a day trip, we visited the Bauhaus school and museum in Dessau. This was a wonderful experience to learn about the Bauhaus collective and see the origins of these design and architectural innovations.