Rice Global Paris Summer Program | 2026 Course Listing
ARTS 237 Body, Image, and Sound
SESSION 2 | Wednesday, June 10 - Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Instructors: Eli Greene & Devin T. Mays
Paris Summer Session 2
Wed. June 10 - Tues. June 30
| Move-in June 9 | Move-out July 1
(Summer 2026)
Course Description
This course is an inquiry of contemporary art practices that complicate, elucidate and question our understanding of the human experience. Through site-visits, museum and gallery tours throughout the city, students will study (up-close) the work of artists, musicians, fashion designers, social scientists and writers that are motivated by similar questions of desire, self-expression and history. We will study W.E.B DuBois's Data Portraits for the 1900's Exposition Universelle in Paris, Rei Kawakubo and the philosophy behind Comme des Garçons fashion label, Parisian Ballroom and Drag culture, among many other artists and scholars who have looked to Paris in their intellectual inquiry. This course will focus on artists whose work blurs the line between art and life, meaningfully engaging with the city, not only as a set or a backdrop, but as an active participant in the work's creation. We will study Paris's significance as a place to practice being and self-expression, exploring the work of artists Marcel Duchamp, Pope L., Adrian Piper, Francis Alÿs and David Hammons. Students will use various tools, techniques and research methodologies including, drawing, frottage, photography, field recording, and the artist's own body to create site-based art works and a series of sonic and visual scores (arrangements). Sites will include: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, and the Rice Global Paris Center in the Marais. These arrangements, in practice, will perform ideas and offer an understanding of body, image and sound.
Credit Hours
This course is 3 Rice credit hours.
Does this course have prerequisites?
No
Does this course fulfill a Distribution Requirement?
No
Application Deadline
Priority Deadline: December 10, 2025
Final Application Deadline: February 1, 2026
For details on these two deadlines, please navigate to the Application Timeline section of the Program Information & FAQs page.
Questions?
For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).
For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.
Eli Greene, Lecturer of Art
Eli Greene's works are often filtered through photography, saturated with the medium and everything it sticks to -- history, memory and loss. Through image, object, and performance, Greene's practice traces the act of one thing becoming another. Her recent work has been exhibited and performed at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Maximillian William, London, F, Houston, The Smart Museum of Art, Gallery 400, The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and Regards, Chicago.
Devin T. Mays, Assistant Professor of Art
Devin T. Mays works with sculpture, performance, and pictures. The materials being used in his practice do not always present themselves as anything more than what they appear to be. Mays refers to his interdisciplinary practice as a place for things to become Things. Mays's recent exhibitions include Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and LIFE - a group show at Artists Space (New York, NY). Recent publishing includes Describing a Thing for Sculpture Journal (Liverpool University Press).