Visual Arts, Erotic SelfUCSD students must perform naked before course mates, lecturer or fail course

To pass Professor Ricardo Dominguez's art course as a student of the University of California, San Diego, you must perform naked before your colleagues of fail. Dominguez will be there and naked with you.

A visual arts course at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), requires students to perform naked before their course mates and the professor in charge, in order to pass.

Student Pulse gathered that it is either the students perform naked or fail the course which is taught art professor Ricardo Dominguez, who also poses nude in the classes.

Student Pulse gathered from a NY Daily News report quoting the syllabus of the course that students are giving assignments that require them to “create a gesture that traces the outlines or speaks about your ‘erotic self(s)."

"Using autobiography, dream, confession, fantasy or other means to invent one’s self in a new way, or to evoke the variety of selves in our imagination, the course experiments with and explores the rich possibilities available to the contemporary artist in his or her own persona," the class description on the Department of Visual Arts website says.

A concerned parent recently raised alarm over the nudity requirement of the course.

“To blanketly say, ‘You must be naked in order to pass my class’ — it makes me sick to my stomach,” she said.

But Dominguez, who holds his classes with only candlelight and gets naked alongside his students, says he has not received any complaints in all the 11 years he has been teaching the course.

“It’s a standard canvas for performance art and body art," he said

"If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the course.”

Several people went online to protest the course which they call "sexual harassment."

"I think it is sexual harassment and he should be stopped," Susan Davis wrote.

A few students, like Michelle Currier, who claims to have taken the course defended it.

I had to take this final a couple years back for an upper division art class at UCSD," Currier wrote on Facebook.

"We had a choice between being nude or doing something emotionally "naked" and every student but one chose to do the nude performance.

"It was uncomfortable for some of us but we were adults and knew what we were getting ourselves into from day 1 of the class."

There has been no response from Dominguez and the UCS Visual Arts Division Chairman, Jordan Crandall.