Observation, experimentation, invention, design. How has photography helped to shape these practices, which have been central to the development of both art and science? How might an interdisciplinary approach to the medium of photography invigorate questions of form, abstraction, realism, and subjectivity? This seminar surveys key episodes in the history and theory of photographic media to uncover overlaps, parallels, and moments of exchange across the history of modern art and science. Course readings, presentations, and site visits will offer case studies with which to consider cross-disciplinary connections, from H. Becquerel’s visualizations of radioactivity and E. J. Marey’s chronophotographs charting bodies in motion, to scientific iconography appearing in the photograms of Man Ray and L. Moholy-Nagy or R. Rauschenberg’s use of x-ray imagery. These and many more examples evince how photographic media continually challenges historians of art and of science to reframe the methodological tools they use to evaluate visual and material artifacts. Students will have the opportunity to study and write about photographs in campus collections.

In most Mesoamerican languages, a single word describes the activities that we would call “writing” and “painting.” This seminar will investigate the interrelationships between image and text in Central Mexico both before and immediately after the introduction of alphabetic writing in the 16th century. We will also review art historical and archaeological evidence for the social conditions of textual and artistic production in Mexico, and how these traditions were transformed under Spanish colonial rule. We will consider the materiality of text and image by working with facsimiles of Mesoamerican books in Special Collections at the Regenstein Library. At the end of the course, students will have acquired a basic literacy in Aztec and Mixtec writing systems, and will have refined their ability to look productively and write elegantly about art.

This seminar charts the rise of print technology and its pivotal role in transforming the European cultural and religious landscapes from the 15th to the 17th centuries. We will investigate the aesthetic, material, and epistemological aspects of print, focusing on key moments in its development, such as Gutenberg’s moveable type and Martin Luther’s printed Bible, while also examining the works of artists like Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi. Particular emphasis will be placed on how printmaking not only revolutionized the dissemination of information and ideas but also redefined the boundaries of art in early modern Europe, thereby expanding the horizons of artistic expression. Students will learn essential concepts and techniques of printmaking and will explore a variety of theoretical and thematic issues related to its study, including notions of reproducibility, questions of authenticity, the advent of copyright law, artistic self-fashioning, evolving devotional practices, and the intersections of art and science.

This seminar tracks the entanglements of visual art and “technology,” a term which took on an increasingly expanded set of meanings beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period between World War I and the present, we examine these expanded meanings and ask how the work of art fundamentally shifted with, extended, tested, or acted upon “technology.” We consider cases from the art historical avant gardes, the impact of cybernetics and systems thinking on architecture and visual perception, midcentury collectives that sought to institutionalize collaborations between artists and engineers, as well as more subtle exchanges between art and technology brewing since the Cold War.

Course readings drawn from art history and the histories of science and technology, as well as site visits to art collections on campus, will inform our investigation. Students will gain historical insights into the relation between visual art and technology; develop analytical tools for critically engaging with the present-day interface of art, science, and engineering; and consider the implications for the futures we imagine.

The course gives an introduction to the relationship between art, media, and technology, as articulated in art practice, media theory, and art theory/history. The key focus is the relationship between 20th-century art and so-called "new media" (from photography, film, radio, TV to computers and digital technologies), but older instances of art- and media-historical perspectives will also be discussed. The objective of the course is to give insight into the historical exchanges between art and technological development, as well as critical tools for discussing the concept of the medium and the relationship between art, sensation/perception, visuality, and mediation. The course will also function as an introduction to the fields of media aesthetics and media archaeology.
 

In the 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World, the French artist Philippe Parreno (b. 1964) turned the monumental space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris into a living, evolving organism, where music, light, films, images and performances led visitors through a precisely choreographed journey of discovery, based on the idiosyncratic body of work that he had created since the early 1990s. This course is devoted to an in-depth study of Parreno’s work, and the highly original form of media thinking that informs it. Rather than focusing on the properties of distinct media, or on multi-medial forms or presentation, his works explore the new forms of life and social existence that result from the various ways in which 20th and 21st century media technologies store, manipulate and produce time. This is a form of thinking and artistic creation that addresses the realities of formats, programs and platforms rather than media apparatuses and messages, and that engages everything from architecture and design to social situations, natural worlds and virtual beings.

The recent removal of Confederate statues in the US and ISIL’s destruction of ancient sites in Iraq and Syria, while motivated by different aims, find a common solution in dealing with images deemed inappropriate. Context is crucial to understanding what is at stake in these different iconoclastic acts: What is being destroyed? Who is destroying it and why? Although the term “iconoclasm” was initially used to describe the violent clashes between rival Christian ideologies over the status of images in a religious context in the 8th century, scholars now use it more capaciously and it refers to any movement dedicated to the destruction of images, be it in ancient Mesopotamia, Reformist Europe, or Talibanist Afghanistan. While the term offers syntactical clarity, it simultaneously obscures the various processes that go into practicing iconoclasm. This seminar proposes a broad and historically contingent study of iconoclasm. By looking at a range of examples from different periods and geographical contexts, we will examine the ways in which images have been perceived as threats, aberrations, seductions, or inconveniences best removed. We will also explore the various ways in which removed images continue to resonate with new meanings. Some class sessions will take place in ISAC.

This seminar takes as its focal point the vast range of conceptual, material, and visual artifacts that are produced by, and indeed help to construct, this enduring fascination with the figure of the witch, from the medieval past to the present. We will examine case studies from premodern Europe to Colonial North America to Indonesia, scrutinizing texts, films, and works of art. Rather than offering a standard history of witchcraft, we will explore the intersections of gender, labor, and representation that the figure of the witch makes specially available for study. Witchcraft constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon that aims to alter reality and the self through the use of various techniques, transmitted both orally and in writing. These techniques have often appeared culturally marked in terms of gender and belief. Witchcraft has for centuries been the business of women in societies where very few avenues existed for women to develop any sort of business.

This seminar explores visual culture and historical arts of Africa primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a broad geographical range of case studies in practices and uses for art and objects of devotion in everyday life. Investigations will highlight objects’ tangible and intangible elements to examine their spiritual and protective dimensions through various lenses: organized religions, including Islam and Christianity, local belief systems and ritual practices, social or political organizations, and other cultural distinctions. Such contextualization will contribute to students’ recognition of the diversity and historical depth of the continent’s arts and cultures. We will visit objects in local museums and special exhibitions for in-person, close looking and to fuel discussions surrounding the role of museums and museum display and interpretation. 

Description Coming Soon

In this seminar, we will read recent scholarship in the field of South Asian art history. Sections of the class will also focus on writing reviews, whether of a single volume or of a thematic kind. Some prior knowledge of South Asian art history and/or methods of art history would be necessary.

In this course we will observe different ways to tell a story through painting, and we will analyse strategies used by artists in early modern Italy to describe space and time in visual terms.Students will engage with different artists, from Giotto to Raphael and Pellegrino Tibaldi, and different cultural and geographic contexts, from Padua and Bologna to Florence, Venice, and Rome, over the span of about three centuries. Students will explore a wide range of visual examples and textual sources on various subject matters, from poetry to history, from the Bible to vernacular accounts about saints, from mythology to contemporary chronicles, in order to investigate what kind of stories were told on the walls of halls and courts of honor, private rooms, or public spaces, aiming at understanding why each of them was chosen.Complex projects such as narrative mural and ceiling paintings usually involved a tight collaboration among artists, patrons, and iconographic consultants, all figures with whom students will become familiar. We will also analyze the theory behind the comparison of poetry and painting (“ut pictura poesis”, “as is painting so is poetry”) by investigating the meaning and the reception of this ancient concept in early modern times, and its implications on the social role of the artist. Students will investigate the significance of narrative frescos in early modern times, while also asking questions about their value and impact today.

This course seeks to align historical and anthropological inquiry into the spatial and phenomenological dimensions of the urban soundscape. The conceptual framework on which it is based explores a variety of theoretical frameworks that have contributed to the construction of the soundscape as an urban phenomenon. It will explore such pre-modern themes as the acoustic construction of sacred and secular space, the visual and aural aspects of early modern time-keeping practices, ritual forms of music and singing in the public sphere, the auditory practices of civic devotion, the phenomena of mendicant preaching and public storytelling, as well as more modern and industrial soundscapes, such as noise and the circulation of information through urban communication networks.

This course centers around the Chicago-born, New York-and-Paris-based, artist Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992), who will be the subject of a centennial symposium in October 2025 jointly organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Student in this class will learn about Mitchell’s life and work through the close study of her paintings and works on paper, gaining a foundation in the methods of object-based learning and applied art historical research of the sort practiced in museums. Together, we will survey the state of the scholarly field on Mitchell and conduct a critical review of her literature and recent exhibitions. We will also consider Mitchell’s early upbringing in Chicago—her exposure to works on view at the Art Institute during her teenage years, her training at the School of the Art Institute and Ox-Bow School of Art, her immersion in the activities of the Poetry Foundation—and interrogate where and how these experiences may and may not be germane to an understanding of her work. Finally, the course will allow students to participate in the early phases of exhibition making, such as proposing and refining the scope and thesis of an exhibition, and the research and development of a checklist.

What could it meant to construct a migratory history of modern art and design? The nineteenth century has been characterized by bounded models of settlement, citizenship, subjectivity, and what it might look like to intimately belong in such a world. Yet the character of that belonging was entangled with experiences of mass migration, mobility, displacement, exile, and untiring attempts to imagine a world otherwise. In this seminar, we will recenter migration as a material reality and interpretive tool. Through a series of case studies grounded in Europe and its wider worlds, students will investigate moments in which people, objects, and ideas formed as a result of the utterly mobile nature of nineteenth-century life and expressive thought. We will turn our attention to a wave of recent scholarship on the topic, and to literary and critical writings of the period, alongside paintings, prints, sculpture, design, and built environments (many from local collections). In short, frequent writing assignments, students will be prompted to reflect on broader applications of a migratory method for reading familiar objects and histories anew.

Icons belong to the most critical category of sacred objects in Buddhism, and they were indispensable for transmitting the religion across East Asia. The ontological status of icons, however, remained polemical throughout most of the religion’s premodern history. While scholars in religious studies have since the 1960s been attentive to the ritual and cultic functionality of Buddhist icons, art historians did not move past style-oriented methodologies and fully engaged Buddhist icons as such until the 1990s. This course investigates different methodologies devised by scholars in the past to study Buddhist icons with various theoretical premises and from diverse historical perspectives and focuses. We will pay particular attention to how the field of Chinese Buddhist art history bears those different approaches to Buddhist icons in its development over the past decades.

This seminar invites students to examine recent scholarly experiments in architectural history. Participants will read and discuss a corpus of books published in the last five years. Each week, we will take a deep dive into a single publication by synthesizing its contribution, unpacking its structure, and demonstrating its potential limits. In-class activities will catalyze dialogue and debate on the readings as well as highlight resonances across assigned books. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed transversal views of contemporary practices in architectural history and heightened their senses of methodological self-awareness.

This class examines the Japanese imaginary of “Chinese culture” together with evidence of concrete interactions between objects and people on “the continent” and “the archipelago.” From the earliest centuries of the common era until the 1870s, Japanese writers, artists, and scholars considered themselves to be living in the Sinosphere: the realm of China’s cultural and political centrality. Starting with a consideration of Chinese material culture in the Shōsōin Repository and the Tale of Genji, we will proceed to address topics such as the relation between Chinese and Japanese handscroll paintings, the spread of Chinese-style ink monochrome painting in Japan, the rise of the Kano school as official painters and Chinese-style painting experts, and the immense popularity of literati painting and calligraphy. Korean painting’s intersection with Chinese and Japanese art in the medieval and early modern periods will also factor into the discussion. We will evaluate the changing dynamics around political power and gender embodied in the Chinese/Japanese oppositional duality and reassess the prevailing narratives concerning whether the Sinosphere faded from view after 1868.

Where is this artifact from? Who does it belong to? How did it get here? Who’s telling its story? Critical inquiry into the practice and politics of museums has reached a new zenith in contemporary discourse. From discussions of acquisition and repatriation to provenience (archaeological findspot) and provenance (an object’s ownership history) and the ethics of curation and modes of display, museum and art professionals—and the general public alike—are deliberating on the concept of museums and the responsibilities of such institutions towards the collections in their care. This course will explore the early history of museums and collecting practices and their impact on the field today, with a focus on cultural heritage collections from West Asia and North Africa. We will first spend time on such topics as archaeological exploration of “the Orient,” colonial collecting practices, and the antiquities trade, as well as the politics of representation and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Next, we will look at critical issues presently facing museums, including ethical collection stewardship, provenance research, repatriation, community engagement, and public education. The course will be structured in a seminar format, with lectures devoted to the presentation of key themes by the instructor and critical discussion as a group. Meetings will include visits to the ISAC Museum at UChicago.

The anachronism of the course title constitutes our program: to what extent can Plato’s thinking about artworks, images, poets in the polis, beauty, the visual world, the senses, subjectivity and criticism be viewed coherently as an aesthetic theory? Does his style and dramatic mode of writing interact significantly with these views? How have they been received, and to what extent are they right?

This seminar introduces Pre-Columbian Andean material culture and built environments surveying the region from the early Chavín culture through the Incas. Readings and class discussions examining broad cultural issues will be elaborated by hand-on analysis of artifacts in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as interactive explorations of art-making techniques. The course particularly seeks to develop understandings of the raw materials used to make objects in order to contextualize them within trade networks, the Andean landscape, and cultural value systems, as well as artistic knowledge and skills.

This course examines the early modern period (1450-1800) through the study of objects produced in various parts of the world that circulated the globe. Some case studies will include: the printed image, feather painting, the biombo, the automaton, porcelain, the atlas, and stonework. Some of these goods were novel, some were hybrid in medium and construction, and many were made in multiples or as copies. How did they circulate? Why were they made and how did they function? Recent publications on such objects and about the “global Renaissance” more broadly will be paired with primary source analysis of inventories, letters, and travel writing from the early modern period in order to evaluate this complex period of cross-cultural interaction and innovation in artistic production and collection. The class will visit the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, and the Adler Planetarium for close study of materials in their current museum or library spaces.

This seminar explores the role of photographic imagery in the global environmental movement from the 1960s through the present. We will investigate the uses of photography in shaping, documenting, and disseminating narratives surrounding ecological crises, activism, and public policy. Through a survey of photographic works in a variety of formats and media, we will explore how visual culture has shaped ecological thought and international politics over the last half-century, starting with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Adopting an interdisciplinary human-centered framework, this course foregrounds questions of environmental justice, sustainability, and the impacts of colonialism on landscapes and communities, offering insight into the role of photographic media as a catalyst for societal change.

Description Forthcoming

How have designed objects contributed to the formation of communities? Focusing on the United States, this course will reflect on the question by considering how design has variously embodied, represented, bound, made visible, excluded, unified and otherwise shaped groups of people and their commitments. The cases we consider will likely include: 19th century Shaker furniture, Depression-era efforts to build a visual index of historic American design, postwar advances in wheelchair design, Africobra poster design and political economy in 1960s Chicago, and graphic design for Chicano newspapers of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. To develop dynamic techniques for approaching design history, class discussion will be complemented by regular in-class written analyses of designed objects, visits from and conversations with some of the scholars whose work we read, and occasional visits from contemporary artists whose work provides a critical lens on design history.

This course will examine so-called stylistic revivals in the history of modern decorative arts and design. Through an examination of “revival” objects, the philosophies informing their facture, and the critical discourse surrounding their function and reception, the course will consider questions such as: What constitutes a “revival”? How are decorative art and designed objects marshalled for different ideological ends/purposes/narratives? What values appear to be imbued in certain materials and aesthetics? How have such associations been made/become naturalized? What assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and power are embedded in these associations and narratives?

This course will investigate materiality in the context of art-historical study. Thirty years ago technical art history was a burgeoning field of study among a small number of museum conservators, curators and scientists. Today curatorial/conservation partnerships are common and analytic methods to examine and characterize artworks are sophisticated and often nondestructive. The intersection of the three disciplines – art history, conservation and materials science – has made it possible to study art in a more holistic and objective manner by understanding the art-making materials, the methods of using them, and the conscious choices made by artists to achieve their aesthetic goals. Additionally, changes to works of art, whether the result of inherent instability, external environmental factors, or artist’s intent may be more readily identified and assessed. 
 
Case studies will be presented to show how artists’ methods and materials can be informative within a broader art-historical context. The course will address the meaningful integration of technical study into one’s own curatorial/art history practice. Students will examine works of art firsthand to determine the materials and methods used in their making, to assess their condition, and to see how various manipulations of different art-making materials inform their appearance. Students will evaluate selected readings and recent technical studies. Class participation is encouraged and expected.  

A critic who began as an abstract painter, bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) was also a queer woman of color and among the most penetrating cultural observers in recent US history. This course centers on the close reading of hooks’ 1995 book, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, which fearlessly and sympathetically took as its subject a perennial conundrum wherein black artists and critics’ relationship to art and aesthetics threatens to be subsumed by their efforts to challenge an art world bent on marginalization and exclusion. By hooks’s own account, she designed this collection of essays and interviews to continue discussions of art and aesthetics begun in earlier work—specifically, to further engage the politics of feminism in conjunction with liberatory Black struggle. The result did a great deal more than this already considerable feat of intersectional study. Art on My Mind demonstrates then-new, still-woefully-underutilized means to think about visual art, write about visual art, and create actual spaces for ‘dialogue across boundaries.’ Art on My Mind, then, remains a model for confronting what addles critical consideration of the work of artists and cultural producers in all groups marginalized by structures of domination. This makes it also a book about transgression, and an excellent object to debate at a moment when generative meetings across boundaries seem increasingly unlikely. Major themes in addition to the aforementioned include ‘the body,’ canonization, cultural appropriation, architecture, criticism, pedagogy, painting, and photography.

This course will explore the fascinating culture of covering and veiling sacred icons, portraits and images that were thought to cause trauma or outrage in the European tradition. It will begin in the ancient world and explore mediaeval, Renaissance and modern art – both paintings and sculptures, as well as images that represent the covering of images… It will attempt to restore the sensual, the tactile and the performative to the experience of viewing art and engaging with its powers, by contrast to the prevailing regime of disinterested contemplation encouraged by the modernist art gallery. The course will be taught with much encouragement to students to experiment and think against the grain.

This course will present an interdisciplinary interrogation into the nature of pilgrimage in pre-Christian antiquity and the rise of Christian pilgrimage in the years after Constantine. It will simultaneously be a reflection on the disciplinary problems of examining the phenomena of pilgrimage from various standpoints including art history, archaeology, anthropology, the history of religions, the literary study of travel writing, as well as on the difficulties of reading broad and general theories against the bitty minutiae of ancient evidence and source material. The core material, beyond the theoretical overview, will be largely limited to antiquity and early Christianity; but if students wish to write their papers on areas beyond this relatively narrow remit (in other religions, in the middle ages, modern or early modern periods), this will be positively encouraged! The course will be examined by a paper due at the end of the quarter.

This seminar examines a range of methods for doing the work of art history with an eye toward strengthening your own original contributions to the field. Through close reading and discussion of recently published scholarship, we will interrogate how art historians generate novel ways of seeing and understanding the objects that they study. This course will be structured around the framework of scale. What is the scale of art historical analysis? Moving from macro to micro, we will traverse units ranging from canons, empire, and environments to art scenes, institutions, and audiences, to the artist, the art object, and the fragment. We will examine how scholars constitute the objects of their criticism, the breadth and explanatory force of their arguments, and the ethics of their endeavors. This approach traverses perspectives from feminism and queer theory, post- and decolonial thought, Black studies, material culture, social history, and critical theory. Some of our guiding questions will be: How does thinking at different scales help us understand visual and material objects differently? How can these methods help us rethink, modify, or dismantle canons? And how do they enable us to reappraise issues of power and exchange within the history of art? In order to think through these and other methodological questions, students will adopt an object on view in a Chicago-area art institution to work with over the course of the semester. Students need not identify as art historians to enroll in this seminar—it will be helpful for all students who want to think deeply about their approaches to visual and material objects, whether still or moving images, sculpture, or performance, particularly if those objects feel genre-bending, difficult to theorize, or recalcitrant.

This course will consider the practice and theory of visual art in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will read a variety of crucial contemporary texts, including those of Thierry De Duve, Boris Groys, Sianne Ngai, and Hito Steyerl, among others. Students should be prepared to produce a research paper at the conclusion of the seminar. Our first reading will be De Duve’s Kant After Duchamp, which should be completed before our first day of class.

Team-taught between Northwestern, the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Chicago, this course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in the AIC collection and the methods and questions such inquiry raises.  Students will be introduced to basic techniques of stylistic and scientific analysis as well as recent theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things as well as their disembodied images.

This course examines multiple temporalities of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, as implied in the history of the entire cave complex, the construction process of individual caves, the successive creation of “family caves,” the relationship of specific caves to the central government and local regimes, and the temporal structures of different pictorial and sculptural programs. It is hoped that such investigations will lay a methodological basis to envision a new history of the Dunhuang Caves. Students will conduct independent research on well-chosen topics.

This is a course in the theory and practice of observing with the intent to describe, analyze, or interpret—as in a typical process of cultural study using words to represent representation. It’s a course in setting into perspective those attitudes and gestures that attention-to-X supposes you will adopt and perform. We want to know, what is it to attend when attention separates out from a method, a hypothesis, an organized mood?

After its modern discovery, Dunhuang—the home of Buddhist grottoes constructed between the 4th and 14th centuries—had been a site of intensive research that paved the way for the rise of Dunhuang Studies later in the twentieth century, including research in cave art and retrieved manuscripts. While these earlier endeavors made an indelible contribution to our knowledge of Dunhuang, this course posits a complexity in building the site into the discourse of modern China and a dialectic relationship between modern Dunhuang and the research of historical Dunhuang. To better understand this complexity, this course foregrounds how Dunhuang came to be known and studied in the politics of Western colonialism and the restructuring of modern China. The course will also trace the trajectory in which modern Dunhuang developed through a spectrum of different “representations” –architectural diagrams, photographs, paintings, exhibitions, etc. By focusing on these representations, students will analyze the agenda in the conception of Dunhuang as a site of national pride and heritage and consider its role in narratives of twentieth-century East Asian Art.

This course focuses on recently published works in the field of modern art, especially those published in the last five years. Our emphasis will be on emerging methodologies and approaches in the field, especially regarding the study of modernism outside of the North Atlantic and the participation within modernism of subjects usually excluded from its canons and discourses.
 

Led by a faculty member each fall, this seminar meets weekly for 80 minutes, to address various topics through discussion with visitors (especially department faculty members) and occasionally through discussion of assigned readings. On the premise that one learns the most about teaching not well in advance but rather by reflecting with peer and senior colleagues on techniques and problems when one is in the midst of the challenge, this forum is meant to address participants' specific concerns and experiences, especially those related to art history. The quarter's topics are determined with student input and may include: the structure of the art history college core course program in which all faculty and students teach; the jobs of course assistant and writing intern; instructor authority and classroom dynamics; leading discussion; effective lecturing; strategic use of pictures in classroom teaching; small-group class projects; designing and grading assignments; designing syllabi. From year to year, the colloquium may address similar topics but the emphasis and tips will change depending on the participants. The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the colloquium, register for credit, and earn a Pass. More advanced students who have previously taken the colloquium are welcome to return on an occasional or regular basis to share experiences, strategies, and to seek advice on new teaching challenges.

This course is conducted by a faculty member every spring to introduce third-year students to the tasks of preparing grant proposals and applications.  The aim of the workshop is to help you produce a finished proposal by the early autumn of your fourth year and to prepare you to apply for grants at that time.  The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the workshop, register for credit, and earn a Pass.