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, the myriad ways contemporary artists engage AI, 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.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American post-1800

This course considers East Asian art through the dimensions of touch and tactility. What happens when we think of art not just as something to be seen, but felt? How do material, tactile, and haptic qualities shape creative processes, as well as our understanding of art across China, Japan, Korean, and beyond? How have modern museum practices, with their “do not touch” signs, transformed our relationship with these works? Through various case studies—from the sensuous surfaces of Chinese decorative objects and the ritualized grinding of ink on stone, the hand-formed and deliberately textured Japanese tea bowls meant to be cradled in hands, to the illusionistic tactility in Korean chaekgeori still-life paintings—we will explore the significance of touch and materiality in artistic expressions and aesthetic experiences in East Asian art history. We will engage with art objects hands-on when possible, develop methodologies for analyzing tactile dimensions of art, and critically examine how touch intersects with cultural values, social hierarchies, and aesthetics across East Asian traditions.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian, modern (post-1800), Asian, premodern (pre-1800)

Photography has played a pivotal role in the history and visual culture of the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, from Civil War albums to Nan Goldin’s diaristic photographs of the downtown New York club scene during the AIDS crisis. Popular conceptions of photography often frame it as a ‘democratic art’ by pointing to its ease of use and low barrier to entry, implying a unique affinity to American democratic society and its values. This framing belies the contradictions at the heart of photography in America, which has been used to support projects of dispossession, racial hierarchy, and state violence, but also struggles for liberation, individual expression, and self-determination. Drawing on the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of photographs made in and about America from the nineteenth century to the present, this seminar will explore photography’s role in establishing, sustaining, and critiquing some of the country’s foundational narratives and principles. Who gets to be an American, and to whom does America belong? Who gets to be an American photographer, and whose photographs are allowed to represent America? What are ‘American’ values, and how have photographers tried to uphold or dismantle those values? 

This course aims to look at Winckelmann not just as a passionate advocate of antiquity but as a “philosophical historian of ancient art”, as his American translator put it in 1849. In particular, the question of a developmental history with history-transcending high points remains of pressing interest: art historians today tend to pluralism, but remain normative in what art they consider worthy of attention. An examination of Winckelmann’s unique mix of personal and historical criteria of flourishing (beauty, pleasure, happiness), of book learning and visual imagination, is thus worthwhile on any account, not because we want to be as subjective as he is, but because we should be aware of what role our subjectivity, our hopes and fears, play in history. Accordingly, texts from the programmatic Gedanken (1755) and antiquarian writings to the monumental History of Ancient Art (1764, and an even longer posthumous version, 1776) will be examined, as will his analyses of beauty, of the representation of gender, of symbol and concept in art. 

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American pre-1800,Theory/Historiography

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. 

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Methodology

This course will introduce students to the methods, theories, and strategies of scientific approaches to the study of art objects and will consider the meaning of different materials and surfaces across artistic media. It will showcase new scholarship in the fields of heritage science and object-driven art history, drawing strength from collaborative work among scientists, conservators, art historians, and curators. Heritage science draws on the applied sciences and engineering to understand how to preserve the world’s cultural heritage and forge connections between making and meaning. The course will explore scientific methods for investigating the production and use of art objects. Focusing on the material studies of paintings and sculptures, pigments, and their binding media, students will learn about the material makeup of art objects. Readings will be drawn from a variety of disciplines, including material science and chemistry, art history, visual and material culture, anthropology, and philosophy.

How has the study of Chinese art evolved since the 1980s? This course charts major trends in the scholarship on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. Guided by the instructor’s reflections on his major writings from the past 45 years—and the changing intellectual contexts that shaped them—the class will read these and other key works from different periods, contextualize major debates in the field, and analyze their underlying theoretical and methodological positions.

Focusing on roughly 1200-1900 CE in East Asia, this course considers the social functions of East Asian paintings and craft objects in conjunction with their subject matter, materiality, and style. Art historian Timon Screech has observed that the function of most paintings in early modern Japan was to radiate positivity and auspiciousness --a fact also connected to Wu Hung's observations about the absence of 'ruins' in traditional Chinese art. How can we put a finer point on a painting's auspicious qualities, and what were some other functions that paintings were fulfilling during this time period, either in tandem with auspiciousness or in place of it? 

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Asian, modern (post-1800), Asian, premodern (pre-1800)

“Media Revolutions Then and Now” explores how the Protestant Reformation and innovations in printing technology coincided to catalyze a sweeping revolution that paved the way for media culture as we know it today. The seminar aims to interrogate traditional narratives that center on printing technology as the driving force of the Reformation, and instead shows how essential religious thought and practice were for the emergence and success of modern media. We will highlight how Reformers like Martin Luther not only provided content but also a theological legitimacy that sustained the print industry, thereby transforming print from a nascent technology into a powerful tool for religious and cultural change. Central to this historical and critical interrogation is the notion of the Reformation as the first modern media event, showcasing how this interplay of theology and technology laid the foundation for our modern media landscape. Accompanying an exhibition at Regenstein’s Special Collections which is running through the winter quarter, the seminar draws not only on the displayed items but also the library rich holdings in early prints. Students will be encouraged to put their own understanding and experience of contemporary media ecologies in dialogue with media ecosystem of the early Gutenberg Galaxy.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)

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This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian pre-1800

This course surveys the landscape of Mexican art from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s, exploring the developments, debates, and problems of this particularly rich moment in the history of twentieth-century art. Within the context of post-revolutionary society and politics, we will study the production, circulation, and reception of prints, photographs, easel painting, film, and craft, along with the work of the famed muralists. Issues to be addressed include: the formation of new ideas of nation and citizenship, the relationship of artists to the state, the place of indigenous peoples and their art in a new social order, the influence of foreign artists and trends, the incorporation of both old and new media and technologies, and the intersection of gender, class, and national identities.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Latin American

The course gives a critical introduction to early video and television art – from the proto-televisual impulses in the historical avant-gardes to the increasing proximity between analog and digital technologies in video art in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. We will focus on the various technical aspects of analog video, as well as on artistic practice and early writings on the subject. Topics  include the technics and politics of time; video, feedback systems and ecology; the reconfiguration of the artist’s studio; guerilla politics and alternative TV; video and autobiography; the relation between video and painting; the musical history of video; the invention of new machines; and video as a “television viewer”. 

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography

This seminar will introduce students to key medieval theories of vision in western Europe ranging from the theological to the scientific. We will explore the ways in which beholders approached and interacted with images, as well as how they understood and theorized these visual experiences. Ultimately, this course will interrogate the overlaps and gaps between theories and practices of looking in order to better understand what looking at an image in the Middle Ages entailed. Topics will include, but are not limited to: visionary experience; optical science; female mystics; devotional images; the Book of Revelation; and changes in pre-modern “visuality” on the eve of the Reformation.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)

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 course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor:  Asian pre-1800, Asian post-1800

This seminar explores visual culture and historical arts of Africa primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on traditional textiles. We will cover a broad geographical range with case studies that center on production, practices, and uses for textiles and related objects of devotion in everyday life. Investigations will highlight textiles’ tangible and intangible elements to examine their spiritual and protective dimensions through various lenses: organized religions, including the three Abrahamic faiths, 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 exhibitions for in-person, close looking and to fuel discussions surrounding the role of museums and museum display and interpretation. At least two class sessions will take place at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: African Art

What role have those objects considered superfluous, lavish, fashionable, and personal played in sculpting our collective social, political, and economic worlds? Furnishings, tapestries, silverware, porcelain, clothing, and jewelry have long been understood as superficial indulgences of the elite, existing outside the space and time of historical change. Yet such items have of course permeated all classes of society and processes of production, promotion, consumption, disparity, power, exploitation and attempts to resist it. Some Marxist historians have understood crisis as integral to capitalist modernity and its rupture, while theorists of art and architectural modernism have somewhat paradoxically imagined luxury as instrumental in building socially equitable futures. In this seminar, we will investigate a series of case studies in which luxury and crisis, these seemingly opposed terms, were negotiated and galvanized by makers, wearers, collectors, and the objects in their possession.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800)

On the one hand, this course explores the cartographic imagination in the medieval early modern period, focusing primarily on developments in cartographic representation in Italy and around the Mediterranean. These spatial experiments were crucial in the formation of knowledge about territories, cities, and urban societies and they have left a rich visual record of the built environment from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Through a range of readings that take maps, cartography, and space as their subject to study, we will explore the methods creating a spatial history of the early period. On the other hand, this course will also allow students to experiment in digital techniques of mapping historical space through a collective project in which we will all be learning to geo-reference historical maps of Rome to trace the city’s urban morphology across several centuries and, at the same time, explore ways of interpreting the past through such cartographic expressions.

Course fulfills the following criteria in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre modern (pre-1800)

This course explores recent forays into collecting and displaying contemporary Native American Art for the Field Museum, a museum of natural history and anthropology.  Through gallery and collections visits, dialogues with Field Museum staff, contemporary Native American artists, and readings, the course introduces students to the potential and problematic of locating, defining, and representing contemporary art within the colonial context of the Field Museum and how collaboration with artists and community members plays a role in shifting the paradigm toward one that centers collaborative curation and is inclusive of the direct voice of artists.  Students will have the opportunity to closely explore the new exhibition: Native Truths: Our voices, Our Stories, discuss the process by which contemporary art was selected for the exhibition and potentially dialogue directly with selected artists who contributed to the exhibition.    
Over 50 new works of art have been commissioned for the exhibition and are on display.  Students will also examine other contemporary art that is in the collection.    

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American post-1800

This course explores the historical and contemporary relationships between art and the environment in a global context. Two central questions will guide our inquiry. First, what constitutes “environmental art” as a field that is both theoretically and historically grounded yet open to redefinition, methodological innovation, and interdisciplinary experimentation? Second, what are the stakes of historicizing this field in a global framework? For instance, in parts of Asia, the term “environmental art” often refers to the environment in spatial and technological terms detached from environmentalist thought. Similarly, Land Art, a key milestone in the field, creates a productive tension with land-based or ecological perspectives. Considering the term’s porosity and evolving definitions, the course adopts a broad purview, encompassing landscape painting, still life paintings, and plantation architecture, as well as recent debates on the Anthropocene, Indigenous land-based thought, environmental justice, and new materialisms. In addition to examining the objects and theories that constitute environmental art, the course will also consider cases of environmentally-informed art historical practice.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Methodology, Asian, modern (post-1800)

One of the world’s largest and most populous cities, Tokyo has long captivated the imaginations of Japanese artists, especially ukiyo-e (woodblock print) designers, who returned repeatedly to the tradition of the “100 Views” (hyakkei) of the city in an effort to capture its mystery, majesty, and constant transformations.
This course is related to the planning phase of a special exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It posits a periodization of Tokyo based around four major ukiyo-e series of “100 Views" from Hiroshige in the 1850s, to Kobayashi Kiyochika's 1876-1882 series in the Meiji period, and continuing on to the “100 Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era” (Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue) by Koizumi Kishio (1893-1945), issued from 1927-1940. These prints will allow investigation of the creeping nationalism and rise in imperialism that would characterize the newly expanded “Great Tokyo” (Dai Tokyo) during the 1930s. The course concludes with an examination of a collaborative work entitled “100 Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century” made from 1989-1999, which will allow investigation of new printing techniques, such as lithography and linocuts, as well as the culture and economy of “The Metropolis of Tokyo” (Tokyo-tou) in the post-Bubble era, concluding with Takashi Murakami’s famed commissions for the real estate development Roppongi Hills.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Asian, modern (post-1800)

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 the University of Chicago.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Historiography, Asian, premodern (pre-1800), and African

This course will consider the profusion of new dyes (aniline, azo, and vat) available for coloring textiles, foodstuffs, and other materials in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and ask if these industrial innovations, which fueled subsequent rapid shifts in fashion, paved the way for modernist experiments with color. Artists who engaged with various media, including Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Marguerite Thompson Zorach, will be central to the discussion. Modern artists’ engagement with theories of color, particularly those expounded by specialists working in the textile industry, such as Michel-Eugène Chevreul, will also be examined. The relationship between colors, dyes, coloniality, politics, and modernity will be interrogated in order to surface the othering and misrecognition of artists and artforms within art historical discourse.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography

Renaissance collecting transcended the traditions of medieval treasuries, developed out of modes of categorization derived from antiquity, and ultimately became the foundation for the rise of the museum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Motivated by aesthetic consideration, curiosity, a quest for order and knowledge, and an interest in personal display, renaissance princes, noblewomen, emperors, naturalists and artists alike acquired art, objects, flora, fauna, ethnographic materials and exotica within a variety of different collecting spaces such as studioli, gardens, libraries, and kunst and wunderkammern. Through an examination of primary sources such as inventories, accounts and letters, of secondary sources about particular collections and collectors, and of various modern theories regarding possessing, consuming and gift giving things, this course explores the multifarious Renaissance collections of Europe, primarily focusing on Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and England.

 This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)

This course, co-taught between English and Art History, considers the fertile cross-pollination between photography and literature in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the present. Tracing the reciprocal influence of text and image-based practices, we will look to photographs in social documentary tradition as a creative foundation for works of prose, poetry, and fiction, while also analyzing the integration of these literary modes into visual media like photobooks and exhibitions. Using archival theories as a critical frame, we will consider photographs as a basis for historical knowledge, as well as sites of creative intervention and revision. The aim of our comparative investigations will be to develop an interdisciplinary toolkit and critical vocabulary to bridge literature, art history, and cultural studies. The course will include multiple visits to museums and campus archives.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography

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.  

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Historiography

The proliferation of straight lines in 20th Century art and architecture is generally associated with rational and universalist procedures and perspectives, and closely associated with the rise of industrial society. This course will look at straight lines in moden art from a very different perspective. We will study a hidden genealogy of straight lines that all seem to evoke the vagaries of sensory realities and capacities and that are aesthetic through and through.  These type of straight lines are all, in their various ways,  related to the close interaction between bodies and media technologies - one of the major themes in modern art. The question, of course, is how and why straight lines comes to express this relationship. To look at this question, we will study artworks and ideas that extend from the mid 19th-century to 21st century art and that includes a wide range of media and expressions, including architecture, painting, drawing, film, video and computer art. More specifically, we will look at how the changing deployment of the straight lines in art signals changes in the relation between bodies, technical systems and the concept of infrastructure. The course will start by paying close attention to one paradigmatic work: La Monte Young's "Composition 1960 # 10 (To Bob Morris): Draw A Straight Line And Follow It". We will  use this work as a preliminary template for moving back to 19th Century encounters between art, architecture and physiological aesthetics and for moving forward in time to recent forays in electronic and digital art. In between we will visit significant moments in pre- and postwar avant-garde art. My hope is that you will never think of straight lines in the same way again.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American post-1800

This course is a socio-spatial analysis of Florence and its most important urban complexes, which incorporated the interactive experience of images, objects, buildings, and urban communities. As a result, it draws on, both implicitly and explicitly, on the material, methods, and approaches of other disciplinary territories such geography, anthropology, social and cultural history, art and architectural history, as well as urban studies and it encourages you to think broadly about what it means to analyze history through an analysis of site specific practices both in terms of their design and production but also their historical reception, use, and experience. The motivation for this course comes from the way in which both Florence and the Renaissance have largely been explored from the perspective of design and production, artists, planners and patrons. Therefore, this course attempts to look at the way the city’s inhabitants actually responded to some of the most important developments in early modern cultural production, and how actively they contributed to some of the most familiar environments of western Europe and continues to be the site of some of the most intense cultural tourism.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)

In twenty-first century museums, the curation of Indigenous objects brings with it many dynamically changing responsibilities and considerations, as well as ethical and legal questions that vary by region, country, and legislation. These topics are essential knowledge for students studying Indigenous art and archaeology in their curriculum and who may be considering careers in related fields. That said, even scholars who do not directly study Indigenous art may someday find themselves responsible for it, whether as a department chair or museum director, making familiarity with these issues essential preparation. Ultimately, the curation of Indigenous art is shaping the leading edge of curatorial practice in museums today—as well as popular discourse.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Latin American

This course is a practicum in writing art criticism. Unlike historians, critics primarily respond to the art and architecture of their time and to developments in the contemporary art world and built environment. They write reviews of exhibitions that may be on view in galleries or museums and that may focus on single artists or broad themes; they respond to urban plans and newly built structures. Importantly, art critics often produce the very first discourse on a given art or design, shaping subsequent thinking, historiography, and making. Accordingly, art criticism is a genre that requires particular skills, for example, identifying why and how artworks and buildings matter, taking a fresh look at something familiar or developing a set of ideas even if unfamiliar with a subject, expressing strong yet sound opinions, and writing in impeccable and engaging ways. Students will develop these skills by reading and writing art criticism. We will examine the work of modern art and architecture critics ranging from Denis Diderot to Michael Kimmelmann and of artists active as critics ranging from Donald Judd to Adrian Piper. Class discussions will be as much about the craft of writing as about the art reviewed. We will deliberate the style and rhetoric of exhibition reviews, including details such as first and last sentences, order of paragraphs, word choices, and the like. This seminar is writing intensive with a total of five exhibition reviews, some of which will be rewritten substantially based on instructor, visitor, and peer feedback and general class discussion. Off-campus field trips also required. Selected student writing will be published in CWAC Voices (https://voices.uchicago.edu/artcriticism/).

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography

This course introduces “interregional art history” as an alternative to the dominant nation-state-based framework in the study of Asian art. The robust discourse on global art history in recent decades has generated a range of methodological approaches, including comparison, transnationalism, internationalism, regionalism, and the global contemporary. These approaches are also reflected in practice, as seen in artist-led collaborations, traveling exhibitions, and biennales. To capture the diversity of interregionalist thought and praxis, the course adopts a case study approach. Key themes include artistic engagements with Pan-Asianism, the 1955 Bandung Conference, Southeast Asian regionalism and ASEAN, Afro-Asia, Transpacific migration, the construction of the Third World and Global South, and the Asia Pacific Triennial (1993–present). While the course materials focus on East and Southeast Asia, students with diverse geographical interests are welcome. A significant portion of class time and assignments will be devoted to critically assessing the strengths, limitations, and future directions of global art history.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian post-1800, Theory and Methodology

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 a range of scholars generate novel ways of seeing and understanding the objects that they study. Our methodological investigations will be structured around the notion of scale, starting from macro concerns like canons and empires while gradually zooming in to consider environments and institutions, audiences and artists, individual artworks, and ultimately fragments thereof. As we move through these stages, we will consider the production, circulation, display, and reception of art objects through a variety of interpretive traditions including social history, critical theory, material culture, phenomenology, feminism and queer theory, and post- and decolonial thought.
 
Some of our guiding questions will be: How does thinking at different scales help us interrogate objects and the multiple histories that shape them? Can these approaches help us rethink, modify, or dismantle canonical patterns of the field? And how do they enable us to reappraise issues of exchange, power, and purpose in our own scholarship? 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 history of exhibiting the art of the ancient Americas from the colonial period until the present. From the European Wunderkammer to the development of the modern museum to recent exhibition, we will consider how colonial institutions and categories shaped the reception of visually elaborated objects from past Indigenous cultures. Paying close attention to the choice of objects presented in exhibitions as well as to the museographical decisions that shaped their presentation—to the extent that they can be reconstructed from archival materials—we will explore how exhibitions both reflected and shaped changing understandings of the ancient American past, and continue to do so today.

Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Latin American

How do we do art history? What is it? What are its premises and where does it come from? This seminar will explore the historical foundations, formulations and applications of current art historical methods, as well as the foundations of the art historical discipline as it emerged from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Theory and practice will be considered through select texts, with special focus on art history as a distinct scholarly discipline today. Rather than attempting to cover a comprehensive history of the methodological and historiographic traditions, the readings will attempt to present a coherent, if highly complex and conflictive, narrative that remains open to continued interrogation by its practitioners. 

This course will examine major developments in art practices from the late 1960s through the early 1980s in key site across South America. Questions and themes will include: the emergence and theorization of non-objectual and conceptual art practices in the region, the relationship between art and repressive political regimes, the establishment of new networks of exchange, and the formation of new definitions of a “Latin American art.” Our goal will be both to analyze the works of art under study and to interrogate leading scholarly approaches to that material. Cases will be drawn primarily from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, with a focus on recent literature in the field, but students are welcome to work on artists from other countries in the region for their individual research projects.

Counter to the narrative of "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art," this seminar examines Continental European art coming into its own. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Western European artists increasingly disentangled themselves from a crippling competition with North American art and focused on issues and ways of making that emerged out of their specific social, political, and cultural contexts. We will investigate the ways in which artists engaged with the Cold War, decolonization, urbanism, “68,” a limited art market, and an emerging pan-European identity and continental networks. With few exceptions, the class will focus on the art of France, Italy, the Benelux and German speaking countries. We will emphasize primary source documents, art with no or limited scholarship, and recently published books.

This class investigates different ways and contexts in which text and architecture are related. The most obvious evidence of their relationship comes from literature, e.g., lyrics, poems, travelogues, diaries, etc., epigraphic documents, and official records. Material texts could also be inscribed on the buildings as traces that reveal practices of building trade, beliefs, or conventions. Religious texts in spells or talismans could also be applied to architecture to exorcise unwanted forces. More extreme examples can be found in the so-called sutra pagodas, literally constructed on paper by sutra texts. Conversely, architecture was also built to contain texts, such as libraries or sutra pavilions. The primary inquiry of the class is to ask how Chinese architecture can be redefined and its cultural/religious/political significance enriched, teasing out not just its spatiality but temporality through text.

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. The course is also an attempt to intervene in the history of beholding. We want to understand what attention is—and can become—when it separates out from a hypothesis, a method, or an organized mood.

In the fall of their third year, students register for the Art History Department Teaching Colloquium. The requirements for this class, fulfilled over the course of the entire academic year, consist of attending three department-sponsored teaching workshops, one each quarter, in addition to at least six hours of programming at the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning (CCTL), chosen by each student to match their individual pedagogical training needs.

All faculty and graduate students in the department are welcome at the quarterly teaching
workshops, the topics of which 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; instructor authority and classroom dynamics; leading discussion; effective lecturing; strategic use of images in classroom teaching; small-group class projects; designing and grading assignments; preparing lesson plans; designing syllabi.

The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the workshops and in their
chosen CCTL programming, to register for the teaching colloquium for credit, and to earn a Pass, which will be recorded once the requirements are completed in Spring quarter.

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.

This course examines concepts of art that reflect iconophobia, “fear of images,” in the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Since antiquity, iconophobia has led to theological debates that resulted in the prohibition of images in sacred spaces, rituals, and other forms of religious practice. In extreme cases, iconophobia has caused acts of iconoclasm, the violent destruction of art. In all three religions, fear of idolatry (“idol worship”) has been the main cause of iconophobia. We will examine what exactly constitutes an idol and how the definitions of idols differ from iconophile (“image-loving”) assessments of religious art. Both iconophobic and iconophile arguments shed light on the various functions and effects of religious images and illustrate their power. Furthermore, they reveal attitudes towards artistic creation, materiality, aesthetics, sensory perception, and truth in art. In order to understand the causes and manifestations of iconophobia, we will examine a range of primary sources, both textual and visual, and engage with the relevant scholarship. We will take a comparative approach, but also pay attention to phenomena and developments that are unique to each religion. Most of the topics and readings will focus on the premodern period from antiquity to the 16th century. However, we will also look at some of the effects of iconophobia in our own time. 

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American pre-1800

This course explores the rich traditions of description – ekphrasis – from Greco-Roman antiquity into the middle ages. It tackles texts (both prose and verse) in order to establish the ramifications of a genre in the European tradition, and its applications in particular to visual culture and religion. There will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond these into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing, religious imagination and ekphrasis in all periods or contexts, as well as into the use of images or films as themselves forms of descriptive response. The course is intended for graduates but interested undergraduates are very welcome. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter. Course Note: This course will be taught virtually for the last two weeks of the quarter. 

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American pre-1800

This course lays out the background to the historiographic complexities of studying visual culture and art history now in relation to the ways the dominant theories and methods of the discipline involved in the context of 20th-century history and ideologies. It is impossible in 9 sessions to cover the entire historiography of an ancient discipline. The course will therefore take a selective approach by focusing on the foundations of the art historical approaches in Germany in the Twentieth century that have proved most formative for the development of the discipline in Anglo-American contexts after the Second World War. This may be seen as a narrowing of focus, but it has the benefit of offering a coherent if highly complex and conflictive story to uncover: effectively the most philosophically intense moment in art history from 1900 to the 1950's, the relation of the discipline and its exiles to the rise, triumph and demise of the Third Reich, and the beginnings of its development in the post-War period. Course Note: This course will be taught virtually for the last two weeks of the quarter.

This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American post-1800