Courses

Explore the undergraduate course offerings in art history, including cross-listed classes and college core classes offered by art history faculty. Much of the coursework offered by art history faculty encourages direct engagement with art historical sources and original works of art, taking advantage of the resources of the Smart Museum and other art institutions in Chicago and beyond. Part of the Rhoades Exchange Program, the annual Rhoades Seminar is taught by a curator at the Art Institute. The Suzanne Deal Booth Conservation Seminars are offered by a conservator or conservation scientist based at the Art Institute. Gold-Gorvy Traveling Seminars involve class travel to work with objects, buildings, and sites first hand.

Undergraduate courses are numbered 10000-29999. 100-level courses satisfy Arts Core requirements, while 200-level courses fulfill major and minor requirements.  Courses of study should be developed after consulting the catalog for required classes and conferring with the advisor and/or Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Undergraduate Courses

10100
Introduction to Art

This course develops skills in perception, comprehension, and evaluation of various art objects. It encourages close analysis of visual materials, exploring the range of questions and methods appropriate to works of art, in their historical, theoretical, and social dimensions. Most importantly, the course emphasizes articulate writing and salient argumentation about visual and other aesthetic phenomena. Three coherent units, on Monument/Site, Image/Medium, and Object/Museum, explore these issues across cultures and periods. Examples draw on original objects in campus collections.

Jacobé Huet
2023-2024
Spring

10701
Sound and the Built Environment

(
ARCH 10701
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.) Please also note that this course will include several field trips around Chicago during class time; if you have any questions or concerns about that, please share them in the consent form when you complete it.

Sound and the Built Environment examines the role of sound at all scales of the built world from the room to the city. This course highlights a sound studies approach in which students will learn how to listen deeply, an act of resistance in a culture that suffers from primacy of the visual. Students will also learn about concepts such as the soundscape, how to read a room intuitively through basic concepts of acoustics (reverberation, clarity, balance, etc), the history of buildings designed purposefully for sound, and the role sound plays in urban life throughout history. Deliverables for this course include a sound studies portion in which students will examine soundscapes that impact their lives in Chicago, and a design portion in which students re-evaluate spaces around Chicago through an acoustics lens.

Kate Wagner
2023-2024
Autumn

14201
In and Out: Supply and Waste in 21st Century Dwelling

(
ARCH 14201
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 6, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.

In the next 25 years, give or take, the world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion souls. 68% of these people, roughly 6.8 billion people, will be living in cities. The challenges of energy, transportation, food production and distribution, shelter are the IN and are, typically, the focus of architecture and its related disciplines. What about the OUT? Fuel emissions, food waste, human waste (solid and liquid), human remains, medical waste, thermal by-products of heating, cooling and manufacture, not to mention building waste to produce housing for 10 billion are the focus of this studio. As we urbanize, as cities expand, as the space for containing waste is ever more remote and the waste itself ever more copious, how do we manage, control or even understand the problem? This course will look at the challenges facing our cities as both recursive and emergent. The scale of these issues is of unprecedented magnitude, though not new in principle. As a practical matter, any solution must simultaneously reference contemporary approaches to waste management and urban sustenance and ancient practices of integration, symbiosis and elimination.

Kindon Mills
2023-2024
Winter

14413
Global Pop

When you hear the words “Pop Art,” what comes to mind? Soup cans, comic book panels,  portraits of Marilyn Monroe, enormous paper clips? These are some of the most iconic examples of Pop Art made in the United States. Since the 1960s, artists around the world have also explored art’s relationship to mass media, consumerism, and representation. This course will examine the work of artists outside of the Euro-American canon who have employed Pop Art strategies. We will cover a wide geographic and temporal expanse, with a special focus on Latin America, and including as well art from East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 

We will consider how artists have employed Pop Art to both challenge and engage with artistic tradition in their respective countries; probe issues of national and personal identity; intervene in political conversations; question semantic and representational certainties; foster new kinds of relationships between art and its viewers; and reflect critically on their media environments. 

Adriana Obiols Roca
2023-2024
Spring

14707
Meiji Modern: Reassessing Common Narratives of Japanese Art

This course is taught in tandem with the traveling exhibition "Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan," shown at The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, open from March 21st, 2024, to June 9th, 2024. Through the exhibition and its objects, the course will contemplate and question the canonization of Meiji art (and the common narratives of art that are engrained in one’s mind). The main pedagogical approach used in this course is visual analysis. Students are required to visit the museum and interact with the actual objects, which will help solidify abstract concepts of Meiji artworks learned in class. While this course is not intended to survey Japanese art history, it aims to equip students with skills that will enable them to ask art-historical questions. Students majoring in art history may also benefit from taking this course, as it is an excellent opportunity to understand what one misses when one cannot access physical artwork.

Minori Egashira
2023-2024
Spring

15705
Introduction to the Built Environment

(
ARCH 15705
)
This course and ARCH 20700 overlap significantly in materials and activities, and students should plan to take only one of the two. They are offered at the 100- and 200- level respectively to satisfy student needs, but should otherwise be considered the same.
This course and ARCH 10700 overlap significantly in materials and activities, and students should plan to take only one of the two. They are offered at the 200- and 100- level respectively to satisfy student needs, but should otherwise be considered the same.

Introduction to the Built Environment. This course aims to equip students with the basic skills and knowledge required to analyze architecture and the urban environment. It offers an introduction to the methods and procedures of the architectural historian. These include practical tasks such as understanding architectural terminology, reading and interpreting architectural drawings, engaging with buildings ‘on site’, and studying buildings in context through urban design issues, such as street networks and public spaces. At a broader level, the course will involve critical discussions about the relationship between architecture and society, the building as a historical object, cultural representations of architecture, and modes of perceiving/experiencing the built environment. The course will operate through a combination of in-class seminars and site visits to buildings in Chicago. This course is satisfies the core level arts requirement.

2023-2024
Autumn

15706
Skills & Processes for Architecture and Urban Design

(
ARCH 15706
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 6, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

This studio course seeks to acquaint students with a range of skills and methods in design, including manual, digital and hybrid methods. Students will test out several design processes through a series of problem sets and micro-projects, and develop their own personal tools and ways as they go. An emphasis will be put on free play and experimentation, followed by rounds of revision and refinement. We will also consider how historical research, precedent, context and constraint can help meaningfully inform design process, without overly paralyzing it. This is an excellent course to take if you are interested in other studio design courses (such as courses listed ARCH 2419X and ARCH 24267), but want to build up your skills before undertaking a major, quarter-long project.

2023-2024
Winter

15780
Western Modern Art from the Enlightenment until Today

Surveying the history of modern Western art from the 18th through the 21st century, this course will introduce students to the artists, art works, and issues central to the relationship between art and modernity: the rise of the self and identity politics, the growth of the metropolis, the questioning of the "real" and the invention of photography, the autonomous thrust and semiotic potential of abstraction, the political ambitions of the avant-garde, and the impact of consumer and media cultures. Most discussion sections will center around original works of art and take place in the Smart Museum of Art.

2023-2024
Winter

15800
Contemporary Art

Focusing on the interrelationships between the art industry and mass cultural formations within the post-industrial and post-colonial worlds, our survey will address a wide range of historical and methodological questions: the impact of new technologies of production, reproduction, and communication; the contested legacies of the utopian projects of the Euro-American avant-gardes, the changing roles of cultural institutions and cultural producers, the formation of new audiences, the global impact of movements for social liberation, and the rise and fall of “modern art.”

2023-2024
Spring

16003
Art of Mesoamerica

This course provides an introduction to the art and architecture of Mesoamerica, a region that encompasses much of modern-day Mexico and northern Central America. We will examine sculpture, painting, architecture, ceramics, and other arts of the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican civilizations over a period of three millennia, from ca. 1500 B.C. to the time of the Spanish invasion in 1519. We will study sacred art, courtly art, architecture and urbanism, writing systems and their relation to images, and the interactions between artistic traditions. Students will gain familiarity with the major monuments and traditions of Mesoamerica. In addition, they will develop their ability to read critically, to look productively, to analyze unfamiliar works of art and visual traditions, and to write lucidly about art.

2023-2024
Winter

16100
Art of the East: China

This course is an introduction to the arts of China, covering the period from the Shang-Zhou dynasties to the twentieth century. It focuses on significant monuments and artworks produced in imperial, aristocratic, literati, religious, and public contexts. We will study archaeological finds, underground architecture, temples, paintings and calligraphy, objects, and artworks. The goal is to help students comprehend Chinese art’s main ideas and concepts, use proper language to communicate art historical ideas, and think critically about issues arising from China’s visual and material culture.

2023-2024
Winter

16800
Arts of Japan

(
EALC 16806
)

This course surveys the arts of the Japanese archipelago through the study of selected major sites and artifacts. We will consider objects in their original contexts and in the course of transmission and reinterpretation across space and time. How did Japanese visual culture develop in the interaction with objects and ideas from China, Korea, and the West? Prehistoric artifacts, the Buddhist temple, imperial court culture, the narrative handscroll, the tea ceremony, folding screens, and woodblock prints are among the topics covered.

2023-2024
Winter

16911
Modeling Contemporary Japanese Architecture

(
ARCH 16911
)

This undergraduate seminar focuses on contemporary Japanese architecture. It builds on an association between three main pedagogies for the study of architecture: observation, critical reading, and modeling. Our discussions will focus primarily on buildings and works by individual architects and artists that are currently active in Japan and whose work contributes to a broader understanding of architecture as a creative field. Special emphasis will be given to the work of a younger generation of Japanese architects who are currently exerting a significant impact on the development of contemporary Japanese culture. The seminar recognizes the broad use and potential of architectural scale models and intends to use them as a central tool for investigation. Students will analyze buildings through various forms of model making. The construction of physical, three-dimensional scale models will provide a useful platform to further develop insights gained through reading, class discussions, and in-depth study of architectural representations.

Erez Golani Solomon
2023-2024
Autumn

17002
Drawing and the Making of Architecture

(
ARCH 17002
)
Consent Only

This September term course focuses on the practice of drawing in the making of architecture. It explores the act of tracing lines on a surface as the foundation of design, a word that evokes through its own origins the very moment of architectural invention. As the most direct expression of the architect's ideas and an operative form of 'non-verbal thinking,' the physical response of the hand to media contributes crucially to the creative process. This studio course will offer an unmediated encounter with drawing techniques: we will test different supports-from parchment to screen, end especially paper-and different tools-natural chalks, antique and modern inks, industrial pencils, as well as keyboards and tablets-in order to understand the interaction, throughout history, between materials and design practice. Parallel to this, we will discuss a wide range of readings critically, thus reconstructing the evolving theory of representation in architectural writings and the relevance of graphic expression to both theorists and practitioners. Ultimately, the course will allow students to penetrate norms and conventions of technical drawing and to understand a primary tool in the production of architecture from the point of view of its makers.

2023-2024

17209
Art in Paris

France emerged from the 16th century devastated by wars of religion; sixty years later it was the most powerful state in Europe. This course will provide an overview of French art in this period, with a strong emphasis on the city of Paris. Three themes will predominate: philosophical skepticism (pyrrhonisme) and the New Science; practices of knowledge, self-transformation and art-making; and the rise of absolute monarchy.  Each week will be divided evenly between lectures at the Paris Center; site visits and walking tours in Paris to discuss architecture, urbanism and to see pictures in their original settings; and visits to the Musée du Louvre.  Walks will be about two hours in duration; visits to the Louvre will be about three hours; a final visit to the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte will take much of a day.  Readings will be drawn chiefly from primary texts (in translation).

2023-2024
Spring

17412
U.S. Latinx Art

This course explores the history of artistic production of Latin American diasporic communities living in the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century and up to our present. How have Latinx artists advanced, challenged, and/or undermined the development of U.S.-American art? How did Latinx artists in the U.S. operate both in dialogue with and independently from artists working in Latin America? Where did the agendas of Latin American expatriates and exiles, immigrants, and U.S. nationals of Latin American heritage intersect and where did they diverge? Exploring a wide range of artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, murals, performance, installation, video) we will trace a history of modern and contemporary art through the work of artists whose heritage spans diverse Latinx cultures, including but not limited to: Chicanx, Nuyorican, Afro-Latinx, and Cuban-American. We will consider the ways that art helps us to unpack and push against the notion of Latinx identity and how it helps us tell a story of Latinx culture and experience in the U.S.

2023-2024
Winter

17501
Art and Feminism

How has feminism changed the landscape of artistic practices over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries? What does a history of feminist art look like and how does it relate to a feminist history of art? In this course, students will consider the relationship between art and feminism, focusing upon artwork produced in the Americas over the last century. Through course readings, seminar discussions, and the close analysis of artworks, the course will be structured around a series of thematic investigations across the geographical space of the Americas, focusing especially upon the U.S. and Mexico. We will consider texts by feminist art historians such as Linda Nochlin and Anne Wagner alongside key texts by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Laura Mulvey; we will explore the work of artists who have identified as feminists (e.g., Judy Chicago, Howardena Pindell) as well as those who have complicated or even resisted such identification (e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama). Key themes will include: representations of bodies, eroticisms, domestic space and labor, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the politicization of materials and making processes.

2023-2024
Autumn

17608
Encountering Islamic Art in France, 11th-21st Century

Note: This course takes place in Paris

Islamic artworks have been among the prized possessions of French collections from the medieval period to the present, but, as the reasons they have entered these collections have changed, so have the institutional spaces that frame how they might be encountered. In the first week, we study Islamic rock crystals and oliphants that were once in medieval French treasuries, and visit the Basilica of Saint Denis. In the second, we study Islamic ceramics, textiles, and works on paper that inspired French designers and painters, and visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. Finally, we study select works that have recently been exhibited for the explicit purpose of cultural ambassadorship, and visit l'Institut du Monde Arabe. How do the formal qualities of specific works themselves relate to the ways that institutional spaces can inflect their resonance?

2023-2024
Autumn

17735
The Art of Post-Revolutionary Mexico

This course surveys the landscape of Mexican art from the eve of the Revolution 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 postrevolutionary 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 famous Mexican 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 the Indian in the 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. Students will develop their ability to analyze works of art both formally and historically and will learn the fundamentals of writing about art and visual culture.

2023-2024
Spring

17915
Women's Work

(
ARCH 17915
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

As a haptic art, an art experienced through touch as well as the other senses, architecture operates at multiple scales: that of hand, building, city. The scale of the hand gives the most direct access to architecture and its furnishings: think of a handrail, a chair, a textile, a brick pattern, a wood detail. This is the realm of craft in architecture and was, for decades, the realm inhabited and ruled by women practitioners. Women designed furniture, made drawings, wove textiles, produced pottery and glasswork as a means of expression within the male world of architectural practice. As an introduction to the study of architecture, craft entails applying principles of proportion, scale, tactility, precision, materiality, and assembly; in this way, craft is a microcosm of architecture. Through a series of projects and readings centered around the craft arts and the women who advanced them, this studio course will introduce students to small-scale making and translate that process to larger scales. Students will undertake two investigations: the first a series of small craft objects and a set of orthographic drawings describing the making process, the second a spatial analysis and workspace for a craft practitioner.

Kindon Mills
2023-2024
Autumn

18606
Structuring China’s Built Environment

(
ARCH 18606, EALC 18606
)

This course asks a basic question: Of what does China’s built environment in history consist? Unlike other genres of art in China, a history of China’s built environment still waits to be written, concerning both the physical structure and spatial sensibility shaped by it. To this end, students will be introduced to a variety of materials related to our topic, ranging from urban planning, buildings, tombs, gardens, and furniture. The course aims to explore each of the built environments—its principles, tradition, and history—based on existing examples and textual sources, and to propose ways and concepts in which the materials discussed throughout the quarter can be analyzed and understood as a broader historical narrative of China’s built environment.

2023-2024
Autumn

18706
Experiencing Medieval Art

How did medieval artists and audiences encounter their material world, and how do we experience these objects and spaces today? Guided by these questions, students in this introductory survey course will learn how to describe, analyze, and contextualize landmarks of art and architecture from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (ca. 200-1200) over a broad geographical area, from the Steppe to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to the British Isles. Class sessions will introduce students to fundamental art-historical methods through a combination of practicum sessions, lectures, group formal analysis, and discussion of assigned readings. In practicum sessions, we will interact with materials such as incense, enamel, parchment and papyrus from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection; experiment with modes of manufacturing Eucharistic bread; view amulets and pilgrimage tokens in the Smart Museum Study Room; handle manuscripts in the Special Collections Research Center; and visit the neo-Gothic Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Proceeding chronologically, we will focus on key themes in art-historical scholarship of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including: sacred spaces in the major monotheistic religions of the period (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the movement of objects and people, text-image relationships, changing theorizations of the image, and the sociopolitical uses of art and architecture. In addition to participation, evaluation will be based on the submission of two annotated readings, a short written formal analysis assignment of an object that must be viewed in person, a midterm, and a final exam. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.


 

May Peterson
2023-2024
Winter

20685
Material Narratives

(
ARCH 20685
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 12, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

This studio explores architecture and design thinking through the lens of building materials--wood, masonry, concrete, metal, glass, and sustainable products. Our focus is on how designers and architects think about materials, how they use them in their work, and how materials can play a principal role in the design process. The larger studio project is to design a pavilion somewhere on campus using what we learn and the language of materials to tell a story. There will be an emphasis on using physical models, along with sketching and drawing, to investigate, develop and communicate our ideas. A few off-campus trips to buildings around Chicago during seminar sessions will require some travel before and after class.

Sam Park
2023-2024
Spring

20704
From Detail to City at Taliesin

(
ARCH 20704
)
Consent Required

The course is designed to immerse students in architectural drawing and making at a site of prolific drawing and making past, in a remarkable environment both natural and built. Working both individually and together, we will use our surroundings at Taliesin to tackle five short projects, increasing in scale, from the tiniest architectural details up through consideration of city and region. As part of the latter portion of the course, we will also consider the Driftless region of Wisconsin specifically, and issues facing this unique rural area in 2023, including environmental challenges, questions of housing, and rural foodways. Typical days will include studio time in the Hillside studio, ample exploration of the Taliesin grounds both programmed and free, conversations with guests familiar with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and others who spent time at Taliesin, excursions across the Driftless region (including additional buildings designed by Wright and others close to him), and a modest amount of work helping to maintain the Taliesin site.

2023-2024

21314
/
31314
Fluxus and the Question of Media

The course investigates the international Fluxus network of the 1960’s and 70’s from a perspective on the relationship between art, media and technology. Often identified with the concept of “intermedia” launched in a 1966 text by artist, writer and publisher Dick Higgins, Fluxus artists seemed at pain to distinguish their work from the multimedia or gesamtkunstwerk approaches of the Happening artists, seeking instead to formulate a mode of working between or even beyond media. Underpinned by a desire to pass beyond the work of art itself, this was a complex position that had profound implications for their approaches to technologies and practices such as film, video, computing, sound/music, theatre, poetry and image-making. We will try to map the various facets of this position, with particular emphasis on its relation to another central concept in Fluxus: the work as event.

2023-2024
Autumn

21451
/
31451
Rhoades Seminar: Reading Ancient Egyptian Art

For millennia ancient Egyptian artists constructed visual narratives on tomb chapel walls, temple structures, and other material remains – such as stelae – that provide glimpses of lived experiences in the land that gave rise to this ancient African culture. Focusing on two-dimensional representations produced in Egypt (ancient Kemet) between approximately 3000–1069 BCE, this course will consider the functions of such pictorial accounts within their original contexts and explore approaches to reading and interpreting them. We will investigate topics including depictions of “daily life” on the Nile, royal sojourns to foreign lands, and the imagined landscapes of the underworld, deconstructing scenes and the ancient artistic conventions used to produce them. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the natural environment of North Africa is reflected in the arts of ancient Egypt, from detailed renderings of indigenous flora and fauna to interpretations of the physical landscape. Sources will include ancient texts in translation and firsthand examination of Egyptian artifacts in Chicagoland museums, including the ISAC Museum.

Ashley Arico
2023-2024
Spring

21809
Art at the Frontiers of Faith: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval Iberia

Spain has long been marked out as a special case in medieval art history: a geographically and culturally distinct area in which the lives, material culture, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more closely intertwined than in any other part of the medieval world. This seminar proposes to test this deep-rooted vision of Spain’s cultural hybridity, tracing through the study of its visual culture histories of cross-confessional contact, collaboration, and conflict. To account for local particularities and historical contingencies, the course follows a broadly chronological framework beginning with the construction of the Great Mosque of Córdoba after the Arab-Berber conquests of 711 and ending with the erection of Granada Cathedral in the aftermath of the expulsions and forced conversions of 1492. Over the quarter, we will critically analyze questions of religious and regional identity, paying close attention to how modern concerns have shaped scholarly approaches to this material. We will also take advantage of Chicago’s collections of medieval Spanish art, notably those at the Art Institute and Newberry Library. This course welcomes students from different disciplines and caters especially to anyone interested in exploring questions related to the historical construction of identity and difference, the complexities of intercultural exchange, the modern reception of the Middle Ages, and the role of art in representing and shaping experience. 

Ben Diego
2023-2024
Autumn

22305
/
32305
Spiritual and Protective Lives of Objects in African Art

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. 

J. Purdy
2023-2024
Autumn

22816
/
32816
Narrative Frescos in Early Modern Italy

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.

2023-2024
Winter

22909
People in Motion: Rethinking Transit in Chicago and Beyond

(
ARTH 22909
)
Consent Only

How do you get from A to B? Within and between today’s urbanized areas, that seemingly simple question has become one of the most fraught and intractable problems. This course seeks to address questions about public transit across scales, from pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure at the level of individual intersections and blocks up to regional train networks and beyond. Like other design studio courses, the class will be project-based, and will ask students to develop a wide understanding of existing systems, but also to learn through creative design projects that expand their sense of what's possible. After working together to understand many existing transit solutions across different scales, to come to terms with and document Chicago's transit landscape, and to dream speculatively about untested transit possibilities both low- and high-tech, students will focus on building a portfolio of creative suggestions for their respective "clients" (e.g., the University of Chicago, the 4th Ward Alderman). Alongside this project work, assigned readings and explorations around Chicago will immerse students in the culture and philosophy of moving people and things, across different moments past, present and future.

Evan Carter
2023-2024
Winter

23011
The Japanese House Question

(
ARCH 23011
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 6, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

This studio course in architecture focuses on the ‘Japanese house’ and the ‘Japanese empty house’ as main objects of investigation.We will study the ‘Japanese house’—arguably the most prolific architectural typology in modern and contemporary Japan, and specifically a small group of ‘Japanese empty houses’ that we will select from Japan’s ‘bank’ of empty houses, which currently includes about ten million. Each student will choose an existing empty house in Tokyo area and develop a transformation scheme. The ‘Japanese house’ and the ‘Japanese empty house’ will be observed, analyzed, represented, and finally re-interpreted by means of architectural design.

Erez Golani Solomon
2023-2024
Winter

23401
Revision, Expression & Portfolio Design

(
ARCH 23401
)
Consent only: Strong priority will be given to third and fourth years who've taken at least two other ARCH studio classes already. Students who have not already taken ARCH 24205 (Skills & Processes for Architecture and Urban Design) may be asked to consult some of the problem sets from that class ahead of this one, to ensure a baseline upon which this class will build. To request consent, please email instructor Luke Joyner (lukejoy@uchicago.edu).

 

This studio course, similar to a "senior seminar" in other disciplines, serves five purposes: (1) to allow students to pick up a few elements (drawings, models, collages, visual and place-based research, etc.) they've produced in other ARCH studio courses and spend more time refining them, outside the broader demands of a thematic studio class, (2) to acquaint students with advanced skills in expression and representation related to the revision and refinement of these elements, based on student interest and needs, (3) to assist students in the development of a portfolio of studio work, either toward application for graduate school or simply to have for themselves, and in systems to organize projects and revisions, (4) to add to students' typographic and graphic design skillsets, primarily using the Adobe Creative Suite, as part of the portfolio process, and (5) to practice and hone communication and writing skills related to discussing architectural projects. While there will be a modest set of skills-based exercises each week, to help structure the studio, most of the work for this class will be students' own project revisions and portfolios, and most of class time will be spent sharing and refining both. Work will be primarily individual, but students will be expected to actively and eagerly support one another, and learn from each other, all along the way. Students will be required, throughout this course, to work with both Adobe Creative Suite and Rhinoceros, as well as through hand drawing and whatever other media the original projects used; other tools or software will be optional, based on student interest.

 

2023-2024
Autumn

23602
/
33602
Native American Art at The Field Museum: An Anthropological Perspective

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 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. 

2023-2024
Spring

24045
Painting Landscapes in 19th century France

Note: This course takes place in Paris

Over the course of the 19th century in France, landscape emerged as a preeminent genre for exploring the complexities of the modern world. The massive growth of cities, industry, tourism, and other environmental changes dramatically affected inherited notions of ecological balance. How did landscape painters respond to these challenges by developing new aesthetic attitudes and representational strategies? We’ll study how landscapes evolved from the Romantics and the Barbizon school, through the Realists at mid-century, to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Artists to be considered in depth include Théodore Rousseau, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. As many classes as possible will be held at the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. We’ll also make field trips to some of the sites represented by these painters.

2023-2024
Spring

24190
Imagining Chicago's Common Buildings

(
ARCH 24190
)

This course is an architectural studio based in the common residential buildings of Chicago and the city's built environment. While design projects and architectural skills will be the focus of the course, it will also incorporate readings, a small amount of writing, some social and geographical history, and several explorations around Chicago. The studio will: (1) give students interested in pursuing architecture or the study of cities experience with a studio course and some skills related to architectural thinking, (2) acquaint students intimately with Chicago's common residential buildings and built fabric, and (3) situate all this within a context of social thought about residential architecture, common buildings, housing, and the city. This course is part of the College Course Cluster program: Urban Design.

Consent is required to enroll in this course. Interested students should email the instructor (Luke Joyner, lukejoy@uchicago.edu) to briefly explain their interest and any previous experience with the course topics. Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment.

2023-2024
Autumn

24190
Imagining Chicago's Common Buildings

(
ARCH
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.) Please also note that this course will include several field trips around Chicago during class time; if you have any questions or concerns about that, please share them in the consent form when you complete it.

This course is an architectural studio based in the common residential buildings of Chicago and the city's built environment. While design projects and architectural skills will be the focus of the course, it will also incorporate readings, a small amount of writing, some social and geographical history, and several explorations around Chicago. The studio will: (1) give students interested in pursuing architecture or the study of cities experience with a studio course and some skills related to architectural thinking, (2) acquaint students intimately with Chicago's common residential buildings and built fabric, and (3) situate all this within a context of social thought about residential architecture, common buildings, housing, and the city. This course is part of the College Course Cluster program: Urban Design.

2023-2024
Autumn

24206
Cultural Cartography of Bronzeville

(
ARCH 24206
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 12, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

The city continually erases itself, replacing the spaces, architectures, objects and activities that resonate in the memory of its inhabitants. While this process is the consequence of familiar forces — capitalist development, socio-cultural changes, environmental responses — the phenomenon of perpetual erasure sometimes produces a form of collective amnesia, interfering with our ability to reconcile with our pasts, especially histories of systemic displacement, exclusion, and exploitation. This course, a hybrid of a seminar and studio, will examine the deep cultural and urbanistic implications of Chicago’s Bronzeville. Via poetry, fiction, history, testimony, interviews, photography,and films, students will recover Bronzeville’s layered history and contemporary implications. In the studio, students will develop drawings to connect these narratives so space and time. Via site visits and conversations, this course will connect with artists, architects and researchers currently completing projects within and adjacent to this area of the city.

2023-2024
Spring

24210
Complex Curves/Plastic Shapes

(
ARCH 24210, ARTV 20020
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 12, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

This course examines the construction and use of complex shapes in 20th century art and architecture. We begin with study of several mid-20th century sculptors, including Gabo, Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Arp, Hepworth and others, who focused on the use of geometry in complex three-dimensional form-making. Students will investigate abstract form through a series of weekly exercises building up in complexity that we then discuss as a group during class. Through these exercises, students will also build up digital modeling skills, which provide a fundamental connection between their drawings and three-dimensional objects. We will ground our investigations by studying the sculptors, from whom we can learn formal organizing principles such as regulatory lines, boundaries and edges, shallow and deep space, and variations on transparency. The discipline learned is applicable at a variety of scales, from small shapes to larger architectural or landscape endeavors. Familiarity with any design process is recommended.

2023-2024
Spring

24255
/
34255
Postcolumbian: The Ancient Americas in Modern and Contemporary Art

In this seminar we will examine the varied ways in which modern and contemporary artists have engaged with the art of Aztec, Maya, Inca, and other ancient American Indigenous art traditions.  We will examine modernist appropriations, later Chicano and Chicana movements, and contemporary re-inventions of Precolumbian art as new forms of Latin American and Latinx expression, commentary, and critique. Artists include Frank Lloyd Wright, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Henry Moore, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Enrique Chagoya, Yolanda López, Yreina D. Cervántez, Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ana de Obregoso, Kukuli Velarde, among others. We will consider the ways artists have used forms of the past in a range of political, social, and aesthetic contexts, and ask what agency iconic forms of the past may have exerted, and continue to exert, on the present. Readings on modern and contemporary episodes in this “Post-Columbian” history will be paired with discussions of ancient art and visual culture, as we entwine understandings of early artworks with later histories.

2023-2024
Autumn

24270
Children & Architecture

(
ARCH 24270
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 12, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

Many who pursue architecture do so initially out of a childlike fascination with buildings, places and worlds. Curiosity and limited understanding naturally provide children with an exploratory relationship to the built environments they traverse, and children also often show a heightened sense of wonder -- heightened emotions of all kinds -- as that relationship plays out. (This can be positive and formative, or scary and traumatic.) And yet, many of the adults who make choices about the worlds we inhabit think mostly of adults, and as adults, in doing so. This architecture studio course investigates the built world through a child's eyes, across different moments in history, including our own. Readings and seminar discussions will range from playgrounds to blocks, preschools to family relations, swimming pools and sandcastles to the very construction of childhood as an idea. We will explore Chicago, and meet with builders of all ages, likely culminating in designing (and potentially building) a real playground space. While previous experience with architectural skills is not necessary to excel in this course, childlike curiosity is required.

2023-2024
Spring

24651
/
34651
Latest Experiments in Architectural History

(
ARCH 24651
)

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 argument, 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.  

Jacobé Huet
2023-2024
Winter

24815
/
34815
Collecting the Ancient World: Museum Practice and Politics

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.

2023-2024
Winter

24816
/
34816
Museums Today

Through a series of case studies, this course examines how museums are radically rethinking their function, their
audiences, and their practices. What problems do they seek to redress? Who do the solutions aim to serve, and to
what end? This course ultimately asks students to debate the role of the museum in the 21st century by way of course
readings drawn from theory, scholarship, and the popular press; class discussions complimented by visits from guest
scholars, artists, and curators; and engagement with real and virtual museum spaces.

2023-2024
Winter

24910
/
34910
Insect Media

(
ARTH 34910, ARTH 24910
)

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world?

This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.

Thomas Lamarre
2023-2024
Autumn

25119
/
35119
Architecture and Colonialism in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia

(
ARCH 25119
)

This seminar invites students to examine the intersections of colonialism with architecture in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the designs of architects working in the region (Le Corbusier, Fernand Pouillon, Shadrach Woods, etc.) and concepts defining colonialism as a design project (segregation, repression, primitivism, etc.). We will also pay particular attention to modes of opposition pursued by residents and their historical impact toward the region’s decolonization. Moments of heightened historical consequence, such as the strategic use of selected architectural spaces by independentist guerrillas, will be thoroughly discussed. The class will progress through a chronological scope, from Orientalism as a 19th century phenomenon to the enmeshment of modernism with colonialism in the 20th century. We will conclude with the emergence of postcolonial modernities. 

Jacobé Huet
2023-2024
Autumn

25402
/
35402
The Invisible within Visual Art

“What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.” This is what U.S.-American artist Sol Lewitt wrote about conceptual art in 1967. This course takes Lewitt’s statement seriously, asking: how can we consider the non-visible dimensions of artworks? How do we interpret artworks that rely upon extra-visual material, including other sensory material like touch, taste, sound, and smell, but also ideas? How do aspects that the viewer must imagine impact the way that artworks make meaning? Taking a broad approach to the category of conceptual art, this course will explore the history of art that is rooted in ideas from the 1910s to the present, investigating case studies of conceptual works from around the globe. Considering artworks that take a wide variety of forms, from paintings and sculptures, to documentary photographs and faked documentary photographs, to performances, installations, and participatory invitations, we will test Lewitt’s statement. If what a given artwork looks like isn’t all that important, how might the invisible inform our understanding of that artwork instead?

2023-2024
Autumn

25545
/
35545
Cartography & the Early Modern State

This seminar focuses on concurrent watersheds in drawing, cartography, and information technology - the rise of hand-drawn maps in government archives. This occurred in fifteenth-century Venice, the first state to combine surveying, drawing, and text in the systematic collection, storage, delivery, and analysis of geospatial data concerning its territories. A radical departure from classical and medieval cartography, Venice’s paper maps synced perspectival pictures with nested layers of toponyms, informational legends, directional indicators and scale bars, requiring a new kind of literacy and hardware to calculate distance. No precedent existed for this analog GIS (geographic information system); other chancery collections came later or did not have the same functionality. We will compare Venice’s paper maps to contemporary landscape painting and print culture’s bird’s eye views and maps. We will address their increasingly dynamic interface, methods of indexing, and storage and retrieval before the arrival of filing cabinets; the addition of polychrome reliefs with their heightened sense of being there; and the increase in flattening abstractions through the end of the Venetian empire (1797). These abstractions anticipated modern mapping before the advent of digital GIS (also a government initiative) and cartography’s return to embedding the user. Students are welcome from across the disciplines and may choose related topics for supervised research projects.

Karen-edis Barzman
2023-2024
Winter

25711
/
35711
Exhibiting Photographs

This course traces the history of photography through a progression of landmark exhibitions, exploring the ongoing and reciprocal relationship between theories of photography and modes of public display. From the first public demonstrations of the new invention(s) through the emergence of photographic salons in the late nineteenth century, the forms of early exhibitions mirrored photography’s fluid and indeterminate cultural status. By the interwar period, new theories of display and visual communication developed by the European and American avant-garde helped to elevate photography's standing in museums, transforming its liminal position between art and mass culture into a modernist virtue. For each case study, students will assess the ways that photographic exhibitions embody cultural and aesthetic values, political ideologies, shifts within the art market, and underlying ideas about photography itself. Along with these historical investigations, the course will include several visits to a multisite exhibition of contemporary photography to engage with current issues tied to curating and display.   

2023-2024
Spring

25731
/
35731
Gender Before Gender: Constructing Bodies in Ancient American Art

Note: Consent of instructor required; email Professor Brittenham a paragraph-long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.

In this course, we will seek to test the possibilities and limits of understanding gender and sex in premodernity through an inquiry into the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Works of art constitute a primary means by which we can access ideas about what we call gender and sex. Based on what we can reconstruct from visual, textual, and archaeological sources, these cultures conceptualized and represented gender in ways that might seem unfamiliar, in the process putting into question our own preconceptions. Indeed, pre-modern works of art might not have served to simply record conventions of gender but also helped construct the very idea of a sexed body within a given cultural context. As we discover commonalities and divergences between these Indigenous American traditions, we will learn to think across cultural contexts and disciplinary divides, putting into question some of our own assumptions. We will see that gender is not an immutable construct but something actively brought into being in different ways in different times and places.

2023-2024
Spring

26501
/
36501
Straight-line sensibilities. A hidden history of 20th Century Art

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.

2023-2024
Autumn

26616
Tracing Time

(
ARCH 26616
)
While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

Tracing Time is a hybrid seminar and studio. The first portion of the course will invite students to engage with a curated selection of techniques for representing time as a broad category of concerns, containing a wide range of nuanced conceptual frameworks and constructs: subjective time, objective time, proper time, coordinate time, sidereal time, emergent time, encoding time, relativistic time, time dilation, reaction time, spacetime, etc. The second portion of the course will invite students to develop their own models, visualizations, and representations of time or temporal phenomenon as a support for considering time as a factor of change in relation to their own research or interest in a particular concern or context, or where time is bound to physical, psychological, ecological, climatic, biological, geological, economic, historical, geographic, or other entangled processes. This course requires no preparation and is therefore open to students from any discipline who share a general interest in urban design, architecture and the arts or who specifically wish to develop a deeper understanding of drawings, models, photographs, video and other graphic mediums as material supports for inquiry.

2023-2024
Autumn

26703
/
36703
Interiority, Modernity, Domesticity, Decoration

(
MAPH 36703, GNSE 26703, GNSE 36703
)
Consent of the instructor is required for registration.This course will include two museum/collections visits in the Chicago area.

The domestic interior emerged with modernity itself. “Interiorization,” Walter Benjamin claimed, was a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century culture, and the interior came to be understood as the physical space of the home in addition to an image of mental life. While often figured as refuge from modernity’s more spectacular developments, this seminar establishes the interior as a complex historical construct, a tool, with which to read the shifting texture of the world outside its walls. At the same time, we will examine how artists, writers, and designers employed the interior as a platform upon which to experiment with new tactics of representation, often borrowing from one another’s toolbox, in attempts to represent that world and imagine possible futures. Case studies will consider paintings, decorative schemes, prints, décor samples, and architectural media—many from local collections and environments—alongside literary and critical writings. We will interrogate these objects to pursue the interior’s entanglement with the following themes: subjectivity, the senses, and the built environment; privacy, publicity, and revolution; space, text, and image; art, decoration, and fashion; craft, race, and globalization; modernism, gender, and domesticity. Students need not be specialists to register but should be invested in working together to activate the overlooked interface between intimate, “feminine,” or private aesthetic experience and broad historical change.

2023-2024
Spring

26705
/
36705
Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Art

(
EALC 26705, EALC 36705
)

This course examines histories of contemporary artmaking from China since the 1970s. The course will begin by introducing post-Mao artistic avant-garde movements, the response to urbanization in art at the turn of the 20th century, and the influence of globalization since 2000. Attention will then be offered to a new generation of young artists from China as well as diasporic artists working transnationally. This course is particularly interested in contemplating ways in which artists capture facets of accelerated time all the while living in a culture where physical environments and interactions are becoming increasingly obsolete due to major investments in robotics, AI technologies, online communication platforms, and virtual monetary exchange applications.    

Ellen Larson
2023-2024
Autumn

26810
/
36810
Topics in Curating Indigenous Art

 
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. 

2023-2024
Winter

27314
/
37314
Writing Art Criticism

(
CHST 27314, CHST 27314, ARTV 27314, ARTV 37314
)
Enrollment is limited and permission of instructor is required. Preference will be given to students with a background in the visual arts or writing about the arts. Please email the instructor (mehring@uchicago.edu) explaining relevant background

This course is a practicum in writing art criticism. Unlike art historians, art critics primarily respond to the art of their time and to developments in the contemporary art world. They write reviews of exhibitions that may be on view in galleries or museums and that may focus on single artists or broad themes. Importantly, art critics often produce the very first discourse on a given art, shaping subsequent thinking and historiography. Accordingly, art criticism is a genre that requires particular skills, for example, identifying why and how artworks 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.

2023-2024
Autumn

27316
/
37316
Crafting Modernity

This course proposes that craft defined artmaking in the United States during the the period after World War I and through to the post-World War II era. For the purposes of the course, craft will be broadly understood to encompass handmade items designed for practical use as well as artworks that, through concepts, materials, and/or processes, trace their lineage to a functional and handmade past. In framing this modernist history through craft, and discussing pedagogy, practitioners, objects,and theories of making, the course positions craft as a primary propagator of modernity. Artists with diverse material practices, such as Anni Albers, Emma Amos, Ruth Asawa, Faith Ringgold, and Lenore Tawney, will be central to the discussion and will foster an assessment and interrogation of craft’s role in producing and popularizing modern art more broadly. In addition to foregrounding the ubiquity of craft and its wide-reaching impacts on culture and society (including educational initiatives and programs, exhibitions and museum collections, and publications), this course will also question craft’s relative absence (until recently) in narratives oftwentieth-century modernism in the United States. Furthermore, while craft has the potential to surface the classism, sexism, and media hierarchies in modern art historical discourse, the need to critically examine craft’s relationship with colonialism, racism, and sexism will also be addressed

2023-2024
Spring

27799
/
37799
Materiality and Artistic Intent: The Object, Conservation and Art History-The Suzanne Deal Booth Conservation Seminar

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.  

2023-2024
Autumn

27800
/
37800
'Conserving Active Matter' - Strategies in Conservation and Contemporary Art (Suzanne Deal Booth Conservation Seminar)

This course will be registered only with instructor consent. Consent requests must include why the student is interested in taking the course, any previous experience they have with the course topics, and how they envision contributing toward the conservation initiative’s goal of diversifying the field of conservation and conservation science.

Conserving contemporary art is a complex activity. This course raises questions about the goal of conservation in various media (painting, sculpture, and variable media) as well as in artistic movements since the 1960s, when the notion of authenticity and originality shifted. Conservation today is not limited to the treatment of the physical artwork; it demands an open dialogue with the varying stakeholders: the artist, collector, fabricator, curator, gallerist, dealer, shipper, art handler, as well as with other specialized conservators. The course also examines various models of artist estates, archives, and artist interviews, responding to the inevitable consequences of contemporary art without the artist.

2023-2024
Spring

28003
/
38003
Islamic Art: Private Collections on Public Display

Consent only

In the past decade, two museums in Texas – the MFA Houston and the Dallas Museum of Art -- have suddenly emerged as major centers for Islamic art. Usually, well-developed displays of Islamic art build on sustained institutional commitment to curation over several generations. However, these Texas museums both quickly transformed their abilities to exhibit Islamic art by securing long term loans of significant private collections. With the al-Sabah Collection and the Hossein Afshar Collection, MFA Houston more than doubled its display space for Islamic art in 2023; and similarly, the Dallas Museum of Art has displayed the Keir Collection since 2014. This travelling seminar brings students to Texas for two weeks, facilitating direct study of an expansive range of Islamic arts produced from the medieval period to the present, in materials ranging from silk, parchment, ceramic, and rock crystal; to lacquer, sandstone, metal, jade, and plexiglass.  Students will learn basic classification systems for navigating the vast range of Islamic arts, and will also each select a specific work for close study. Upon return to campus, students will develop their thoughts on the object in relation to questions of collection and display. What force does a given object have in shaping, confirming, or challenging logics of collection and display? What might the same object achieve differently within the context of a different, possibly thematic, exhibition?  

2023-2024
Autumn

28201
/
38201
Art on My Mind

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.

2023-2024
Winter

28311
/
38311
Image, Iconoclasm, Animation

(
RLVC 28311, RLVC 38311, CLAS 35923, CLCV 25923, KNOW 38311, MDVL 28311, RLST 28311
)
The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.

This course will explore the fantasies of the animation of images both ancient and early Christian, both secular and sacred, as the backdrop to examining the phenomenon of iconoclasm as an assault on the image from pre-Christian antiquity via Byzantium to the Protestant Reformation. It will tackle both texts and images, the archaeological context of image-assault and the conceptual (indeed theological) contexts within which such assault was both justified and condemned. These historical issues cannot be separated, in our scholarly approaches and responses, from a vibrant contemporary culture around question of virtuality, animation, image-worship and image-destruction in the current world. The course will provide space to reflect on the problems raised by this. The course will be taught over the first four and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. 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.

2023-2024
Spring

28325
/
38325
Art and Description in Antiquity and Byzantium

(
RLVC 28325, RLVC 38325
)
The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.

This course explores the rich tradition of ekphrasis in Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantium – as it ranges from vivid description in general to a specific engagement with works of art. While the prime focus will remain on texts from Greece, Rome and Byzantium – in order to establish what might be called the ancestry of a genre in the European tradition and especially its fascinating place between pagan polytheistic and Christian writing -- there will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond this into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing and ekphrasis in other periods or contexts, depending on students’ interests and needs. A reading knowledge of Greek in particular could not be described as a disadvantage, but the course can be taken without knowing the ancient languages. The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. 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.

2023-2024
Spring

28607
/
38607
Art, Science, and the Environment

Did human activity—from the detonation of atomic weapons to the proliferation of plastics—change the Earth and life on it? Rather than study air or water, this seminar will look at art and visual culture since 1945 to find deposits, traces, and effects of such activities.

 The course will survey scholarly texts from art history as well as the histories of science and technology to pursue these and other related questions: How have historians framed developments in postwar and contemporary art in relation to concurrent developments of scientific ways of knowing and imagining the environment, broadly defined? Moreover, how has the advance of scientific knowledge beyond our planet informed visual culture? From smart devices to immersive digital art installations, what forms of techno-ecologies surround us today? Through visits to the Smart Museum of Art, as well as other campus collections, students will have the opportunity to study and write about original works of art

2023-2024
Winter

28705
Christian Iconography

(
RLST 28705, MDVL 28705
)

In Christian culture, visual images have for many centuries played a pivotal role in ritual, devotion, intellectual thought, and religious instruction. The most important aims of this course are that students understand images convey meaning in very unique ways and learn how to decode their visual messages.The study of iconography encompasses a variety of methods used to identify the subject matter of a pictorial image, describe its contents, and analyze its discursive strategies in view of its original cultural context. We will cover some of the most important themes visualized in the arts of Christianity by analyzing imagery spanning different periods, geographical regions, pictorial media, and artistic techniques. While special emphasis is placed on the intersections of art and literature, we will also examine pictorial themes that are independent of a specific textual basis. Alongside the study of Christian iconography, this course will address broader issues of visual inquiry, such as patronage, viewer response, emotions, and gender roles. In this course, students will acquire a ‘visual literacy’ that will enable them to explore all kinds of works of art fruitfully as primary sources in their own right.

2023-2024
Spring

29600
Doing Art History

Required of third-year students who are majoring in art history; open to non-majors with consent of instructor. The aim of this seminar is to deepen an understanding of art history as a discipline and of the range of analytic strategies art history affords to students beginning to plan their own BA papers or, in the case of students who are minoring in art history, writing research papers in art history courses. Students read essays that have shaped and represent the discipline and test their wider applicability and limitations. Through this process, they develop a keener sense of the kinds of questions that most interest them in the history and criticism of art and visual culture. Students develop a formal topic proposal in a brief essay and write a final paper analyzing one or two works of relevant, significant scholarship for their topics. This seminar is followed by a workshop in Autumn Quarter focusing on research and writing issues for fourth-year students who are majoring in art history, which is designed to help writers of BA papers advance their projects.

2023-2024
Winter

29609
/
39609
Realism: Art or Metaphysics?

(
CMLT 25999, CMLT 35999, KNOW 25010, KNOW 35010, SCTH 25010, SCTH 35010
)

Besides its historical role as the first capital-letter avant-garde in painting and literature, Realism is making a return in many current artistic and, for that matter, cultural and journalistic contexts. But whether one examines its entanglement with reputed adversaries like Romanticism and Idealism, its origins in ancient and medieval metaphysics, or its strange side career as a label for amoral pragmatism in political theory and practice, the many-sidedness of realism makes pinning it down quite a challenge. Is there any common thread binding Plato and Courbet, Virginia Woolf and García Marquez, Catherine Opie and Ai Weiwei? Can there be a realism of dreams and desire, such as one might find in Freud? And is realism a revolutionary venture, or a consolidating surveillance of social types? What role do new technologies and forms of spectatorship, from oil painting to photography, the printed book to streaming media, play in its rise and evolution? Readings in art history, fiction, and philosophy will alternate with film screenings and gallery visits.

Mechtild Widrich
2023-2024
Autumn