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

This 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.

How are we to understand the ancient Greek world and how it was shaped and inhabited? How can the study of the past inform our perception of the present world around us? This course introduces students to the built environment of the ancient Greek world through the study of the architecture, monuments, and urban forms developed in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Rather than solely focusing on examples from the ancient Aegean, this course will take a geographically broad perspective that spans from Sicily to Afghanistan to highlight the diversity of styles and cultural influences incorporated into Greek architecture and urban development. This topic will be approached thematically, ranging from the architecture of sanctuaries to monuments in public spaces to modern receptions of ancient Greek architecture.

This is an introductory course and survey of the major patrons, architects, and building programs that defined the spatial contexts of the Renaissance in Italy and meets the general education requirement in the Humanities Core. Between the 15th and 16th centuries, the political aspirations of governments, popes, princes, and merchants demanded a more articulated architectural environment that would facilitate increasingly complex modes of public and private life. They were aided in this endeavor by the emergence of a newly professionalized class of architects, who turned their eyes towards both a systematic study of the classical past and a critical assessment of their contemporary world. Renaissance urban palaces – both civic and private – and rural villas provided the stages upon which a new art of living could be performed. New inventions in military engineering responded to rapidly advancing technologies of warfare. Urban planning techniques created new topographies of spiritual and political triumph and reform, while treatises on ideal cities laid the foundations for the modern integrated multi-functional city. Between Venice, Florence, Rome and their rural surroundings, this course will focus on a range of important patrons such as Roman Popes, Venetian Doges, princely courts and private merchants, and will explore what made the works of such architects as Filippo Brunelleschi, Giuliano da Sangallo, Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, Michelangelo, Jacopo Sansovino, and Andrea Palladio, so creative, innovative, and influential well into our own contemporary architectural landscape.

In the years leading up to Martin Luther’s radical transformation of the political-religious landscape, late medieval and early modern Europeans were inundated with a flood of “alternative facts” that called into question the intellectual, ethical, and religious values governing their lives. With the advent of new media technologies, images became important vehicles of commentary and disputation for Reformers, leading to the formation of a public sphere of discourse to which the image was central; yet, at the same time, the image itself and its role in daily life came increasingly under attack. This course provides an introduction to artistic production in northern Europe from the late fourteenth century through the sixteenth century through the lens of the productive, if tumultuous, relationship between art and the epistemological challenges of the Reformation. Particular attention will be paid to the shifting status of the artist, focusing on the historical and cultural circumstances that led to the elevation of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as well as their relationship to the world outside the Alps, including Italy, Spain, and the New World. This course will also examine topics such as the relationship between word and image, iconoclasm and iconophilia, public and private spheres of patronage, and strategies of visual polemics. Readings will include primary sources in translation and selected works of modern scholarship.

Social media, TV, and print are today’s most popular formats for the consumption of images, but what visual media were available to medieval viewers and how did they influence beliefs and practices? This course introduces the art of medieval Europe, covering the period from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the eve of the Reformation (c. 500-1500), a period rich in technological innovation. Why does medium matter? What counts as medieval media? We will examine a range of visual material, both luxury and mass produced, including manuscript illuminations, relics, pilgrimage souvenirs, paintings, prints, and the human body. Students will become familiar with major themes in the study of the art of the Middle Ages, such as the relationship between word and image, the role of the artist, socio-economic structures of art production, and changing attitudes toward the image. We will also track the afterlives of medieval objects by looking at their re-use and re-interpretation across time through collecting, curation, and conservation-restoration.

Hands-on experiments with art materials and visits to local collections will build knowledge of the physicality of objects. By the end of the course, students will be able to recognize key medieval artworks and monuments, analyze visual material, and distinguish some historical materials and techniques of production. Assignments are tied to building confidence in visual literacy, critical thinking, and oral presentation.

This core class introduces students to the visual arts of early South Asia (Paleolithic period to circa first millennium CE). During this time period, South Asia gave birth to three major world religions—Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Christianity and Islam too made it to South Asia and the arts of these religious traditions flourished in various pockets of the Indian subcontinent. In the class, we will look at paintings, buildings, and other objects that continue to beguile researchers, such as the paintings of Bhimbetka Caves (ca. 10,000 BCE); the enigmatic seals from Indus Valley (ca. 2000 BCE); the high polish of Mauryan sculptures, like the Ashokan capital that forms the emblem of India (ca. 3rd cent. BCE); the extraordinary rock-cut temples of Ajanta and Ellora (fifth to thirteenth centuries); and the famous minarets of Jam and Qutb in Afghanistan and Delhi (twelfth century). The course will explore many themes in the study of early South Asian art; some prominent ones are the role of politics, nature, and religion in shaping artistic practices. Conversely, we will also look at how artistic practices impacted civic institutions and religious organizations, while exploring what art can reveal about how natural resources were viewed, extracted, and preserved in early South Asia.

This core class will pick up the narrative thread from “Introduction to South Asian Art: Early South Asia (Part I),” although taking that course is not a pre-requisite (but encouraged). In this class, we will cover the period that I call, for the sake of convenience, “Latter South Asian,” i.e., from about the turn of the first millennium to the present day. During the period covered in this class, European explorers landed on Indian coasts, with the Portuguese making it to India as early as 1498. (Christopher Columbus tried to get to India too, but as is well known, he got massively lost.) From the fifteenth century, with European forays into the Americas, the world order changed dramatically, and South Asia—and its artistic culture—benefited from being a global commercial hub. South Asian patrons commissioned such extraordinarily expensive buildings and objects as the Taj Mahal (completed 1653) and the Peacock Throne (1635; the Kohinoor diamond from this throne forms the centerpiece of the British crown jewels). Equally, climate crises and colonial exploitation from as early as the seventeenth century left its marks in the art of the region. The modern period saw anticolonial resistance, the emergence of postcolonial nation states, as well as the dispersal of a vast South Asian diasporic community across the world. Art making and architectural practice responded to each of these historical shifts, and this class will examine what the visual art from South Asia can teach us about its complex “latter” history.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Autumn Quarter examines the origins of civilizations in Latin America with a focus on the political, social, and cultural features of the major pre-Columbian civilizations of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec. The quarter concludes with an analysis of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, and the construction of colonial societies in Latin America. The courses in this sequence may be taken in any order.

This course introduces big problems created by the movement, relocation or displacement of objects that are assigned special cultural, artistic, and historical values in new contexts. Such objects are often used as historical sources to justify the present, generating competing claims about the past while also raising problems and questions of preservation, ownership, copyright, and access. This class will ask how objects move from their original place to modern collections. How do they become art or part of cultural heritages? And how do they become historical sources? To address these complex issues, we will examine case studies of “moving objects” from two different geographies and historical contexts, China and the Middle East, in a comparative framework. We will discuss both historical and art historical questions stemming from specific objects and their stories in those two regions. We will talk about objects that were forced to move, relocated, or displaced, thereby their significance and value transform or take on new meanings. The dispersal and replication of moving objects in various collections is especially relevant today, with the creation of different types of digital replicas.

This course investigates the development of Latin American art from the early nineteenth century to the present. Through the study of representative artists, movements, and works, we will trace this history from the formation of art academies in newly independent Latin American nations through the region’s rise to prominence in an increasingly global art world. Although we will adhere to a roughly chronological organization, a set of key themes and debates will likewise structure our investigation. Among them are: the formation of collective identities (and the intersections of race, class, and nation); the impact of social and political revolutions and counter-revolutions on artistic practices; the reception and adaptation of indigenous and European (and later U.S.) art practices; and the various national, regional, and global frameworks that have been used to think through the specificity of art production from Latin America. Special emphasis will be placed on developing the skills needed to analyze a wide variety of modern and contemporary art, including painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, and site-specific installations.

This course takes the long view of modern Japanese art and architecture with a focus on the changing relationships between object and viewer in the 19th and 20th centuries. Beginning in the late eighteenth century with the flowering of revivalist and individualist trends and the explosion of creativity in the woodblock prints of Hokusai and others, we will then turn to examine Western-style architecture and painting in the late nineteenth century; socialism, art criticism, and the emergence of the avant garde in the early twentieth century. Also covered are interwar architectural modernism, art during World War II, and postwar movements such as Gutai and Mono-ha. No familiarity with art history or Japan is required.

This course will explore the relationship between the visual arts and culture of death in the western Middle Ages. Death did not mark a firm end for medieval people, whose daily lives included ideas about the Resurrection, revenants, and saints – a special class of holy undead. We will turn to the visual arts as a privileged medium for commemorating and caring for the dead in order to chart changing conceptions of death and the afterlife from roughly the third century to 1500 CE. We will study a variety of works of art, from manuscripts to sculptures, textiles to poems, drawn from different regions throughout medieval Europe. Examining primary sources (in translation) and relevant secondary literature, students will hone their abilities to comprehend the past through historical objects and to understand the particular role that works of art played in mediating the relationships between the living and the dead. Special topics include reliquaries, necromancy, the Apocalypse, and the Black Death.

This course for non-majors meets the general education requirement in the Humanities Core. Centrally located open urban spaces have been dominant architectural and social features of western cities.  By focusing on these urban gathering sites, this course explores a range of key historical moments in which different formations of the city square emerge (political, communal, royal, imperial, colonial, modernist, privatized, etc.)  Its goal is to define a set of criteria for analyzing what constitutes a city square, how “public space” also has a history, how public monuments function over time, and how understanding the urban environment is always dependent on the intimate relationship between physical structures and spatial performances.  It will consider, therefore, both the design morphology and the social configurations that infuse such spaces with meaning in any given context.

This course invites students to reflect upon the idea of modernity in architecture as it developed between 1450 and the end of the 20th century. The purpose of this course is two-fold: 1) to introduce students to selected architectural episodes across time and space; and 2) to demonstrate that modernity as a concept is deeply charged with power dynamics. Indeed, the idea of modernity systematically includes a strong delineation of its margins: the people, cultures, and places that have been portrayed as lacking the modern mind, techniques, or esthetics. In this respect, modernity and its antonyms are often inseparable, like two sides of the same coin. Throughout the quarter, we will discuss exclusionary modern visions, debunk their absolutism, and amplify the voices of those who have proposed alternative models for modernity in architecture.

Introductory courses are the gatekeepers of our field, ritualizing students’ entrance into architectural history as a discursive space and propagating hierarchies through subtexts in knowledge. In response to this condition, this course invites students to reflect upon the values and limits of inclusion and exclusion of certain figures, buildings, and geographies in architectural history as an active practice. Students will learn about canonical moments of architectural history as well as episodes that are not typically included in introductory courses. These marginalized segments are of acute interest in that they redefine inclusivity in modernity on the bases of race, class, culture, and/or gender. Lectures, readings, and assignments are designed to encourage students to locate their position towards and against prior models of discursivity in architecture.

This seminar invites students to examine the intersections of colonialism with architecture in Algeria and Morocco. Throughout the quarter, we will discuss the designs of architects working in these two contexts (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.

From the Renaissance to the present day, architecture has been a blatantly male-centric field. This course invites students to consider women who overcame systemic barriers to become figures of agency in 20th-century architecture. We will examine the lives and works of women who have managed to attend architecture schools, despite historical gender-based exclusion or restriction on enrollment, as well as those who found impactful ways to play architectural roles without academic training. We will pay particular attention to how these protagonists add necessary complexity to the modernist canon. The course will start with a first module on positionality (women as architects, women as clients, and women as residents) followed by a second module with a biographical scope (Minnette De Silva, Eileen Gray, bell hooks, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy).

This course explores the historical development of East Asian architecture during the 19th and 20th centuries. Students will examine the work of pioneering figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Tadao Ando, Kenzo Tange, SANAA, Wang Shu, and Rem Koolhaas, among other landmark building projects and significant historical events in China, Japan, and beyond. The course encourages students to use historical and cultural contexts as a lens to broaden their understanding of the relationship between architecture and society. How has architecture influenced the way people live over the last two centuries? How can architecture act as a catalyst for social transformation or a medium for social critique? How are East Asian traditions integrated into the global currents of modernization and globalization while preserving regional characteristics? By engaging with these questions, the course guides students through an understanding of why architecture and urbanism are critical in rapidly transforming societies and how ideological, technological, and aesthetic visions are manifested in architectural productions and discourses.

Through very regular, required site visits to museums, galleries, and experimental spaces in the greater Chicago area, this course will introduce students to the close consideration—in situ—of works of art created in our times, as well as to the application to these works of pertinent modes of critical and historical inquiry. Sites to be visited include the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the Fraction Workspace, Mess Hall, the Hyde Park Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, among others.

This course will consider Japanese woodblock prints as artistic and social objects during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. While viewing actual prints in area collections, we will discuss style and technique, the representation of class and gender, the world of the pleasure quarters, illustrated plays and fiction, urban growth and travel, censorship, and the supernatural.

This investigation considers architecture as a “value-added” proposition, and looks at the several works as to how they take a unique position with regard to the marketpace. Architecture is largely considered for its aesthetic and cultural benefit, but here the proposition is that architecture, and the work of architects creates or improves value in their projects. Investigation begins with the normative, understanding the role of money in practice, including construction and development, all within traditional roles. The discussion includes review of the important relationship between time and money in projects. Value is often recognized through economic appraisal, which is different than architectural work impacting the performance (and thus the value) of a project. Typically value is reviewed in terms of optimizing efficiency and economy, but a fuller understanding is here pursued, including size, such as how larger projects can affect an urban area, or time, and how the value of a project may change. Different architects have used a variety of organizational approaches to improve project performance, and in some cases, have operated directly as developers or contractors. These improve projects with a different techniques. Some use dramatic form to influence market perception; others develop new responses to emerging markets; and lastly, architects working directly as contractors has resulted in unique results. Examples of each of these approaches are examined in review of work and writings by John Portman, Victor Gruen, Luigi Nervi, Bertrand Goldberg, and Cedric Price. The goal is to consider architectural value from a broad perspective, considering both normative and different approaches within a larger understanding. Student work includes either a research paper or a studio-type presentation, investigating these issues, with a particular project or architect.

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

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

This 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.

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

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

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

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

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

This studio critically explores the dialogues between tradition and modernity in contemporary Iranian art, architecture, and material culture. Through studying Iran's architectural heritage alongside emerging design practices, students will undertake projects that investigate how art and architecture can reinterpret the past to encounter the current political and economic landscapes. The studio will delve into recent buildings and artifacts created by Iranian architects and artists who actively engage with the discourse surrounding an “Iranian modernity.” We will specifically review the works of an emerging generation of artists and architects whose practices are instrumental in shaping cultural scenarios in Iran today. The studio involves two design projects, one at the scale of an object, and the other at the scale of a building. Through these projects, students will explore the politics and poetics of contemporary Iranian art and architecture, thinking about the local and transnational trajectories within the broader global arena.

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

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

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

Description Coming Soon

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

This 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.

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

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

Can exhibitions make arguments? How do spatial or object-driven arguments differ from textual ones? This course pursues such questions through a series of case studies focusing on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Structured around the richness of Chicago’s art collections and spaces, each class session will bring us to a different institution, including on-campus venues like the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society, and off-campus ones, including the Arts Club of Chicago, the Driehaus Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the course of the quarter, we will develop a toolkit for analyzing a variety of modes of exhibiting art, touching on a range of spaces and topics, including the emergence of the modern museum of the 1930s, the role of artists and institutional critique, approaches to exhibiting global contemporary art, and the place of performance in the museum. In each case, we will consider the ways that curators put artworks in conversation with one another spatially, advancing individual or institutional points of view, and explore how such strategies differ according to subject matter and context of display.

This seminar is offered as part of the Chicago Objects Study Initiative. Students will be required to travel to different sites throughout the city each week and should therefore factor into their schedules roughly an hour of travel time before the official class period.

The course also entails a traveling component. Students must be available between October 24-27 to travel to New York City where we will hear from curators and visit leading museums and galleries. The Department of Art History will manage the cost and coordination of air travel, hotels, and ground transportation.

Artifacts from pre-modern China are often on display in museums today as art objects, and appreciated for their aesthetic value and craftsmanship. However, before entering modern collection, many of them had participated in people’s daily, cultural, religious, and/or social lives. They were used, touched, collected and exchanged; they also inspired and mediated intimate emotions, philosophical discussions and artistic creations. In this course, we will study an array of objects of this sort, from bronze vessels and mirrors, to porcelains and textiles. Taking cues from their material and visual aspects, we will examine a selection of objects within their original contexts where they were made and used, and think about how they would have engaged their historical beholders. We will also explore the objects’ “journeys” across time, space and medium, and discuss the theoretical and ethical issues that arise from each scenario. Through lectures, in-class discussions, museum visits, readings and writing assignments, students will familiarize themselves with the cultures of pre-modern China through the objects it produced, and develop skills of visual thinking and material-based analysis of art objects. Student will also review key discourses surrounding objects and material culture within and beyond the discipline of art history.

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. 

The Chicago Park District seems to preserve "first nature" within the metropolitan field. But the motive for establishing this sovereign territory was hardly natural. Today, cultural change raises questions about the significance and operation of this immense network of civic spaces. What opportunities emerge as we rethink them? While this design studio focuses on the development of new model parks for Chicago, it can support students coming from a broad range of disciplines. Texts, seminar discussions, and field trips will complement and nourish the development of architectural proposals.

In this architecture studio course, you will learn and practice a range of architectural skills, using as a starting point the library as an institution, and in particular the range of libraries in and around Chicago. You will look at, sketch, and work within libraries across the campus and city, and think about the role the library plays in our time. Studio projects will focus on the library as a locus for learning, a public space, an organizational system, a set of social services, and an architectural opportunity. After a series of short design exercises, you will work in groups to design a proposal for a new library for Chicago, on a real site that you choose. The bulk of your time will be spent on these studio projects, but there will also be reading and conversation. Materials for drawing and making will be provided. (Note: this class will not have field trips outside of class time, but will regularly meet at different locations both on-campus and around the city. Please make sure you've built enough time into your schedule to get to and from meeting locations.)

This course will examine the life of buildings-- how they perform, evolve, and adapt over time. How do particular design decisions influence human experience and behavior? Which parts of the building align with its intended use and what are surprising outcomes or changes? These questions aim to provide students with a deeper understanding of the built environment and the series of decisions that shaped them. Through readings, surveys, site visits, and conversations with architects and building users, we will measure and examine the spaces around us. Students will begin with a series of short analysis and design exercises and create short films, projective collages and diagrams, and architectural concept models. Building on our collective observations, research, and analysis, we will then finish with a final project where we respond to an existing building and propose an alternate life path. The format of the course is part-seminar, part-studio that aims to equip students with practical tools and strategies needed to shape our world and account for the long-term impact of design.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Description Forthcoming

Water can be seen as both a material substance, subject to ecological forces, and an immaterial receptacle for multiple and conflicting meanings. This landscape architecture course explores the constructed environments around Chicago’s varied and interconnected water systems along these material and immaterial lines. As a studio/seminar hybrid, this course draws on critical and literary readings, seminar discussions, creative writing, explorations, and a series of studio projects. Seminar and studio sessions will together track a progression from the interior - perceptions, memories, and felt experiences of water that animate landscape with personal meaning - to the exterior - specific landscapes around Chicago’s water bodies and the social, political, and ecological forces at play between the city and these environments. We’ll use the body as a mediator between these two scopes, drawing metaphoric meanings across these interior and exterior perceptions. Studio projects will give students the opportunity to develop skills in architectural drawing, while also recognizing that these drawings are inherited from building design and need to be creatively adapted to landscapes. Employing a range of analog media (e.g. hand drawing, watercolor, collage), these projects will help students build up spatial ideas and also express the felt qualities of particular places and experiences. The final studio project will examine a constructed landscape along an edge between land and water in Chicago. Students will map the history and ecology of the project site and use that as a jumping off point for its reimagination, negotiating between large-scale systemic forces and the peculiar details of that place. Prior experience with architecture is not required, but active curiosity about spaces and places is.

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.

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

Themes include state-of-the-art approaches and strategies for communicating and presenting science in professional and public spheres, understanding how the public learns and experiences science, exploring the interaction between science, art and society, discovering UC's top historic science discoveries, and thinking anew our campus science experience.

This is a course in the life and works of Noah Purifoy (b. 1917 in Snow Hill, Alabama, U.S.), whose career divides unevenly across a 1960s period spent in association with the Watts Art Center in Los Angeles, and another beginning in 1989, when he relocated to Joshua Tree, California. Here Purifoy lived and worked chiefly as a sculptor, creating and arranging works on and for a ten-acre parcel of desert scrub, until his untimely death in 2004. Around and within these life chapters Purifoy interlaced a fine-art practice with social work, modernist furniture design, and educational policy. But it is the unrivaled subtlety of Purifoy’s thinking about art-in-the-world that will be our subject during this quarter-long exploration of art’s atmospheres and frameworks; biography; citation; ‘creativity’; crisis representation; cultural history; environment; materialism and museum-ism; reference; temporality; and, vitalism.

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

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

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

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

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.

Problems and methods in Art History. Required of fourth-year Art History majors who wish to pursue honors.