Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed before the start of the class.
Fall 2024
ARTH 501 (CRN 1257)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture (3 credits)
Current Problems in Art History: Art, Activism, and the Visual Culture of Resistance
Prof. Reilley Bishop-Stall
Fridays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This course will examine the longstanding relationship between art, aesthetics and resistance. Art and activism have long been intertwined and the introduction of the Internet and the rise of social media have radically altered activism and, by extension, activist art. This course will investigate the impact of changing technologies and social structures on protest movements, community mobilization, and social justice campaigns by looking specifically at their accompanying art and imagery. We will consider the aesthetics of defiance and resistance even before the development of any notion of āactivismā as we understand it today as a way of interrogating reductive and established narratives of power and victimization, noting that collective action, resistance, and resilience is future oriented and rooted in imagination. In addition to the art and information produced by activists and allies this course will investigate the representation and framing of protest movements and social justice initiatives in the media and the popular imaginary. This course will consist of weekly thematic group discussions as well as close engagement with current exhibitions and local events, documentary and activist filmmaking. Student participation and collaboration is necessary for the success of this seminar.
ARTH 502 (CRN 1260)
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History (3 credits)
Histories of Color; Or, Pigments and other People
Thursdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
What are we talking about when we talk about color? This seminar examines some indicative selections from a flood of recent, interdisciplinary work that has approached color not only as productive of paintings and other artworks, but of populations. How, we will ask, is color meant to overlap with and depart from conceptions of race among other concerns? Framed historiographically, the course seeks to push on the methodological and theoretical possibilities and limitations of chromatic research for art history and beyond it.
ARTH 600 (CRN 1261)
Advanced Professional Seminar (3 credits)
Art Writing
Prof. Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Wednesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm
For all our disparate fields of study, the craft of writing serves as common ground. In this seminar, we will gather weekly for collective exercises aimed at apprenticeship in a range of approaches to what might be called "art writing." Through texts by historians, artists, and critics, we will consider the ways in which writing is intertwined with making, sensing, feeling, thinking, and living. We will also discuss recent developments in feminist/queer/trans theories, ecocriticism, and Black studies as they concern voice and style. Opportunities to workshop writing for grant applications and public audiences will also be provided.
ARTH 645 (CRN 1263)
Medieval Art and Archaeology (3 credits)
The Art and Anthropology of Gift Exchange
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Wednesdays, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
A contradiction lies at the heart of the term āgift:ā the Oxford English Dictionary emphatically stresses the free and disinterested nature of a gift, but anthropologists have long theorized giving as deeply entangled in agendas of hierarchy and strategy. In his 1925 Essai sur le don, Marcel Mauss famously declared that there could be no free gift because giving is always governed by self-interest. Jacques Derrida claimed that there could be no gift at all let alone a free one: to give always already negates the giving. Building on the rich body of anthropological and sociological scholarship, this seminar examines the phenomenon of gift exchange in the pre-modern Mediterranean. Gifts themselves will play a primary but not exclusive role. We will also consider structures of secular and sacerdotal patronage, imperial largesse, diplomacy, tribute, spolia (the reuse and repurposing of gifts), votive dedication, and theft. Although a basic understanding of the visual vocabulary and development of medieval art is desirable, this seminar is intended for all graduate students invested in theorizing cultural exchange.
Winter 2025
ARTH 501 (CRN 1105)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture (3 credits)
Ancient and Living Archives: Indigenous Materialities
Prof. Gloria Bell
Thursdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an āancient archiveā for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this seminar investigates wampum, beadwork, and other arts practices and technologies as archives both ancient and living. Throughout this course we will engage with scholarship on materiality, visual sovereignty, art institutions, and the embodied practice of historical and contemporary Indigenous artists. Our readings include a mixture of art history, materiality studies, and archival theories. We will make site visits to art institutions to think about the competing sovereignties of Indigenous cultural belongings and artworks within colonial art institutions and to encourage sustained respectful engagement with cultural belongings being artworks for Indigenous and settler communities.
ARTH 646 (CRN 1107)
Topics: Chinese Visual Culture (3 credits)
Face as World in Chinese Art, 1000-1500
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Thursdays, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
The era of the pandemic has exposed our obsession and frustration with the face. The face has always occupied the center of social engagement, virtual and real, constantly re-inscribing the negotiation between the self and that selfās image. While we live in a culture where the authenticity and expressiveness of the faceāreal and represented alikeāis generally celebrated, not all cultures share (or have shared) the currency of the ideal faciality. How might we understand different forms of such negotiation in the culture where representation of explicit emotional expressions ā the faces that smile, frown, or cry ā is largely shunned? What could the very negotiation tell us about social, cultural, religious, or political milieu of that society?
This seminar draws on historical and conceptual dimensions of how such āmakingā of faces was interwoven with the lives of the people in premodern China, beyond its seeming role as a simple sign of their inner, emotional interests. Underlying such interests were certain attitudes toward defining, making, and remaking of boundaries that derived from the shifting landscape of social classes, religious beliefs, as well as of image making itself. Focusing on linkages between the represented facial expressions and senses of boundary making, the seminar explores a set of often contrasting subjects through distinctive modes of representation. Each mode reveals particular practices of seeing revolving around various sites of social and religious encounters, ranging from spaces of commemoration or worship (such as monastery or tombs), through street corners (shared by commoners and literati alike, or selectively shared with women and foreigners), to the expanded world (shared by humans and animals).
ARTH 653 (CRN 1206)
Topics: Early Modern Visual Culture 1 (3 credits)
Making Worlds: Global Mobility, Invention, and Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
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This seminar assesses the intersections of global mobility, planetary crisis, and artistic invention before the advent of the modern era (ca 1492-1700). We will investigate how the escalation of global capitalism, colonization, extraction, and exploitation generated innovative forms of art that were simultaneously creative and destructive. The focus of the class will be on worldmaking and the role of visual imagery, built environments, and material culture that advanced new understandings of the world as a human-made invention. We will take up questions raised by decolonial, anti-racist, and ecocritical approaches to art and art history and be attentive to conflicting and oppositional worldviews.
Potential research topics include (but are not limited to):
Ā· in-between spaces: the sea, gardens, plantations, ports, markets, coastal areas, ships, menageries, curiosity collections, utopias, heterotopias
Ā· extraction: mining, quarrying, fishing, logging, hunting, monocropping
Ā· labour: practices of enslavement and exploitation, colonialism and anticolonialism, patronage systems, resistance, opposition, and rebellion
Ā· Indigenous knowledges and lifeways
Ā· visual and material forms that embody, employ, or contribute to transformation, degradation and/or renewal
Ā· phenomena that challenge human experience: mountains, waterfalls, ice, caves, storms, forests, rainbows, earthquakes, etc., and aesthetic responses (wonder, horror, the sublime)
Ā· tools, processes, technologies, media, and systems of managing, transforming, collecting, and classifying materials, animals, plants, artifacts, and ācuriositiesā
Ā· transportation, transplantation, and commodification: people, animals, insects, birds, trees, plants, waters, minerals, rocks, soil, etc.
ARTH 725 (CRN 1113)
Methods in Art History 1 (3 credits)
Contemporary Artās Historical Past
Prof. Mary Hunter
Tuesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This seminar will explore how contemporary artists have engaged with historical artworks. By examining how artists have looked to art historical precedents for centuries, this course will question the concepts of artistic āprogressā, āinfluenceā and āmovementsā. The first half of the course will analyze art from the 1870s to the present, with a focus on how current artists have embraced or critiqued works by key figures in late nineteenth-century French art (the so-called āmodern mastersā). The second half will take a broader approach by encouraging students to look at how artworks from their area of expertise (the focus of their MA or PhD projects) have informed contemporary practice, or for those studying contemporary art, how living artists have turned to specific artists, artworks or styles from the past.