Fall 2022
ARTH 205 (CRN 1299) (3 credits)
Introduction to Modern Art
Dr. Julia Skelly
Monday and Wednesday, 10:05 am-11:25 am
ARTS W-215
“What does it mean to be modern?” This course considers this question and its implications for art, art criticism and arts institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia spanning 1750 to 1955. Students will encounter a broad range of works including painting, sculpture, architecture, print and the decorative arts. We will consider engagements with the art and culture of antiquity, relationships between art, politics and imperialism, the emergence of art institutions (academies, museums), and the ways in which the arts constituted and challenged ideas surrounding class, gender and race. The course likewise endeavors to introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques.
ARTH 215 (CRN 1300) (3 credits)
Introduction to East Asian Art
Mengge Cao
Tuesday and Thursday, 10:05 am-11:25 am
ARTS W-215
This course provides an introduction to the art and visual culture in China, Korea, and Japan from ancient times to the present. Organized in loosely chronological order, the course will present a series of case studies of art objects that address particular problems or concepts in East Asian art history. Through close-looking and contextualization, we will explore topics such as the world-making technologies in Buddhist caves, the ordering of nature and human society in landscape paintings, the patterns of inter-regional exchange manifested in funerary artifacts, and the formation and dissemination of art collection as statements of shifting values. In this course, we will learn the foundational skill of formal analysis, a kind of close-looking that translates our first-hand observation into a language of form, which can be compared, questioned, and theorized with further investigations in the technologies of making, the ways of looking, and larger social contexts. In addition, we will understand the diversities and interconnectedness in East Asia art history through a wide scope of geographies and temporalities. We will also familiarize ourselves with the materiality of the art object and its politics of display through replica handling and a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. No prior knowledge of East Asian languages is required.
Restriction: Not open to students taking or who have taken EAST 215.
ARTH 223 (CRN 1301) (3 credits)
Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art 1300-1500
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:35 am-12:55 pm
ARTS W-215
This course is a selective survey intended to introduce students to major artists, monuments, cities, and subjects of Italian art from c. 1300-1520. Particular attention is paid to the republics of Florence and Siena, and to the North Italian courts of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino. The art of this period in Italy, commonly referred to as the Early Renaissance, was grounded in the exigencies of commune, court, and city, and followed a period of rapid economic expansion, urbanization, and technological development. We will consider the changing role of the artwork in political, religious, and social contexts, and in public and private life, bearing in mind the varying interests of those who commissioned and crafted works of art and those who encountered them as beholders. From this variety of uses and responses emerged multiple conceptions of the nature of art and the role of the artist. Together we will explore these through primary and secondary source readings in which special attention is given to the historical figures of artist, patron/client, and beholder, to technique and workshop practice, to art theory, and to the powerful role of art in society. Beyond learning about milestone works of art that still possess cultural resonance today, this course will familiarize you with the excellent collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and decorative arts in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. No prior knowledge of Renaissance art or Christian art and symbolism is required.
ARTH 302 (CRN 1302) (3 credits)
Aspects of Canadian Art
Felicity T. C. Hamer
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:05 pm-2:25 pm
ARTS W-215
This course will explore issues of memory and bereavement through photography, in a Canadian context, through an examination of case studies spanning the 1880s-to present day. Some questions to be explored: How do memory and imagination influence our reading of photographic media? How is photography incorporated within death and bereavement rituals? Who is seen/remembered and how? What are the effects/implications of beholding or witnessing visual media of death and atrocity? How and when should these be circulated – and to what end? Who can lay claim to certain memories/images?
ARTH 315 (CRN 1303) (3 credits)
Indigenous Art and Culture: Indigenous Arts of Turtle Island
Prof. Gloria Bell
Monday and Wednesday, 1:05 pm-2:25 pm
ARTS W-215
This course will examine the production of First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists on Turtle Island. A diverse range of contemporary art practices – including painting, tattooing, photography, and film will be considered in relation to key aspects of the cultural, political and social life of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Much of the work examined reflects and responds to the continuing legacy of colonization and successive Canadian governments’ policies of assimilation and segregation. Artists, artworks and exhibitions examined will therefore be both historically and contemporarily contextualized. Additionally, we will engage with recent scholarship in Indigenous studies and material culture, and current events related to the theme of the course. The course is divided thematically, rather than chronologically, with weekly topics addressing significant aspects of Indigenous art and culture in Canada today. We will make site visits to local art spaces to learn about contemporary Indigenous practices and the contested spaces of museums. Students will participate in class presentations and view a variety of media.
Note: Cross-listed with CANS 315.
ARTH 321 (CRN 1304) (3 credits)
Visual Culture of the Dutch Republic
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Tuesday and Thursday, 8:35 am-9:55 am
ARTS W-215
As Svetlana Alpers wrote in her provocative book, The Art of Describing: “In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness. If the theatre was the arena in which the England of Elizabeth most fully represented itself to itself, images played that role for the Dutch.” In this course, we explore how the 17th-century Dutch Republic represented itself to itself through the examination of a wide range of visual imagery, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to various forms of popular culture. Our focus will be on the central role played by visual culture in an early capitalist republic whose sudden rise to wealth and power was fueled by overseas trade, colonization, and the exploitation of land, resources, and people, including the brutal practices of the transatlantic slave trade. The functions of art will be examined in relation to key symbolic sites such as the home, the marketplace, the brothel, the town hall, the anatomy theatre, the gallows field, the curiosity cabinet, the church, the synagogue, the rural countryside, and the colonies. Our exploration of Dutch visual culture as a central mode of self-consciousness will thus open into a broader understanding of early capitalism, republican politics, gender and sexuality, religious conflicts, medical and scientific developments, and colonial and racist violence.
ARTH 336 (CRN 1305) (3 credits)
Art Now
Art for Coexistence: Contemporary Art’s Response to the so-called “Migrant Crisis”
Prof. Christine Ross
Wednesday, 2:35 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-215
This course examines contemporary art’s response to the alleged “migrant crisis.” Focusing on European and North American artistic practices, it asks: what is art’s original contribution to the understanding of that “crisis” and why is this contribution critical to the development of the 21st century? The answer to this twofold question can be encapsulated in a single yet multilayered term: coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently. Art discloses migration not so much as a crisis than an interaction between two counterforces: the influx of displaced people worldwide and the endangerment of displaced people/increased refusal to host displaced people; art is also searching for ways to transform that relation.
The course’s main claim (to be discussed and investigated) is that contemporary art is uniquely attentive to the dark and potentially more luminous interdependences shaping migration today—the interdependences between citizens-on-the-move of some of the poorest, most colonially-damaged and politically unstable countries worldwide (parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America) and citizens of some of the wealthiest economies and democracies worldwide (Europe and North America), between these migrating beings seeking asylum and Europe’s and North America’s increasing refusal to grant them asylum, as well as the interdependencies structuring the internal displacement of people within specific countries in Latin America and North America. Art explores coexistence not as a living-together or a cohabitation but as what intellectual historian Mira Siegelberg designates as a “political organization of humanity,” that turns exodus into a process of exclusion, marginalization and latent elimination of 1% of humanity (1 in every 97 people worldwide). Challenging that relation, art invents a set of interconnected calls for coexistence: the call to historicize, to become responsible, to empathize, to story-tell; in these calls, viewers (primarily, though not exclusively, from Europe and North America) are interpellated as participating in the dynamic forces of migration, both its “necropolitics” and its struggle for equality.
The artistic practices examined in the course include installations, performances, video works, webcasts, digital platforms and alarm phones, counter-monuments, sculptures, graffiti, photographs and paintings, rescue boats and forensic investigations. Focusing on the work of Banksy, John Akomfrah, Binta Diaw, Undocumented Migration Project, Richard Mosse, Laura Waddington, Forensic Oceanography, Teresa Margolles, Kader Attia, Ai Weiwei, Tania Bruguera, Bouchra Khalili, Stan Douglas, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) and Isuma, the seminar investigates these artistic practices by establishing a dialogue between art and key texts in the fields of political philosophy, postcolonial, decolonial, Black and Indigenous studies, and the critical field of refugee and migrant studies (including writings by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Tiffany Lethabo King, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Jacques Rancière, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thom Davies and Arshad Isakjee, Christina Sharpe, Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, Didier Fassin, Étienne Balibar, Georges Didi-Huberman, Iris Marion Young, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Mark Kalluak and Dylan Robinson). Its ultimate claim is that contemporary art is inviting us to unlearn our preconceptions and assumptions about the refugee or migrant “crisis.” Unlearning is about learning so see migration more critically, more disobediently and as transformable.
ARTH 339 (CRN 1306) (3 credits)
Critical Issues - Contemporary Art: Contemporary Architecture and Design
Dr. Evgeniya Makarova
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:35 pm-3:55 pm
ARTS W-215
This course provides an introduction to the history of contemporary architecture and design to undergraduate students with little to no prior knowledge of the field’s theories and methods.
We will first look at the wave of movements, schools, and ideas in architecture that came in the wake of the social changes and the technological advances associated with modernity. We will then turn our attention to some of the major trends that proliferated in dialogue with, and often in opposition to the Modern Movement, including Postmodernism, Regionalism, Deconstruction, and Eco-Architecture.
Geographically, the course focuses on Europe and North America, but also attends to examples outside the “Western world”. Other than buildings, it examines practical objects and elements of décor designed by architects for private and public spaces.
ARTH 352 (CRN 1307) (3 credits)
Iconoclasts: Feminism in Art and Art History
Dr. Julia Skelly
Monday and Wednesday, 8:35 am-9:55 am
ARTS W-215
This course will consider a range of different ways of writing feminist art histories, beginning with Linda Nochlin’s ground-breaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” (1971) and ending with a feminist approach to global contemporary art. We will examine the work of female artists who were, and continue to be, positioned as ‘other’ in relation to male modernists, as well as early feminist artists who used their own bodies and core imagery to create what is now known as “essentialist” feminist art. The theoretical framework for part of the course will be Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque,’ a figure who exceeds gendered norms and expectations. Russo notes that the act of exceeding norms has inherent risk, and we will consider the ways in which female and feminist artists have exceeded gendered boundaries, as well as the risks and rewards that have accompanied these ostensible excesses. We will also discuss feminist art-historical scholarship that has set out to recuperate female artists, in addition to deconstructing the (masculine) discipline of art history, specifically the work of Griselda Pollock. Issues of race, gender and sexuality will be central to our discussions, and we will attend to the importance of taking an intersectional feminist approach to work by Black feminist artists such as Faith Ringgold. Broadly speaking, this course will take an intersectional, queer, feminist, and anti-racist approach to art and art history.
ARTH 400 (CRN 1308) (3 credits)
Selected Methods in Art History: The Art of Doing Art History
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Thursday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
This seminar approaches art history as a set of practices. Weekly exercises and workshops are designed to offer training in the following arts: writing a compelling visual analysis, putting together a successful research proposal, critiquing an exhibition, explaining your research with clarity and confidence. A key aim of the class is practical skill building. The weekly writing exercises are designed as building blocks for the Honours Research Paper (ARTH 401). We will also consider the history of art history in relation to recent developments in the discipline, paying particular attention to the racialized discourses, methods, and exclusions that have structured art history and its methods.
The major outcome of this course will be a strong honours research paper.
Limited Enrolment: The Honours Seminar and Honours Research Paper are limited enrolment courses for upper-level students in the Honours and Joint Honours program. Registration in this class is only by permission of the Instructor and Student Affairs Officer.
ARTH 401 (CRN 1309) (3 credits)
Honours Research Paper
An Honours research paper written in consultation with an academic advisor.
Limited Enrolment: The Honours Seminar and Honours Research Paper are limited enrolment courses for upper-level students in the Honours and Joint Honours program. Registration in this class is only by permission of the Instructor and Student Affairs Officer.
ARTH 420 (CRN 1310) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1: Alterity and "Othering" in the Renaissance (1300-1600)
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Friday, 10:05 am-12:55 pm
ARTS W-220
This seminar explores the articulation of visual difference in the art, material, and performance culture of Renaissance Europe. It focuses on representations of religious, racial, ethnic, social, and biological diversity among humans, but also on the invented "others" of classical mythology, including issues of hybridity and monstrosity. Finally, we will also look at identity categories defined by historical conceptions of gender and sexuality, e.g., witches, prostitutes, and hermaphrodites.
ARTH 440 (CRN 1311) (3 credits)
The Body and Visual Culture
Dr. Julia Skelly
Monday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-5
The first few weeks of this seminar will be dedicated to reading foundational texts in the study of the body, for example Jane Gallop’s Thinking through the Body (1988), and then moving on to texts that look specifically at the body in visual culture, including contemporary art, film, etc. These texts will be taken from a range of fields including feminist theory and art histories, queer theory, Indigenous studies, skin studies, addiction studies, and anti-racist studies (or critical race theory, if you prefer). Considering the fact that we are currently living in a time of transphobia and punitive legislation for 2SLGBTQ+ individuals (not to mention a time of anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, and anti-Black racism, misogyny, and the loss of reproductive rights with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade), this course will be unabashedly political in terms of the texts that have been chosen. This is not the time to pretend that Art History as a discipline and as a discourse is separate from lived experience and politics. In the latter part of the course we will narrow our focus dramatically, turning to recent(ish) scholarship on trans and nonbinary individuals (bodies) in art, art history and visual culture.
ARTH 447 (CRN 1312) (3 credits)
Independent Research Course
Supervised independent research on an approved topic.
Prerequisite: Instructor's approval required.
ARTH 490 (CRN 1313) (3 credits)
Museum Internship
The Department of Art History and Communication Studies offers undergraduate students the opportunity to undertake internships at museums, art galleries, and artist-run centres, amongst other institutions, as the equivalent of a 3-credit course toward their academic degree program. These internships are intended to provide students with valuable work experience and to offer them insight into how things function in particular career fields through their exposure to research, curatorial, and exhibition practices, as well as to the distinctive concerns, needs, and interests of arts and cultural organisations.
ARTH 490 is an individualised course designed to complement and build upon students’ experiences in their completed internships by providing additional opportunities for them to reflect upon these experiences and to consider how they may relate to broader issues within the context of museological practice. Students’ work in the course will culminate in the development and submission of a final research paper, which they may write on a topic of their choice pertaining to museums, museum studies, and museological practice.
Prerequisite: Department approval required.
ARTH 501/EAST 501 (CRN 1314) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture: "Other" Art in Chinese Past
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Wednesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-5
What makes art official? What does it mean for art to be considered unofficial? Such fundamental questions in art’s position in society occupy this seminar, which centers upon China. We will explore how certain art practices became socially sanctioned while others did not. While our inquiries will begin from antiquity, our main focus will be upon middle-period China (9th-14th centuries). This was an era of remarkable changes, of shifting paradigms in socioeconomic structure, ecology, knowledge production, boundaries of religious realms, and cultural diversities. Changes in the ways of seeing here were intertwined with many such shifts, often disguised as visual interests only, such as the renewed pursuit of “lifelikeness” or “spirit-likeness.” In the seminar, we will examine artistic modes shaped by tension between “official” and “unofficial” cultural understandings, between the classical and the contemporary, between orthodox and unorthodox, and between text and image.
ARTH 502 (CRN 1315) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History: Art Under Liberalism
Prof. Matthew C. Hunter
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
“Live dangerously”: that, as Michel Foucault declared in 1979, could be the motto of classical liberalism. As Foucault’s pithy formula suggests, liberalism signals more than an ideology of free markets and individuals. But, what does it entail? How does liberalism’s danger relate to the precarity of contemporary neoliberalism? And by what methods (i.e. steps and procedures of knowledge-production) can we reconcile liberal discourses and values with specific imaging technics, spatial typologies or other configurations of the visual? Open to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students alike, this seminar examines the conditions of art and architecture under liberalism, from the later eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. Guided by recent historiography while drawing on period liberal voices and their critics, we will examine what liberalism has been taken to entail and how it has shaped the making, beholding, commerce and possibilities of art and architecture. Through focus on specific places and institutions—the prison and the dockyard, the national gallery and the insurance office—we will consider shifting figurations of the liberal self’s race, gender and politics in eras of slavery, revolution, and imperialism. In so doing, the seminar aims not only to enliven studies of JMW Turner, Robert S. Duncanson, and other artists, but to sound possibilities for different, critical histories of modern visual production and its built environment.
Winter 2023
ARTH 202 (CRN 1176) (3 credits)
Introduction to Contemporary Art
Prof. Christine Ross
Tuesday and Thursday, 1:05 pm-2:25 pm
ARTS W-215
On March 10, 2018, the photographer Nan Goldin [middle left] led the opioid-crisis activist group P.A.I.N. to the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They threw hundreds of pill bottles—labelled “prescribed to you by the Sackler Family”—into the pool of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, to protest sponsorship by the family that owns one of the largest makers of opioids.
North American and Western European art from the 1960s to today—the focus of this course—must be seen as a dramatic response to the cultural dominance of formalist modernism; a necessary questioning of its principles of self-referentiality, medium specificity, disembodied authorship and spectatorship. It broke and still breaks with the understanding of art as fundamentally optical (i.e., as essentially involving vision, understood as universal and disinterested). It engaged—although not consistently and sometimes obliquely—with society at large and the political turbulences of the times, especially with the counterculture of the 1960s, the African-American civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, the events of May 1968, the feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements, the Vietnam War protests, the AIDS crisis, and, more recently, the climate crisis, decolonization, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous claims. It invented and invents aesthetic strategies to think aesthetics politically. These strategies include: assemblages; happenings, event scores, non-dance and performance; feminist and queer performativity; expanded media; linguistic propositions; é and detournement; the promotion of everyday life and “poor” aesthetics; site-specificity; home and the “unhomely”; anarchitecture; institutional critique (including Goldin’s protest above); appropriation; participatory, relational and collaborative practices; care and storytelling; earth, land, ecological and environmental interventions; new materialism(s); and much more.
Introduction to Contemporary Art examines this historical transformation. While probing North American and Western European art, it emphasizes diversity and complicates the Western paradigm whenever possible. Throughout, it addresses issues of gender, sexuality, racism and antiracism, Black art and Indigenous art, colonialism and decoloniality, (im)migration and forced displacement, as well as human/nonhuman relations. Following a roughly chronological order but establishing a constant dialogue with recent artistic practices, it investigates some of the main art movements, practices and techniques of the period. Course Requirements: two exams (mid-term and final) and one research paper.
ARTH 207 (CRN 1177) (3 credits)
Introduction Early Modern Art 1400-1700
Laura Eliza Enríquez
Wednesday and Friday, 2:35 pm-3:55 pm
ARTS W-215
The goal of this course is to offer a general introduction to early modern art from the 15th- to the 18th-century from a global perspective. The course will focus on the creative and artisanal practices and manifestations in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, and their intellectual and cultural exchanges with the Middle East, Asia and the Atlantic world.
Following a thematic approach, this course is designed to introduce some of the main concepts and features of early modern art, in relationship with a broader intellectual, cultural, economic and sociopolitical context. It will address both established topics in the historiography the period, and new directions in the field that derive from critical post-colonial and gender, as well as from material and sensory studies, and the global turn.
A selection of artifacts, materials, and primary sources from various traditions will guide the discussion, with the assistance of relevant secondary literature, coming from both seminal and emerging scholarship. The course will cover themes such as the following: visual culture; the revival of paganism and Classical Antiquity; Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Iconoclasm; sacred vs secular images, artifacts, and rituals; women’s creative practices; still life and genre painting; material, technical, and theoretical art treatises; the relationship between ars and scientia; and transoceanic voyage, material exchanges, and colonialism.
This course will also bring to discussion larger theoretical issues that are relevant beyond the specific case studies studied in class. Such historiographic and philosophical questions may include: the nature of perception, representation and knowledge; the historical origins and aftermath of colonialism, and the challenges of multiculturalism.
ARTH 305 (CRN 1178) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History
Dr. Julia Skelly
Wednesday and Friday, 4:05 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-215
There are two primary objectives of this course. The first objective is to provide an overview of the methods employed in the discipline of art history since the eighteenth century. The second objective is to provide students with an opportunity to determine which methods resonate with them for future coursework. We will begin with discussions of formalism and iconography; subsequently we will discuss critical methodologies including feminist interventions into (masculine) art history, writing queer art histories, attending to intersectionality and the black female subject, as well as Marxism, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.
ARTH 310 (CRN 1179) (3 credits)
Postcolonialism
Dr. Özlem Gülin Dağoğlu
Wednesday and Friday, 11:35 am-12:55 pm
ARTS W-215
Through the comparative and transnational exploration of a series of case studies, the course will examine postcolonial discourses and theories. How have artworks furthered or called into question imperialism, as well as constructions of race, gender, and identity? Addressing a range of artistic practices within their diverse global contexts, the course will provide an understanding of how modern and contemporary arts were experienced beyond and in dialogue with Western contexts from the nineteenth century onwards. The course will also provide an understanding of their relationship to the art museum and the academic discipline of art history. The aim is thus to introduce students to a critical rethinking of art historical canons and sites, and methods of investigation of its subjects.
ARTH 325 (CRN 1180) (3 credits)
Visual Culture Renaissance Venice
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Tuesday and Thursday, 4:05 pm-5:25 pm
RPHYS 112
This course examines Venetian architecture, sculpture, painting, graphic arts, and material culture within a framework that acknowledges the status of Venice itself as an elaborately constructed work of art. Due to the unique position of the city—built upon a series of reclaimed islands in a shallow saline lagoon—Venice has always been understood as a floating mundus alter (‘other world’) positioned between East and West. This course recovers the complexity of Venetian visual culture as it changed over time, with special focus on the 'Renaissance' period, c. 1450–1580. We will examine the dual origins of Venice in ancient Rome and Byzantium; Venetian connections to the Islamic world; the cultivation of a materially opulent, hybrid architectural style rooted in East and West; the display of socio-political values through visual and ritual culture; the theory of Venetian artistic style and subject matter; and the ambivalent projection of Venice as both center of piety, pilgrimage, and republican values, and as marketplace, theater, and playground of the early modern world.
Note: Cross-listed with ITAL 365 (CRN 7163).
ARTH 353 (CRN 1181) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art History 1: Modernities of Asian Art
Prof. Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Monday and Wednesday, 10:05 am-11:25 am
ARTS W-215
This course provides a critical introduction to art in East and Southeast Asia from the 18th century to the present. We will focus on how conceptions of race and ethnicity arise out of visual production in key moments of cross-cultural encounter, whether between the so-called West and non-West, or intra-regionally within Asia. Through comparative examination across multiple cities and countries, we will also explore broader questions about the relationship of art to historical phenomena like colonialism, urbanization, industrialization, militarization, and globalization.
ARTH 360 (CRN 1183) (3 credits)
Studies in the Photographic: Photography and Ethics
Dr. Julia Skelly
Monday and Wednesday, 8:35 am-9:55 am
ARTS W-215
This course will examine photography that represents violence and pain in a range of temporal and socio-political contexts. Case studies will include photographs of conflict zones and contemporary artists who depict or index the aftermath of violence, for example, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, whose work is concerned with drug violence and femicide in Mexico City and other global contexts. Issues related to spectatorship, race, gender, trauma, and social/scholarly responsibility will be discussed.
ARTH 420 (CRN 1184) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1:
Bodies in Contact: Body Arts and Cultural Encounters
Prof. Gloria Bell
Tuesday, 8:35 am-11:25 am
ARTS W-5
This seminar explores body arts through tattooing and other body modification practices within a global framework of cultural encounter and exchange. Expanding on the work of anthropologists and art historians, we will examine a variety of artistic media including: colonial prints and drawings, popular tattoo patterns and designs, anatomical and medical illustrations, circus posters, scrimshaw carvings, magazines on radical body modification including Re/Search, and the artworks of contemporary Indigenous artists working in the Pacific and North America as well as contemporary body modification artists. This course will cover historical periods from first contact in the Americas circa 1500 to present day “modern primitives” and the tattoo renaissance. In addition, we will consider body arts in relation to constructions of self and community, appropriation, resistance, and the assertion of multiple identities. We will make site visits to local art spaces as appropriate.
ARTH 421 (CRN 1885) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 2: Anti-colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues in Art History and the Humanities
Prof. Christine Ross
Monday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
What does it mean to “decolonize art history”? What does decolonizing do? How have art historians, artists, curators and, more broadly, the humanities responded to “the call to decolonize”? (Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, “Decolonizing Art History,” 2020).
This seminar mobilizes these questions by providing a critical introduction to some of the major writings in the field of anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies, from the mid-twentieth century period of decolonization to the present. It focuses on the theoretical and methodological debates which inform the field and its main objects of study: imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, indigeneity, the transatlantic slave trade, and the coloniality of being, as well as what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler has called the tenaciousness of the histories of colonialism in the present—the “strange” (i.e., not straightforwardly identifiable) continuity between the colonial past and present, its inherent racism and necropolitics. These studies have significantly influenced (although perhaps not significantly enough) the art historical study of art and art institutions of societies that have arisen from colonial rule; they also offer and renew analytical tools to analyze them. Special emphasis will be given to the theoretical dialogues that have grown around these studies. Starting with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) and Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978), we then turn to some of the contemporary developments and questioning of these major texts, notably the Subaltern Studies Collective and the decolonial option, and their expansion within the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies and environmental studies. These perspectives will be typically discussed in relation to specific artworks and institutions.
Seminar Requirements: readings, seminar participation, oral presentation and reading report.
ARTH 422 (CRN 6884) / COMS 490 (CRN 6885) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 3: Black Sound and Technoculture
Prof. Alex Blue V.
Wednesday, 2:35 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-5
This course offers the opportunity to expand our understandings of race (with a particular focus on Blackness), sound, aesthetics, and technology, and the ways in which these things overlap and interact. We will address numerous questions, including: how can a sound have a race?; What does it mean to sound Black (adjective)? What does it mean to sound Black (verb)? In addition to readings, we will incorporate film, music, and other forms of media to explore a range of topics at the intersection of Black sound and technoculture.
Cross-listed with COMS 490.
ARTH 447 (CRN 1186) (3 credits)
Independent Research Course
Supervised independent research on an approved topic.
Prerequisite: Instructor's approval required.
ARTH 474 (CRN 1187) (3 credits)
Studies in Later 18th and 19th Century Art 3: Drawing for Art Historians
Prof. Matthew C. Hunter
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
“Embodied knowing”; “artisanal epistemology”; “maker’s knowledge”: terms like these (along with some lavish funding) have recently drawn many historical researchers toward forms of practice-based investigation. By recreating production techniques used in the past, so historians of art, science and neighboring fields have argued, we can new pose questions; we can gain insights about artworks and the cultures from which they emerged in ways inaccessible to conventional academic methods, which remain focused on texts. This seminar seeks neither to critique nor to historicize recent scholarly efforts to mobilize material making, although we will engage with some critiques and historicization. Nor does “Drawing for Art Historians” aim to teach drawing skills in the manner of an art-school class. Instead, this course uses the foundational practice of drawing at a moment of its rich, variegated spread in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century for methodological purposes. Offering what is hoped will a break from the academic routine of screens, readings and writing that have reached a crescendo in the COVID era, we will put graphic practices to some gentle tests to pose the following question: what can the art historian learn by doing?