DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

What is modernism? Why did artists in the late nineteenth century stop making realistic images of the world and instead start experimenting with form to the point that they invented abstract art? Modernist art arose in the historical period we call modernity, defined by industrialization; urbanization; colonization; revolution and mass war; the rise of mass commodity culture, spectacle and technology; and the emergence of the art market as we know it today. Modernist art sometimes optimistically mimics the new forms of mass visual culture but more commonly reworks or rejects those forms in a critical commentary on their inequities. From the late 19^th C to the mid-20th C, primarily in Europe, we will examine the key modernist “isms”: Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Purism, Constructivism, and Socialist Realism, as well as the rise of abstraction culminating in Abstract Expressionism.

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How did individuals define themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world, and how did they express their affiliation with multiple and diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other collective social identities? How did groups portray perceived differences between themselves and others? What do we know of the construction of gender identities, race, age, and class distinctions? What dynamic roles did dress, hairstyle, body decoration or ornament, and personal possessions play in establishing and expressing individual and collective identities?

This course explores evidence for self-and group-fashioning in Greece, Rome, and their neighbors in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. We examine a wide range of textual and material sources, including works of art, archaeological contexts such as burials and religious institutions, biographies, autobiographies, and legal documents, including dowries. We also consider culturally significant modes of self-representation and commemoration, such as portraits and funerary monuments, along with the collecting and transfer of objects that represented accumulated social entanglements, such as heirlooms.

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The year 2020 has witnessed a series of crises in which protest has been both effectively and creatively used and also, at times, demonized. This class examines themes in the visual language of protest in the United States since the 1960s, with particular emphasis on recent political movements and topics that will include climate change and global climate justiceand responses to police violence, prisons, and antiblackness, and may also include Indigenous sovereignty, antifascism, disability and trans rights, activism around Covid19, and other efforts. We will bear in mind relationships to more traditional forms of art like painting and sculpture as well as print media and social media; we will also discuss theories of collective action and questions of force and violence as well as nonviolence, but the main focus is on modes of creativity connected to protest. The organizing principle will be specific tropesand mediaof protest: for example, tree-sitting, tents and occupations; the megaphone, sound, and music; bicycles, automobiles,pushcarts, floats, and other vehicles; the mask; giant puppets;parties and pleasure; coffins, memorials,and the Grim Reaper; stenciling, graffiti, murals, and mark-making; video and social media; and other modes of performance and strategies for producing visibility. Class will be held remotely; if possible, we may have one or two optional socially distanced field trips.Following a short sequence of introductory readings, students in small groups will participate in researching imagery and themes that they will present to the class as a whole for group discussion. The final project will involve small groups each making contributions to the curating of a collective “guidebook” of protest imagery, format to be determined.Work will be assessed both collectively and individually.

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How can we imagine modes of life that oppose social injustice and the tangle of race, gender, and class hierarchies that sustains it? What would a world that radically promotes or even realizes justice look like? This course will investigate the ways in which feminist writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined a future that does not resemble the past, reinventing for us the very texture of daily life. Among the themes we will explore are the relation between architecture, urban planning, and various forms of surveillance/control; the relation between work and life, with a focus on domestic labor and the struggles of the 1970s international feminist movement; and the relation between the demands of the community and personal freedom. While concentrating on 20th and 21st century, we will draw our cases from literature and speculative science fiction (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale) and a variety of media practices: film (Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames and Elizabeth Tadic’s Umoja: No Men Allowed), installation art and architecture (WomanHouse and feminist architectural theorists) performance and video art (Martha Rosler’s Semiotics in the Kitchen and Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and TV series (Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and the recent The Handmaid’s Tale).

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This seminar provides an introduction to art historical research methods for undergraduates, particularly those interested in writing an honors thesis. The seminar will survey the history of art history with a focus on recent debates and interventions within the field (e.g. feminist, critical race theory, and decolonial approaches). The seminar will also provide students with concrete tools to develop, research, and write a piece of original art historical scholarship. What does it mean to ask an original art historical research question? What is historiography and how it is critical for mapping out and developing an original thesis statement and argument? How does one effectively analyze and implement primary sources? What constitutes “evidence,” and how is the dominant perception of “evidence” shaped by art history’s origins?

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This course is intended to aid second-year Art History graduate students in the writing of the required QP. It is organized around a series of assignments to facilitate and prompt reflection on the key tasks of art historical writing including the translation of the visual into the verbal, the framing of a question, structuring of a research agenda, proper use of primary and secondary source materials and self- and peer-editing. While our primary purpose is the production of a strong QP final draft, secondary benefits include critical engagement with strategies of writing pedagogy and consideration of our individual priorities and voices as writers.

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This course considers the past and future of European medieval collections in light of recent critical museology and curatorial practice. Through thematic discussions and selected case studies, we will examine the longer history of the ‘medieval wing’ in encyclopedic museums and dedicated museums of medieval art alongside more recent debates concerning the presentation of the art and artifacts of Indigenous and other marginalized groups in museum contexts. We will interrogate some of the modern uses of the medieval as a category and European medieval art as materials in the formation of national, imperial and White racial identities in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will also consider the future of medieval collections and their display, particularly in light of the current calls for a ‘global medieval’. Our goal will be to find a path forward that resists the supposed universalism and neutrality of the presentation of the European past and the colonial and neocolonial projects in which medieval art has been enmeshed. To this end, for their final project students may write a traditional research paper or offer a proposal for the reinstallation of a section of a current medieval collection.

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This seminar will examine recent and past scholarship on the built environment of the transnational and transatlantic Spanish Habsburg monarchy (c. 1500 to c. 1700), with special consideration given to spatial theory and comparative history astools for reimagining an architectural history of thepolitical domain. Following an introduction to important writings by Fernand Braudel and Henri Lefebvre, the seminar will focus on key cities of the empire including Santo Domingo, Cuzco, Seville, Madrid, Naples, and Mexico City. We will consider monuments and public spaces in each of these places as products of a vast network of people, ideologies, and aesthetic principles that circulated in multiple directions.

Each week, the seminar will meet synchronously for two hours and asynchronously for one hour. Students will write weekly responses to readings and prepare two or three presentations that will be posted for viewing and commentary by all members of the seminar.Reading knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese would be beneficial but is not required.

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