DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

This Freshman seminar considers the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fashion through the lens of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Marie-Antoinette’s lavish gowns and towering wigs, the empire-waist dresses of Regency England, and richly printed calico muslins, among other objects, will be understood through the histories of race, colonialism, science, and industry. Who made these garments? What materials did they use and where were these materials from? How was fashion deployed as a tool to perform power, gender, race, and national identity? What is the relationship between fashion and art?

Throughout this course, we will also engage with contemporary art and popular culture with the goal of understanding the historical legacy and fetishization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century period dress.PDF

How do buildings reflect history? This introductory-level course attempts to answer that question by surveying the human built environment of the past six centuries from a global perspective. We will study buildings large and small as well as gardens, parks, towns, and cities thinking along the way about the many meanings of place and space in modern history. From the Forbidden City in Beijing to the Piazza Duomo in Florence and from the Houses of Parliament in London to the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, the sites covered in this course will encourage students to think broadly about the technologies, uses, and aesthetics of architecture across time and geography and across a range of social, cultural, and religious traditions. Students will learn to write about architecture though writing assignments centered on visual analysis and complemented at times with drawing exercises.

The class meets three times per week, twice for lectures and once for a discussion section in a smaller group setting on Fridays. Previous study of art history is not required, and you do not have to be an artist in order to complete the drawing exercises!

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This slide-lecture course is designed to give both art majors and non-majors an introduction to the myriad forms and concerns of art over the last half century. We will begin in the present, looking first at the impact of globalization on the conditions underlying art's production, exhibition and reception. We will then return to the late 1950s and the center of the international art world at the time, New York, and examine how the traditions of painting and sculpture, and with them the idea of a modernist canon, were increasingly challenged by a range of practices (dispersed geographically and otherwise) that have been loosely labeled as neo-dada, pop, minimalism and conceptual art. The second half of the course will focus on the issues raised by the return to representation in painting, by photography and other technologies of reproduction, and by new genres like video art and installation. Even more recent paradigms will be examined, such as the superceding of images by information, and of art exhibition by communication and media platforming. We will consider some of the different ways that artists handle information and new media and technology, for example how they have appropriated relatively new forms like networks and databases. Along with the social and technological changes associated with globalization and the artistic responses to such changes, we will track shifts in art's relationship to audiences and culture at large, and will question the relevance today of distinctions between high and low, margin and mainstream. This will finally equip us to update our notions of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts, and re-evaluate the usefulness of the avant-garde as a model and re-examine its long-held desire to merge art and life.

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Paris cemented its reputation as a global center of art in the second half of the nineteenth century. But art-making in Paris did not happen in a vacuum. French artists were active players in the city’s numerous crises and transformations between 1848-1900, which included utopian popular revolutions, foreign occupation, and massive urban reconstruction projects. Nineteenth-century Paris was also the capital of an empire that stretched from North and West Africa to the Caribbean and Polynesia. The foreign bodies and objects that filled the city as a result of these imperial circumstances left an indelible mark on French art.

This course explores art in Paris at the intersection of modern politics, colonialism, and capitalist industrialization. In addition to avant-garde painting movements such as Impressionism and its “post-Impressionist” challengers, we also examine Orientalism and Primitivism alongside academic sculpture, universal exhibitions, and reproductive technologies like photography and the illustrated press. Some of the artists we examine include Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Rosa Bonheur, Nadar, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Moreau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.

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During the early 1990s political transition from apartheid to democracy, the concept of a “South African cultural expression” was one of the oft mentioned phrases indexical of a prospective post-apartheid cultural imaginary. However, twenty six years later, not only has the promissory view of democratic possibility lost its transformative charm, the phrase itself that once encapsulated our cultural futurity has also lost its discursive sway. But in what ways could the envisioned new artistic sensibility captured by phrase, South African cultural expression, help address and practicalise the liberatory as well as conciliatory promises attributed to democracy? What is South Africa? Who are South Africans? This course retrospectively explores the complexities and debates that surround the early 1990s cultural discourses in the unfoldment of democratic dispensation.

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The discourse on the protest paradigm in South African cultural history is one of the most contentious topics in the country and exhibits the tensions that exist between art and politics. Protest art was at one point, the most dominant idiom of cultural expressions associated with the anti-apartheid liberation movements, boasting various aesthetics motifs, strategies, and approaches to art. This course engages the historical unfolding of the aesthetics of resistance and protest in the South African cultural landscape, with particular attention being given to visual arts. The course will track both the local South African reflections and practices as well as the global debates and contentions on the aesthetic and political merits of the resistance paradigm in visual arts and culture.

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Formerly called primitive art and also known as the, Non-Western art is a geographically-expansive category connected by the histories of colonialism and imperialism that brought the art and artifacts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas into Western museums. In fact, many of the objects that comprise this canon are oftentimes not “objects” at all. Taking a decolonial approach to study the canon of Non-Western art, this course addresses the animacies and ontologies of different categories of “objects” in museum collections, including materially-embodied deities such as Katsina dolls (Hopi) and Orishas (Yoruba diaspora); ancestors that take form as seeds (Pueblo) and ceramics (Mimbres), and materials such as feathers (Aztec, Tupinamba, Hawaiian) and pipestone (Lakota, Dakota and Yankton Sioux) that mediate different realms of existence. The class will also consider the remains of humans, plants, and animals housed in anthropology and natural history museums. The question of objecthood also applies to people conceptualized as property, sold as commodities and displayed within ethnographic and World’s Fair contexts as well as the land upon which museums are built. We will learn about some of the ways that these “objects” entered into museums as we compare the Western epistemologies by which they are organized there to the indigenous ontologies they occupy within their cultures of origin.PDF

Critical Reflections on Racial Violence in American Art surveys racial violence as a subject within 20th and early 21st century American art, foregrounding African Americans as active shapers of visual discourse, and emphasizing how art has been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize this violence. It will critically consider the challenges and opportunities posed by teaching and exhibiting this material and develop a historical context for current debates about the production and circulation of art that engages with incidents of historical and contemporary racial violence. The Block Museum of Art’s presentation of the exhibition A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence will serve as a case study and source of primary materials for this course. A Site of Struggle explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in ways that run from the explicit to the resolutely abstract.PDF

What do the ostrich egg cup, agate pomander, coral, and other objects laid out on the table in this painting have to do with one another? Their luster, rarity, and highly worked surfaces and combinations of material signal their appeal as unusual things, attractive to early modern European collectors of cabinets of curiosities, also called Kunst- and Wunderkammern. Assembled across Europe from the mid-16th century through to the early 18th century, collections encompassed such varied items as natural specimens, art works, foreign goods, and sometimes musical and scientific instruments. The wide-ranging variety of objects in van Roerstraeten’s, Still Life with Ostrich Cup and the Whitfield Heirlooms may seem random to our eyes today but allude to a culture of collecting in which a microcosmic scope was the ideal.

This seminar will offer an opportunity to explore the types of objects, practices, and motivations that shaped early modern collections, primarily in northern Europe, through a series of case studies anchored in objects at the Art Institute and will meet primarily at the museum. We will address the roots of early modern Kunst- and Wunderkammer collecting practices, and examine several of the best-preserved records, including treatises, catalogues, and inventories (in modern editions). Objects at the Art Institute will afford first-hand observation and inquiry into the structure and aesthetics of early modern collections in addition to investigation into material and display. We will also examine representations of collections and of the sorts of objects they encompassed as well as the legacy of early modern collections in the origins of public museums. Through discussion and individual research, we will consider how cabinets, the objects and images of the type that would have been collected for cabinets, and their materials were enmeshed in a variety of social and political contexts including networks of collectors, diplomacy, and colonialist projects.

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This course is required for and limited to 3rd year Art History students who are writing the dissertation prospectus.

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Writing in the mid-16th century, Francesco da Sangallo stipulated in a letter that when one spoke of sculpture, one spoke of marble. This ontological connection between sculpture and (white) marble only strengthened over the course of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, at the same that the discipline of Art History came into fruition. Why does this history associate marble exclusively with whiteness, despite the material’s many valuable polychrome varieties? Why does this history treat this whiteness as the absence of color, rather than a color with its own host of political, cultural, and racial associations? What are the sculptural implications for other materials, notably porcelain, sugar, and bronze? This course attempts to answer these questions, among others, by tracing the parallel and interwoven histories of eighteenth-century ideas of racial difference and white marble’s rise to prominence within the field of Art History.

Students are encouraged to write seminar papers on the political and racial valences of color and materials in art and art historiography across cultural traditions, time periods, and media.

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