DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Over the centuries, individuals and societies have often made the decision to tear down monuments to past historical figures who committed reprehensible acts or who symbolize great injustices. When, in recent years, people cast critical attention on statues of Confederate generals, they participated in a long history of conflict over monuments. In this course we study general issues around monuments but focus specifically on monuments in Chicago: those that arguably represent historical violence and injustice; those that attempt to redress wrongs; those that do not yet exist but should. We also look at how contemporary artists have intervened in the very definition of what a monument is or can be, using different tactics (not necessarily always statues) to assert their claims. How can contemporary art represent history? How can we engage in debate about the ethical and political issues involved? By engaging with readings and multiple site visits, we will explore how to research, write about, discuss, and present the history, politics, and visual and material characteristics of works of art situated in public space. We will also explore the visual traces of African American, Native American, and women's history (and their intersections) in the city.

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Portraiture by Black artists has gained widespread prominence and visibility in recent decades, whether in the form of national portraits such as those of Barack and Michelle Obama, large-scale public art commissions, or through attention to prison photo studios that document self-expression and familial relations among incarcerated subjects. One of the most popular and potent sites of cultural, social, and political contestation, “Black portraiture” has emerged as an expansive category of inquiry across the fields of art history and cultural studies. In this first-year seminar, students will engage a range of approaches to Black figural representation from the early twentieth century to the present. We will analyze how artists and ordinary subjects have used film, painting, photography, and sculpture to generate representations of themselves and others in order to address issues including but not limited to beauty, class, gender and sexuality, racism and antiblack violence, modernity, and decolonization. Students will learn how to interpret, discuss, and write about portrait-based objects in terms of their material form, circulation, reproduction, sites of display, and patronage.

Wracked by revolutions religious and secular, defining itself in relation to the many new worlds that became visible through colonial conquest and through microscopes, and ushering in new social and political forms with the rise in power of cities as well as absolute monarchs, early modern Europe was also a time and place within which what we now call “art” came into being. This course will consider works of art and architecture by well-known artists such as Donatello, Van Eyck, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Bernini, Borromini, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Wren, David, Reynolds, and Hogarth, within religious, political, and scientific contexts. But we will also examine popular prints, urban space, fashion, and performances in cultural centers like Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, and London.

This course is intended as an introduction both to the period/place, and to fundamental modes of art historical analysis and interpretation. There are no prerequisites for this course.

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This slide-lecture survey course is designed to give both art majors and non-majors an introduction to the myriad forms and concerns of art from the 1960s to the present. We will begin by examining the rise of pop and minimal art, and the challenge these movements—along with the earthworks, conceptual art, and performances that followed them—posed to the idea of modernism and the traditions of painting and sculpture. The question of postmodernism will be important to the course both thematically and chronologically. 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, by new media and genres like video art and installation, by shifts in concern regarding audience and public art, and by increased pluralism and globalism and their impact on our definitions of mainstream and avant-garde. No prerequisites. This course is available as a distribution requirement. P/N permitted only if course is not used either as a general distribution or departmental requirement.

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How do institutions such as museums, along with other created contexts such as websites and archaeological sites developed as tourist destinations, shape and construct our notions of the past? How are these institutions enmeshed with broader cultural and political agendas regarding cultural identity and otherness, the formation of artistic canons, and even the concept of ancient art? This course explores modern strategies of collecting and display of material culture from ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome, both in Europe and the United States and in their present-day homelands.

The course approaches the construction of ancient Mediterranean, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art through modes of reception over the past two centuries. By analyzing programs of collecting and display, it seeks to understand both the development of modern scholarship in ancient art and the intersection of institutional and scholarly programs. Topics examined include the historical development of modern display practices in public and private museums; notions of authenticity and identity; issues of cultural heritage and patrimony; temporary and “blockbuster” shows; virtual exhibitions and museums; and the archaeological site as a locus of display. Chicago-area museums will provide important resources for studying firsthand examples of temporary and long-term installations.

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This course explores the art and architecture of Mexico from the time of the Spanish invasion in 1519 to Mexico’s emergence as an independent nation in 1821. It begins with a consideration of Indigenous Mexican artistic traditions in a range of media including painting, sculpture, and the building arts as a necessary introduction for understanding the Indigenous legacy in the art and architecture produced in a territory that came to be known as New Spain. The course also traces the invention and codification of European-American artistic practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, the course will pay special attention to the impact of people and things from Africa and Asia as well as Europe in giving shape to a colonial society in the early modern Americas. Students will think about works of art and architecture as products of particular social and political contexts, relying on primary source readings translated into English and accessible, recent scholarship. For students with Spanish-language reading skills, there may be optional reading assignments for extra credit.

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The nineteenth century was an age of revolutions—not only in Europe but across the globe. As the Industrial Revolution rapidly reshaped the world’s material and social relations, popular revolutions erupted to overthrow corrupt ruling classes and experiment with new forms of political and social organization. Some of these revolutions are well-known, such as the French Revolution (1789) and the Russian Revolution (1917); others deserve more attention, such as the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution (1908). At the same time, the nineteenth century witnessed the massive expansion of European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, igniting numerous anti-colonial revolutions, including the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Indian Rebellion (1857). These revolutions posed a direct challenge to “modern” Europe and its supposedly liberal values.

Moving between these diverse political and cultural contexts, this course investigates art’s role in representing revolutionary ideals and producing new kinds of political subjects in the nineteenth century. This course takes a global frame that centers capitalism, interimperial competition, race, and gender as the primary forces that drove revolutionary art-making throughout the world. Instead of a broad survey, this course closely analyzes individual artworks in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, photography, and political cartoons.

How did we get into this mess? The idea that human beings are separate from something called “nature” which they can and should dominate and control is one of the most pervasive ideas in modern Western culture—meaning European and North American culture since the end of the Middle Ages. Over hundreds of years, alongside and intertwining with the development of capitalism and colonialism (for the “indigenous” was often placed on the side of nature), Western culture produced artificial divisions between human and nonhuman nature. Artists and scientists alike aspired to equal nature’s powers and eventually exploit and “conquer” it—or “her,” since “Nature” has often been gendered female—with the tools of technology. How did this come about? How did nature push back? This course attempts an alternative, ecological history of Western art from the perspective of how art has depicted, defined, constructed, and reckoned with nature. What is nature and the natural? How do nature and art mutually define one another? What does it mean when art rejects nature? Without attempting to be comprehensive, the course will work through carefully selected case studies—some of them student-generated—in landscape, still life, and figure painting; scientific illustration; garden and landscape design; and photography. We will read accessible scholarship and primary texts in art theory and natural science. We will try (and undoubtedly not fully succeed) to come to terms with how this history is reflected in contemporary ecological and epidemiological crises. The course will be taught as a combination of lecture, discussion, and student presentations. It does not require prior knowledge but does hope for your attentive engagement and intellectual curiosity. Written work includes short papers, take-home midterm, and a an 8-10pp final paper.

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At key moments throughout the intertwined histories of art and science, the emergence of new technologies transformed the possibilities of perception, representation, and knowledge alike. The field of media archaeology seeks to reconstruct the social contexts, cultural impacts, and imaginary horizons of these moments by investigating obsolete media technologies like the X-ray or the hologram.

Grounded in the Block Museum’s exhibition, The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, the course positions Robleto’s creative practice as an entry point into the field of media archaeology. Robleto’s inquiries into the histories of medical visualization, sound recording, and 19th-century visual culture will dovetail with readings and course materials that showcase various critical and artistic approaches to scientific media. Combining lectures, discussions, and student presentations, each week will examine a different set of objects and topics, such as maps, magic lantern projectors, silent films, early computer animation, planetariums, and virtual reality. Through film viewings, archival/study room visits, and guest lectures, students will enjoy the opportunity to materially engage with analog media technologies, and to interface with artists and scholars practicing diverse forms of media archaeology.

Course requirements include short written assignments, an in-class presentation, and a final paper (with option for creative component). Students will be asked to individually attend at least one exhibit, archive, or screening outside of class.

This course takes as its premise that, in the decolonizing world across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, formulations of modern art and literature took primary place in debates about emerging national cultures, attempts to assert anti-colonial solidarity, and, similarly, efforts to define and contour notions of new subjectivities and personhoods outside of colonial paradigms, western epistemologies, normative historiographies, and power dynamics. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Block Museum’s Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, we will meet as a small group in the museum to tether our study of modernism to the primary objects (artworks, journals, posters, ephemera, and films) in that exhibition and in the Herskovits Collection in the Northwestern Library. Using these on-site primary sources alongside critical essays and literary texts, we will attempt to answer a central question: why, during the 1960s and 1970s when the importance of documenting the realities of colonial rule and anti-colonial struggle was acknowledged as paramount, did artists and writers turn to various non-realist techniques (allegory, mysticism, visual poetry, metapoesis, eg) as formal strategies? Or do we propose a false binary when we situate—as one might in US-European visual and literary cultures—abstraction and realism in opposition? How does the abstract relate to the real and to art and literary histories in other regions, and what might its political purchase be? In what ways do gender or religion intersect with modernist strategy during this period and in this context? Sessions will be discussion based, and we will take advantage of programming around the exhibition—including artist’s talks and visiting speakers—to help expand the historical reach of our study. Students will work towards a conference paper to be presented at a professional symposium at the end of the quarter. Readings will be made available as online pdfs but students might consider purchasing the exhibition catalog from the Block.

This is a combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar. Undergraduates will receive additional support in a TA-led discussion section/workshop.

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This seminar will explore the topic of Renaissance art and its prominent place in the study of art history. We will examine art produced in the sixteenth century across the globe, both in relation to European developments as well as independent of them. Students interested in the seminar should have some prior knowledge of early modern art history and be ready to address questions such as the following: How far away from Michelangelo could an artist live and still be part of a tradition labeled Renaissance? What if a sixteenth-century artist residing in Peru or the Kongo never set foot in Europe and yet produced works that could be considered European? Whose Renaissance is art history speaking of when it uses the term?

Active participation in seminar, including writing weekly responses to readings, will count for 40% of the course grade. The remaining 60% will be determined by a multi-part research paper project and an oral presentation of work in progress. Participants should plan on two Friday afternoon meetings (dates TBD) in Chicago, one at the Newberry Library and another at the Art Institute of Chicago.

How do we make community through care and collaboration? When does collective action become art? Taking art’s recent “social turn” as a starting point, this class will explore how public performance, community organizing, forms of communal care, and mutual aid constitute creative interventions. Put differently, this is a course about creative forms of relationality and relationality as a creative form. Together, we will examine projects at the intersection of artistic practice and political activism, ranging from Fluxus and Womanhouse, to the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, feminist video collectives in Mexico City, and radical pedagogies of teaching artists in Chicago public schools, to contemporary tactical media interventions and large-scale international exhibitions. We will seek to understand how the less visible relationships behind artworks, exhibitions, or community projects themselves might constitute creative practices, while taking seriously the artistic value of interventions that may not look like “art.” In doing so, we will collectively investigate art historical theories of social practice and relationality. Accessible readings from interdisciplinary scholars will address themes of artistic collaboration and community action in relation to race, gender, queerness, and indigeneity. Along with participation, evaluation will be based on a short paper, a presentation, and a final project in the form of either a research paper, creative project, or community intervention, designed in discussion with the instructor. Depending on scheduling availability, we will also incorporate artist visits and/or a gallery tour.

Through artistic representations ranging from urban planning materials to video art, this seminar considers how space is produced and contested. Utilizing the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, we will focus on modern and contemporary art from the nineteenth century to today that present and represent political power through spatial dimensions to better understand the role of space in shaping social relations and realities. From French Impressionism’s disclosing of class anxieties through urban development to 1960s photography documenting anti-war demonstrations in the streets, we will look at artistic responses to spatial antagonisms such as gentrification, protests, suburbanization, and colonialism. While most of our objects engage with the uses of and rights to the city, this course also thinks about other contested spaces like the body as a site of transgression and resistance. Each week will revolve around connected themes—public space and belonging, protest and confrontation, imagination and utopias, for example—rather than being chronologically or geographically structured. As the course is conducted at the Art Institute, students will have a unique opportunity to work directly with artworks in the museum’s collections, to develop critical skills for visual analysis first-hand, to draw connections between visual culture and spatial theory, and to gain knowledge about museum practices more broadly. We will therefore also ask questions of the museum itself as an institution that both shapes and facilitates claims to space/place and history. This course demonstrates the connections between spatial production, world-building, and visual culture in order to assess the radical possibilities of contesting space.

Pan-Africanism, a concept first theorized during the late nineteenth century, has been widely understood as a political movement claiming solidarity and freedom for African and African diasporic peoples around the world. What are the cultural dimensions of Pan-Africanism’s drive for self-determination, civil rights, and political emancipation? What forms and formats have been important vectors for the circulation of Pan-African idea(l)s? How might we differentiate Pan-Africanism from related concepts such as Afrocentrism, Afropolitanism, Black Internationalism, and Worldmaking? In this course, we will analyze histories of art and aesthetic practices from the early 20th century to the present that are informed by or give shape to Pan-Africanist thought, including state-sponsored cultural festivals, paradigmatic artist collectives and art movements, transnational institutions, forms of vernacular and popular culture, as well as individual artistic practices. Students will engage seminal museum exhibitions that have examined the intertwining of African and African diasporic politics and culture and will gain insight into the planning of a forthcoming survey exhibition on Pan-Africanism slated to open at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024. This seminar will include visits to Northwestern’s Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The historical juncture at which we currently find ourselves—wracked by the compounding catastrophes of the global pandemic, ecological disaster, and postcolonial neoliberalism—demands a radical rethinking of art history as an academic discipline. The urgency of redressing art history’s lingering complicities with white supremacy, coloniality, and the profit motive propels us to reconsider foundational questions: What is art? What is history? What is an object? What is scholarship? What is a method? What is an archive? This seminar addresses these and other questions from perspectives both within and beyond art history, including Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory, new materialisms, among others. Rather than assimilating subaltern voices into a hegemonic “global art history,” the seminar begins with the premise that art history needs rebuilding from the ground up. The goal is to work proactively and collectively towards new horizons of art historical scholarship by attending to a diverse body of methodologies that offer dynamic ways of reconceptualizing art historical narration, (inter)disciplinarity, canonization, and research. While theory and historiography will be the abiding focus of the course, students will also be asked to bring in specific examples of art, architecture, and visual and material culture to ground our discussions in practices of object analysis.

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What constitutes a dissertation prospectus? What purpose does the dissertation prospectus serve beyond establishing a student’s field of study? How can the dissertation prospectus become a useful tool to help guide PhD candidates through the dissertation research and writing phases? This quarter-long course, specifically designed for third-year PhD students in the Art History department, will answer these questions, while also providing students time, space, and resources to produce a workable prospectus draft. In addition to reading examples of prospectuses and successful grant applications, we will explore resources by writing coaches Michelle R. Boyd, Wendy Laura Belcher, and Karen Kelsky, with a particular focus on developing a long-term writing practice. Each week, time will be allotted to questions and concerns about dissertation prospectus writing. In addition to this, we will have the opportunity to discuss various topics related to professional development, including CVs, personal statements, conference abstracts, and grant applications.

History and theory of the avant-garde movements around the globe, encompassing literature, visual arts, and performance arts. Conceptual approaches including the process of unmaking sense, the challenging of traditional modes of production and perception, the relationship with the literary/art markets, the relation between art and politics, the paradoxes of destruction and conservation. Guest speaks and museum visits. Collective project of timeline construction and individual research projects.

Focusing on transnational socialist art from the 1930s to the 1970s, this seminar de-centers modernism by following alternate axes of international cultural alliances that bypass the white Euro-American center. From the establishment of the Moscow-based Comintern arts section in the 1930s (see Comintern Aesthetics) to collaborations between the USSR and the Eastern Bloc with de-colonizing socialist nations in Africa in the 1960s and the non-aligned nations in the 1970s, as well as global Maoism (see Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution), the seminar will take a workshop format to consider international, anti-colonialist and anti-racist socialist cultural production. We will also consider socialist axes within the USSR, including Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (sites of Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences in 1958 and 1973) and Ukraine. The seminar will consider primary sources such as George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism (1964) and Audre Lorde, “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” and recent scholarship in this developing field such as Jonathan Flatley, “Picturing the World of the Communist Black International” (2021), Bogdan Popa, De-centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (2021), Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), and Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization (2020). Our guiding questions will be: How did the modern art of international socialism look different, as well as function differently, from international modernism based in Euro-American market models? What is its afterlife in the present day?

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This course takes as its premise that, in the decolonizing world across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, formulations of modern art and literature took primary place in debates about emerging national cultures, attempts to assert anti-colonial solidarity, and, similarly, efforts to define and contour notions of new subjectivities and personhoods outside of colonial paradigms, western epistemologies, normative historiographies, and power dynamics. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Block Museum’s Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, we will meet as a small group in the museum to tether our study of modernism to the primary objects (artworks, journals, posters, ephemera, and films) in that exhibition and in the Herskovits Collection in the Northwestern Library. Using these on-site primary sources alongside critical essays and literary texts, we will attempt to answer a central question: why, during the 1960s and 1970s when the importance of documenting the realities of colonial rule and anti-colonial struggle was acknowledged as paramount, did artists and writers turn to various non-realist techniques (allegory, mysticism, visual poetry, metapoesis, eg) as formal strategies? Or do we propose a false binary when we situate—as one might in US-European visual and literary cultures—abstraction and realism in opposition? How does the abstract relate to the real and to art and literary histories in other regions, and what might its political purchase be? In what ways do gender or religion intersect with modernist strategy during this period and in this context? Sessions will be discussion based, and we will take advantage of programming around the exhibition—including artist’s talks and visiting speakers—to help expand the historical reach of our study. Students will work towards a conference paper to be presented at a professional symposium at the end of the quarter. Readings will be made available as online pdfs but students might consider purchasing the exhibition catalog from the Block.

This is a combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar. Undergraduates will receive additional support in a TA-led discussion section/workshop.

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Empire Redux charts the rise of a native modernist vision that emerged in negotiation with, and in resistance to, European colonial imperatives of spatial, ethnographic, and material control of the late Mughal empire. At par with Iberian and the Ottoman empires, the Mughal empire had extended over much of Central and South Asia since its inception in the 16th century. However, South Asia’s long 18th century was marked by the rapid decentralization of the late Mughal State, Iranian, and Afghan invasions, and its gradual colonial takeover by the British East India Company in a period seen as a crisis of the Mughal State. In this phase, marked by large-scale migration of artists and literati fleeing the capital Delhi to the regional provinces, only a fledgling group of artists remained who were positioned at the nexus of exchange of power and patronage from the Mughals to the British. The seminar analyzes a new set of politically operative works which sought to recover the spatial, embodied, and performative histories of Mughal rule in a normative colonial sphere. Through themes focusing on cartography, court painting, urbanism, portraiture, ethnography, and souvenirs, this seminar will formulate the preconditions of a paradigmatic ‘spatial and material turn’ in 18th century artistic practice that not only upended the Company’s provincializing and racializing approaches, but also reformulated the Mughal as de rigueur, recalibrating the parameters of colonial taste and consumption in Anglo-Mughal society.