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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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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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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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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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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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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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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