ART_HIST 225 Introduction to Medieval Art (300-1450)
This course offers an introduction to major artistic monuments and artistic developments of the medieval period (roughly 300-1450 CE) with a focus on Europe. It surveys a diverse range of works of art and architecture from this period and positions them within their original social, political, spiritual, and economic contexts. Lectures and discussion sections will trace the shifting ways in which images were defined and perceived over time and consider how the flow of objects and styles linked Europeans to broader world systems. We will also identify key moments in the birth and development of architectural forms still common today such as churches and mosques. Students will develop skills in visual analysis and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.
Paris acquired 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. Between 1848–1900, French artists were active players in the city’s numerous crises and social transformations, including 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 conditions dramatically shaped the evolution of 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, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.
ART_HIST 359 / MENA 390-6-1 Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Cairo/Paris: Art & Empire in the Modern City
This course explores the co-evolution of artistic modernity and the colonial metropolis in the 19th century with a focus on Ottoman Cairo and its connections to the traditional center of scholarship on art, empire, and modernity: Paris. Beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the country’s occupation by the British in 1882, this course will trace Cairo’s cultural transformations through close attention to a range of objects and sites—paintings, political cartoons, urban monuments, museums, world’s fairs, architecture, and scientific illustration—produced at the nexus of Franco-Ottoman rivalry and cooperation. This course challenges conventional binaries of East vs. West, traditional vs. modern, and local vs. global by exploring art's active roles in shaping urban life across these two cities. Special attention will be paid to the transcultural formation of national, racial, gender, and sexual identities.
ART_HIST 368 Special Topics in Modern Art: Women and Textiles
This course examines woman artists of the twentieth century who worked with textiles—as fine art, as collective industrial production, and as craft. Textiles were historically associated with “women’s work” and domestic life and not taken seriously as art. We will investigate such topics as the modernist artists of the 1910s-1930s who challenged this division between craft and high art, such as Anni Albers at the Bauhaus, Sonia Delaunay in Paris, Liubov Popova of the Soviet avant-garde, and Norwegian Hannah Ryggen’s acclaimed narrative tapestries; the female collectives of industrial textile designers of mid-century Italy and the Soviet Union (with a focus on acclaimed designer Anna Andreeva); the feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s who upended the masculine art world status quo through their shared knowledge of traditional and experimental textile techniques, such as Faith Ringgold, Harmony Hammond, Miriam Schapiro and the Womanhouse collective; and throughout, the particular importance of textiles to speak to stories of exclusion and marginalization for artists of color and indigenous artists.
ART_HIST 378 / MENA 390-6-2 The Global City: Babylon
Considered one of the greatest cities of antiquity, Babylon was the seat of successive powerful empires, a center of culture and political power in the ancient world. And yet, no ancient city was so desired and feared, so admired and despised. Babylonian citizens saw their city as a paradise—the center of the world and symbol of cosmic harmony, while Greek historian Herodotus called it the world’s most splendid city. But for the Jews, it was a city of sin and pride. For millennia, the city and the myth of Babylon have inspired artists, writers, and philosophers all over the world.
In this course, we will explore the art, architecture, and urban history of Babylon from its foundations to the present day, as well as the artistic legacy of this ancient city in the modern world. We will survey the visual culture of Babylon in a variety of media from the miniature art of cylinder seals to the grandeur of its monuments like the Ishtar Gate. We will study the city’s palaces, temples, and colossal walls as representations of imperial ideology, and inspiration for fantastic structures, like the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens. In addition to the ancient artistic legacy of Babylon, we will consider the historical and cultural memory of the city in the modern world, through grand artistic depictions since the Renaissance, and visual representations in popular culture from films to video games to sci-fi and opera. Finally, we will examine how the city and its monumental buildings were instrumentalized by Saddam Hussein as symbols of nationalism and propaganda in the 1970s and ‘80s.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Contemporary African Art
This course examines the contributions of African artists to contemporary art practice and discourse from the 1980s to the present. Students will explore the critical networks, strategies, politics, and institutions that have shaped and supported the making, circulation, and reception of African art practices in recent history. The course will strive to analyze objects from multiple vantage points, considering the ways in which the meaning and value imputed to African art practices shifts across local and international contexts. Students will gain substantial insight into the role of museum exhibitions, art biennials, publishing platforms, and transnational collaborations in defining the field of contemporary African art. We will question how artists today interrogate geopolitical power arrangements and engage issues related to gender, identity, and sexuality. We will also explore how artists grapple with the insights and limitations of theories ranging from decolonization, feminism, modernism, and globalization to ideas of Posthumanism and the Anthropocene. The course will address a spectrum of media including film, installation, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and sound.
ART_HIST 390-03 / ASIAN_AM 380-0-2 Undergraduate Seminar: On Our Own Terms: Political Solidarities and Aesthetic Alliances in Latinx Art
“Chicano,” “Hispanic,” “Post-Chicano,” "mestiza," “brown," "Latinx.” Since the 1960s, each of these terms has been used to establish a common ground and a commons for people of diverse nationalities and ethnicities whose commonality is that they share a lineage in the pre-conquest Americas and live in the United States. What are the stakes of these ethno-political identities when used to describe artists and their work? This class foregrounds intergenerational perspectives of artists, curators, and critics in artworks, exhibitions, and writings to explore the politics, aesthetics, and material sensibilities associated with each term. Students will nuance the shifting definitions of identity forged in relation to the Americas, the nation-state, settler-colonialism, indigeneity, immigration, race, and hegemonic society, across six decades of art and community initiatives artists, who are described today as Latinx, living in the United States.
ART_HIST 395 / ENVR_POL 390-0-25 / AMER_ST 310-0-20 Museums Seminar: Black Art and Ecology
In conjunction with several exhibitions and public installations on view in the fall of 2024, this course will study the ways in which Black artists in Chicago have engaged with environmental justice, social and natural ecologies, and the space of the city over the past 80 years. We will study artists' use of sustainable practices and reclaimed materials, the critique of spatial inequality and the space of the city itself as an artistic medium through urban farming, public art, and community engagement. Readings include theoretical and historical texts, but the primary object of study will be the artworks, exhibitions, and installations themselves. As a museum seminar, we consider the methods of institutions of different scales and types, including alternative galleries and artist-led projects, as they collect and present work by contemporary and historical Black artists. Students must be able to attend site visits that will often extend 1-2 hours past class hours on Fridays because of transportation time.
ART_HIST 401 Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar
The historical juncture at which we presently 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 material? 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.
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: Art and Patronage under the Valois
Part planner, part money-bags and part intended audience, the figure of the patron looms large in art historical writing about the Middle Ages. But what do we really know about the patron's part in either art making or art viewing? This class seeks to problematize this familiar concept through both critical group discussion of general theories of patronage and student-conducted case studies of individual examples. The first half of the course will consider definitions of the patron, the question of patronage and agency and theories of collecting. In the second half of the course students will select an individual patron connected to the well-documented Valois family and present weekly on their relationship to various types of art making.
ART_HIST 440 Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art: Materiality
The materiality of art is central to how art is made, how it looks, what it means, and how it is preserved. Art history’s recent material turn has challenged art historians to look beyond the fine arts to material culture while also expanding the field’s geographic and temporal focus. However, this trend in scholarship obscures art history’s long tradition of object-oriented study. This seminar examines this historiographic tradition while also looking towards current theoretical approaches to materiality, including, but not limited to, theories of agency (the means through which objects shape human behavior), making (the processes of creation, the transmission of artistic knowledge, and the global movement of makers), exchange (the movement of objects through space as they are gifted, purchased, sold, or simply used), and matter (the physical substances that comprise all objects).
