ART_HIST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Empires of Fashion
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.
ART_HIST 230 Introduction to Art of the United States: Native Modern and Contemporary Art
Our study of the Native American art begins in 1848, with settler expansion into the American West, and ends in 1992 with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the United States. Within this period, we will consider a diverse range of media, including basketry, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, painting, sculpture, and performance, installation, video, film, photography and institutional critique to understand:
- How engagements with settlers, scientists, and tourists placed aesthetic demands of “tradition” on Native art in the earliest moments westward expansion - How the political policy of assimilation worked in tandem with cultural appropriation in the early 20th century - How Native insistence on sovereignty and the Red Power Movement broke the established expectations settlers placed on Native artists - How Native artists have navigated the complexities of presenting their work within settler institutions - How Native art expresses Gerald Vizenor’s idea of “survivance,” the “renunciation of dominance, tragedy and victimry.”
Each week, students will also be introduced to contemporary Native artists working over the past 20 years whose research-based practices shed new light on history.
ART_HIST 250 Introduction to Early Modern European Art
This introductory course offers a survey of European art from the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution (c. 1400-1800). Focusing on the arts of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, this course introduces students to the significant artists of early modern Europe, including Michelangelo, Dürer, Brueghel, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, and Vigée Le Brun. Through close study of individual artworks, students will learn how to analyze works of art as products of their particular social, political, and historical contexts. Along the way, students will study the major historical forces that shaped the evolution of European art during this period, including the wars of religion, the establishment of royal art academies, the rise of the art market and the art critic, and the expansion of trade and colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Students will also consider the roles of gender, race, sexuality, and class in the development of European art.
Around 1720 a new style of art and architecture emerged amidst the highest echelons of the Parisian aristocratic elite: the Rococo. Characterized by gilt interiors, ornamental curves, and pastel colors, the Rococo infiltrated all forms of art making, from architecture, to painting, sculpture, porcelain, and even fashion. The style was immediately ridiculed for being overtly feminine, frivolous, and excessively luxurious. Associated intimately with the doomed queen of France, Marie Antoinette, the rococo is often cited as a direct cause of the French Revolution that would take France (and Europe) by storm in 1789.
In this course we will study Rococo art, from its origins in the sixteenth century to its fall from popularity circa 1785. By unpacking both the Rococo’s bad reputation and socio-political importance, we will explore how the style was both gendered and racialized. How did Rococo art challenge dominant heteronormative aesthetic practices? How did it establish and fetishize a culture of whiteness in direct opposition to a growing colonial plantation system across the Atlantic? Throughout the quarter we will cover a variety of artforms (painting, sculpture, the decorative arts, and architecture) through the lives of key female patrons—including the infamous Marie Antoinette and lesser-known art historical “influencers” such as Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry. Focusing primarily in France, this course will also look at iterations of and reactions to the Rococo in Germany, Italy, and England.
This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of major developments in architectural, urban, and landscape history, from 1750 to 1890. Charting a period of significant change that animated architectural discourse and practice, students will explore the highly innovative and experimental ways in which key architects and planners responded to the challenges of a rapidly changing and globalizing world and to the possibilities introduced by new technologies and materials. While this course focuses on developments that took place within the European and North American frame, they are situated in relation to global processes including trade, imperialism, nationalism, migration, and industrialization. Each lecture is organized around defining transformations in architectural culture during this period: We will explore how the era of revolutions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries expanded the role of architecture in the creation of new types of public and political space; how industrial production and prefabrication gave rise to radically new architectural vocabularies and catalyzed debates about national styles and aesthetic and environmental “character”; and how new housing, labor, and urban reform movements, such as utopian socialism, offered visionary spatial strategies in pursuit of an elusive social equality. This course prioritizes discussion and critical reflection and emphasizes the study of primary sources.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Contemporary African Art
This course examines the significant contributions of African artists to the field of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present. We will explore the complex networks, strategies, political dynamics, and institutional frameworks that shape the production, dissemination, and interpretation of African art today. By analyzing artworks from multiple perspectives, we will consider how the meaning and value of African art practices shift across local and global contexts. This course provides an in-depth understanding of the role of museum exhibitions, art biennials, publishing platforms, and transnational collaborations in shaping the field of contemporary African art. Through critical inquiry, we will explore how artists engage with geopolitical power structures and address issues related to gender, identity, and sexuality. Additionally, we will examine how contemporary practices respond to or draw inspiration from theories of environmental justice, diaspora, decolonization, feminism, modernism, globalization, and posthumanism. The course will cover a range of media, including film, installation, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and sound.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Black Portraiture
In recent decades, portraiture of Black individuals has gained significant prominence, establishing itself as a focal point in museum and private collections, a driving force behind major exhibitions, and a recurring theme in public art commissions. As a category of cultural, social, and political analysis, “Black Portraiture” encompasses a range of creative forms, from collage and comics to film, painting, photography, and sculpture. In this seminar, we will explore recurring approaches to producing and theorizing the likeness of Black subjects since the advent of the twentieth century. We will critically question the utility and limitations of portraiture, asking what desires it fulfills and whose interests it serves. Through a range of case studies, we will interrogate the role of art criticism and the art market in shaping the value, reception, and institutionalization of Black Portraiture. Students will probe notions of “visibility” and “representation,” carefully considering the increasingly blurred boundaries between empowerment and exploitation. Additionally, we will engage with debates surrounding the influence of social media, meme culture, and artificial intelligence on evolving definitions of portraiture. Students will ultimately gain a deeper understanding of portraiture’s cultural and political stakes and its ability to both shape and reflect racialized systems of power.
Modern art and architecture confront us with ruptures—of traditions, histories, landscapes, identities, bodies, and systems of power—forcing us to grapple with the violence and disorientations that define modernity. In the process, cultural producers have often turned toward the conventions of horror not only to make sense of modern existence but also to provoke radical reimaginings of the world.
This seminar explores examples from global modern and contemporary art and architecture that seek to provoke visceral responses from their audiences. The course is organized historically and thematically, engaging topics such as colonialism, war, revolution, and catastrophe. Students will endeavor to define the genre of horror and to identify its key devices, such as the uncanny, grotesque, abject, and dystopic. While we will learn from examples across art and architectural history, we will focus on works within the Block Museum of Art and other collections across campus, such as the Michael McDowell Death Collection. We will consider a variety of cultural objects, including painting, photography, film, architecture, and urban planning. As we do, we will also think about questions of reception and exhibition—what it means to look at, process, and be affected by the horrific. The seminar will culminate in an online exhibition of objects from the Block’s collection on the subject of horror and art. Throughout the course, we will draw on decolonial, media, and spatial theories to deepen our understanding of how strategies of horror and dread are called upon to unsettle dominant perceptions.
This intensive writing workshop is designed for and limited to third-year PhD students in the Department of Art History who are writing the dissertation prospectus. The dual purpose of this seminar is to present students with a clear understanding of what constitutes a successful dissertation prospectus for their field of study and to provide them with ample time, space, resources, and feedback (in consultation with their advisor) to produce a workable prospectus draft by the end of the quarter. We will address the different functions that a prospectus serves, namely as a guide to help structure the research and writing phases of the dissertation; we will learn from advanced graduate students and faculty how to think about the prospectus as the foundation for later fellowship and grant applications, studying examples of successful prospectuses and subsequent applications; and we will explore resources designed to help students develop a structured but adaptable writing practice. In addition to workshopping their own proposals, students will learn the art of peer review in providing critiques of fellow students’ work in progress.
ART_HIST 450 / MENA 410-0-1 Studies in 19th Century Art: France & the Ottomans: Art & Revolution Across Empires
This graduate seminar explores the relationship between art and imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on the art and architecture of the French and Ottoman empires. Rather than prioritize processes of cultural exchange, this seminar takes the various revolutions (political, social, economic) that defined this period of global history as a transcultural framework for examining the co-evolution of French and Ottoman art. This seminar combines deep analysis of individual artworks with historical and theoretical readings from disciplines outside of art history, including postcolonial studies, feminist theory, queer theory, comparative literature, and MENA studies. In addition to studying established frameworks for analyzing Franco-Ottoman art history (such as Orientalism), this seminar also explores new approaches for writing transcultural art histories at the intersection of revolution and empire.
This seminar will be of interest to students of art and imperialism, modern French and Ottoman cultural history, Orientalism, and revolutionary politics and aesthetics. Students are welcome to write their final research paper on any topic that touches on these themes.
ART_HIST 460-0-2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Modernism Now
This seminar asks, what does the study of modernism look like now, in 2025? Modernism in the visual arts is usually described as a phenomenon that began in Europe sometime after 1850 and came to an end at some contested date around 1970, with the advent of a broadly defined post-modernism. Yet this timeline is highly Euro-American- and capital-centric. Modernist art, as a response to modernity, happened—and perhaps continues to happen—at different times in different parts of the globe and under different political regimes, like socialism. This course will examine defining texts on modernism, including more recent decolonial accounts that decenter modernism (e.g., Partha Mitter). It will also examine recent key books on modernism in art (such as Joshua I. Cohen’s The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents, Stephen S. Lee’s The Ethnic Avant-Garde, Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies White Gold, and my own Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism), which demonstrate the current state of the field and allow us to imagine the possible futures of modernist study from the perspective of our current predicament,
ART_HIST 460-0-3 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Black Lens: Reframing Photographic Practice
From the daguerreotype to the meme, this seminar examines how the history and materiality of photography and other lens-based practices have been reframed through the lens of Black experience. Concentrating primarily on new scholarship, we interrogate themes of fugitivity, collaboration, death, futurity, diaspora, diffraction, skin, blur, surface, and artificial archives. Focused largely on the United States and the Caribbean, the photographic and videographic practices of Dawoud Bey, Arthur Jafa, Rodell Warner, Carrie Mae Weems, and Cosmo Whyte, among others, will be considered. We investigate this work through site visits to exhibitions around Chicago, including at the Arts Club and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Readings include texts by Siobhan Angus, Sampada Aranke, Ariella Azoulay, Emilie Boone, Rizvana Bradley, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and Legacy Russell.
