ART_HIST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Medieval Sports and Art
Chariot-racing, archery, tennis, and jousting were just some sports enjoyed over the 1000 years (4th–15th centuries CE) known as the "Middle Ages." Kings and queens, monks and nuns, and nobles and peasants engaged in these to gain athletic prowess, fame, status, wealth, love, sex, and fun. This course examines the powerful visual expressions of various sports and games developed, cultivated, and encouraged or discouraged over the medieval era in the Mediterranean world. The evidence includes athletic monuments, illustrated manuscripts, tapestries, and relatively unexpected objects such as mirrors and combs. Modern material, such as films and TV excerpts, shall also be used. Key issues explored are the spectacle and spectatorship of medieval sports; gender, class, and religion in the practice of sports; the body, fashion, and the spaces of sports (stadiums, arenas, etc.), and comparisons between their medieval and modern versions.
ART_HIST 232 Introduction to the History of Architecture: 1400 to the Present
How does the built environment shape social meaning and reflect historical change? In this introductory-level course, we will survey the human designed environment across the globe, from 1400 to the present day. Through in-depth analysis of buildings, cities, landscapes, and interiors, we will observe how spatial environments are created and invested with meaning. From Tenochtitlan, riverine capital of the Aztec empire, to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Palazzo Medici in Florence, from the Palace of Rudolf Manga Bell in Douala to the Colonial Office of the Bank of London, and from Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House in Sao Paulo to David Adjaye's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., this course will introduce students to the changing technologies, materials, uses, and aesthetics that have helped define architecture's modernity across time and geographies. Through detailed visual analysis and the study of primary source documents, students will become familiar with architectural terminology and historical techniques of architectural visualization. Through written exercises and guided slow looking, students will learn how to critically analyze and historically interpret the built environment at various scales.
This undergraduate lecture course introduces one of the most contested terms of art historical inquiry today: modernism. Broadly, the term refers to the collective efforts of cultural producers to respond to the ever-shifting conditions of perception and social life brought on by modernity. The course examines some of the key moments in global modernity from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. It provides a critical introduction to the rise of modern art practices from a range of locales, pushing against the hegemonic discourses upholding the Western canon to underscore the interdependencies between the Global North and the Global South.
From anti-colonial modernism in India to considerations of race and modernism in mid-century Jamaica, this course takes seriously the diversity of experiences of global modernity by examining movements and moments formed in opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. We will examine how the aesthetic of newness, ideas of "progress," and radical formal invention characteristic of modernism were rooted in the societal transformation of modernity. The work of the course contests the idea of modernism as a purely European or American phenomenon while considering artists' efforts to elaborate internationalist artistic languages, reflecting and refracting the concurrent rise of the modern nation-state. Across the quarter, we will focus on how modernist traditions transformed through their circulation across cities, nations, and continental borders. The overarching goal of this course is the consideration of how the formal concerns of distinct movements in modern art, responding to modernization, emerged out of specific historical and cultural contexts and how each movement pushed against the tastes of society at large to radically challenge ideas about art itself.
ART_HIST 329 Special Topics in Medieval Art: Medieval Mediterranean World
This course explores the medieval Mediterranean world's art, architecture, archaeology, and material culture from late antiquity to the early modern period, or between the late 4th and 16th centuries. While the Renaissance blossomed in Italy in the 1400s, in this course we will investigate the medieval art and art forms that circulated among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities around the Mediterranean until the 16th century. We will study the geographies of the Mediterranean Sea—including Italy, Spain, Egypt, North Africa, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Holy Land, and the Middle East—focusing on their rulers, kingdoms, merchants, craftsmen, pilgrims, and travelers in order to explore the means and spread of artistic and architectural patronage across the area. We also will explore the role of art and architecture in the sacred and secular lives of the region's Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Among others, we will learn about monuments (architecture, mosaics, wall paintings), objects (ceramics, metalwares, coins, and textiles), and historical texts to better understand the medieval Mediterranean's artistic, cultural, and political dynamics.
ART_HIST 359 Studies in 19th Century Art: Impressionism
An art form called "Impressionism" was born in Paris in 1874 when a group of like-minded painters and print-makers showed together in an independent art exhibition. The last of six such shows took place in 1886. Its practitioners continued to hold sway in vanguard circles, and to develop into the 1890s. The key artists were Cassatt, Pissarro, Degas, Caillebotte, Morisot, Renoir and Monet. What were the defining characteristics of this new style called "Impressionism"? The paintings and prints represented only the contemporary urban and suburban world (no history; no religion; no mythology) and in startingly novel ways: the pictures were brighter, more freely handled, and oddly evasive than any made before. The 2024 celebration of the 1874 exhibition's 150th birthday renewed interest in the history and meanings of Impressionism. The course will take a broad perspective on its interpretation by investigating a wide array of topics: questions of globality, colonialism, and the environment as well as matters of gender, class, modernity, technology, medium and technique. We shall also dip into the work of the successor generation of innovative artists, the so-called "Post-Impressionists" (including Seurat, Signac, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin). Together – through your responses to lectures and readings and in the context of class discussion – we will try to make some of the most familiar and admired paintings and prints of the later nineteenth century strange and problematic again.
ART_HIST 367 Special Topics in Art of the Americas: African American Photography: From Frederick Douglass to Carrie Mae Weems
Since the early days of photography African Americans have specifically engaged the medium to navigate African diasporic identity. Seminal Black thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois argued for photography's importance in the construction of African American identity. Organized chronologically, this course traces the shifting social status of African Americans from the 1850s to today and examines the relationship between African Americans and the medium of photography. This chronology will also help us map the rapid development of different photographic technologies over 150+ years. Putting primary sources in conversation with art historical texts, this course will introduce students to major thinkers that have contributed to African American art history including Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Deborah Willis, Shawn Michelle Smith, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt. While focused on the intersection of African American identity and photography, we will also draw connections to the broader African diaspora. Students will have the opportunity to examine art in person at The Block Art Museum and/or the Art Institute of Chicago which each hold important key photographs related to the course topic. Through course discussion, short writing assignments, and visits to local art collections, we will explore these topics together and strengthen core art historical skills of visual literacy, analytic writing, and critical reading skills.
ART_HIST 367 Special Topics in Modern Art: Transnational Avant-Gardes: Imagining the Future
This course explores the movement of future-oriented art practices across the overlapping geopolitical spaces of modernity, 1900-1968. We focus on five paradigms that sought to place art in the position of the vanguard of social and political change. We engage these movements and their use and claims of art and architecture as "avant-garde" forces against established conventions. We examine Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism, tracing their formations and transformations across multiple geographies, including the Soviet Union, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere. We will engage these practices first from a historical perspective, examining the broad spectrum of new and critical art that emerged in the twentieth century. Our historical lens will focus on the transnational movement and connectivity of people and ideas, taking into consideration how the global economy of an unequal distribution of resources contributed to these practices. Secondly, and interconnected to these historical and economic shifts, we will adopt a historiographic perspective, questioning how the avant-garde has been depicted and acclaimed—assessed for meaning—for historians, artists, and collectives during various periods of transformation and resistance (and even revolution). Rather than drawing a strict division between the historical and so-called "neo" avant-garde movements, our aim is to recognize the continued exchanges and interplays between the avant-garde projects that preceded World War II and those that emerged after. This trans-temporal line of inquiry allows us to contemplate the continuation of avant-garde practices as artists navigated new contradictions and contexts in the ostensibly bipolar Cold War order.
This seminar introduces art historical research methods for majors in their third (junior) year. The seminar will survey the history of art history with a focus on recent debates and interventions within the field (e.g. intersectional, critical race theory, and decolonial approaches). The seminar will also provide students with concrete tools to develop, research, and write a piece of original art historical scholarship. What does it mean to ask an original art historical research question? What is historiography and how it is critical for mapping out and developing an original thesis statement and argument? How does one effectively analyze and implement primary and secondary sources? What constitutes "evidence," and how is the dominant perception of "evidence" shaped by art history's origins?
The production of commercial prints in Japan was the result of a popular revolution in Japanese society. Japan's great premodern cities, especially Edo (now Tokyo), were home to an increasingly prosperous, sophisticated, and literate urban dweller who would purchase images of their favorite celebrities of the day or the latest illustrated novel. This class will explore the birth of the commercial Japanese print, and its many incarnations leading to the designs of contemporary artists. During our discussions we will consider the changing role of the artist and issues of use and reception, including the part the West played in maintaining the popularity of Japanese prints into the 20th century. Along with art historical analysis and a study of the commercial context of the prints, issues of connoisseurship will feature strongly in this class taught from a curatorial point of view. As this class will be conducted largely in the Art Institute's Japanese print storage area, it is a rare opportunity to view works of art up close and unframed, essential for an understanding of printing techniques and collecting practices.
This course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in area collections and the methods and questions such inquiry raises. Students will be introduced to the material histories of objects and global media practices, basics of technical and scientific analysis and related theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things as well as their disembodied images. Required for all second-year art history graduate students and limited to second-year graduate students.
ART_HIST 430 Studies in Early Modern Art: Materiality, Mobility, Mind: Early Modern Printed Images
How did printed images translate and circulate ideas, both as independent objects and in early modern books? This graduate course will interrogate the culture of print and its many manifestations in the early modern period (fifteenth through eighteenth century) with a focus on Europe and its zones of contact.
Through class discussions online and hands-on sessions at the Newberry, the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Library at the University of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Prints and Drawings Department, the course will track the form, use, collection, and dissemination of the printed image. The course will culminate with a visit to the Art Institute exhibition [Lines of Connection], curated by Jamie Gabbarelli (AIC) and Edina Adam (Getty).
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Pan-Africanism: Histories, Aesthetics, and Politics
Concurrent with the opening of the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (December 15–March 30, 2025) at the Art Institute of Chicago, this course considers the cultural and political dimensions of Pan-Africanism, beginning with its origins in the late-nineteenth century and extending to the present day. Students will critically examine the process of narrating art and cultural histories through the multivalent form of the exhibition, it's catalogue, and its institutional context within an encyclopedic museum.
Students in this course will meet at the Art Institute of Chicago weekly and will engage with the exhibition as the primary case study for considering a range of questions, including: 1) How does the exhibition’s layout, design, checklist, and use of media support its overall arguments about Pan-Africanism's evolution and endurance as a force in culture? 2) What other kinds of spaces, sites, or institutions have enabled attention to and the circulation of Pan-Africanist ideas? 3) How do the intersections of class, gender, race, and sexuality, shape our understanding of Pan-Africanism’s influence on art and politics?
This course will consist of weekly reading assignments and a final project; discussions will be supplemented by in-class conversations with visiting artists, curators, and a range of public programs, including symposia and film screenings. Students should be prepared to travel to the museum weekly. This course will also include graduate students from the University of Chicago, and so space will be limited.
