ART_HIST 101-7 First-Year College Seminar: Photography and African American Culture
This seminar introduces students to histories of photography and lens-based practices, attentive to the role the medium has played in Black communities in the United States from the mid nineteenth century to the present. Studying photographic technologies from the daguerreotype to the meme, the course explores how notions of citizenship, justice, social visibility, criminality, race, and gender have been variously negotiated through engagements with photography. We also explore the meaning of photographic forms from the U.S. in the Caribbean and Africa.
Course goals and learning objectives: This course is both an exploration of photography and a forum for students to hone the skills and habits of mind needed to succeed at Northwestern. This includes identifying and evaluating arguments and presenting ideas orally and in writing. We will also spend time discussing how to navigate the university and how to keep your balance in the years to come.
ART_HIST 101-7-2 First-Year College Seminar: Bubble: The Art of Economic Boom and Bust
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: This course surveys the art and visual culture of economic boom and bust. We begin with historical examples from Dutch still life painting and its relationship to "tulipmania," to colonialism, print culture, and paper money in the "Mississippi Bubble," to Hollywood and the Great Depression. We then discuss selected modern art movements in relation to poverty, anti-work movements, gentrification, and the 2008-9 housing bubble (otherwise known as the subprime mortgage crisis). You will learn skills in interpreting art, understanding art movements, and analyzing the relationship of art and society. There will be short writing assignments and a final project that involves holding a debate on what the next bubble to "burst" will be. Generative AI and the contemporary art market are two possible examples.
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, economic and spiritual contexts. Lectures and discussion sections will trace the shifting ways that 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.
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 the course, we will investigate the medieval art, architectural elements, 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. These figures will guide our investigation into the movement, migration, exchange, and patronage across the region while exploring the role of art and architecture in the sacred and secular lives of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Through our study of monuments (including architecture, mosaics, and wall paintings), objects (such as ceramics, metalwork, coins, ivory, and textiles), and historical texts, we will examine the cultural and political dynamics that defined the medieval Mediterranean world. We will also engage with spatial thinking and digital tools through ArcGIS StoryMaps as part of the Digital Mediterranean project, gaining skills in mapping artistic exchange. A visit to the library’s Map Room will offer hands-on experience with medieval and early modern maps to explore how the Mediterranean was represented and navigated, while a Block Museum study session focused on Shahnameh folios will provide a close analysis of artistic techniques in Persian illustrated manuscripts.
ART_HIST 359 / MENA 390 Studies in 19th Century Art: Art & Revolution, 1789-1917
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 professed 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, architecture, drawing, prints, photography, and political cartoons.
ART_HIST 369 Special Topics in Contemporary Art: Against Brain Rot: Attention, the Arts, and Civic Engagement
From doom-scrolling through highly visual social media platforms to the PR strategies of reigning political parties, our attention is being flooded at unprecedented rates with a barrage of content. Not only does this frenzied rhythm fracture our ability to focus, but it also hinders our ability to respond effectively to today’s interwoven crises. This course will pair Art History’s study of attention with political and social mobilization theory through case studies of public art, endurance art, new media art, and other interventional genres from the last 100 years. Together, we will ask: what can we learn about civic and public life through leveraging attention in and with the arts? How do state and private enterprises leverage attention, and how do they encourage citizens to pay attention, as in the “attention economy”? How can a deeper understanding of attention through the arts open new possibilities of active participation in social, civic life?
Weekly topics include holding vs fracturing attention, attention as or vs action, and collective manifestations of attention, such as public demonstrations. Exercises include weekly attention reflection journals, analysis of artworks through recreation/restaging, meditation and mindfulness practices, extended object analysis, etc. This course is built with varied learning needs in mind, angled towards encouraging resilient practices of attention while fostering a supportive environment for all types of learners. This course is designed for advanced undergraduate students who have taken several art history classes, though students with a breadth of other humanities classes are encouraged to enroll.
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 Covid-19 pandemic, global political turmoil, 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 430 Studies in Early Modern Art: The World’s Europe, 1500 to 1700
This seminar will explore scholarship on European and European colonial objects and buildings across the globe, assessing the state of early modern art history in the three decades since the publication of a groundbreaking volume edited by Claire Farago, Reframing the Renaissance of 1995. The book was an early effort to de-center Europe in what was then overwhelming called Renaissance and Baroque art history via a consideration of cultural exchange. The scholarly project of decentering continues today with renewed political urgency as well as new terminology. Seminar readings will include studies about Europe’s place in the early modern world that are sometimes traditional and other times radically imaginative in tackling the topic of people, ideas, and things on the move across space and time. Readings will draw from art history and history, engaging with postcolonial, global, and interconnected methods. Although focused on the early modern period, the seminar will be of interest to students of art and empire or transnational and transcultural exchange during any historical era. In addition to contributing actively to seminar discussions, participants will write a 1,500-word book review and a 6,000-word research paper or research prospectus.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Pan-Transdisciplinary Experimentalism and the Art of Black Study
This course engages and expands existing understandings of “Black study,” scholarly orientations and methodologies that arise from Black communities (primarily in the United States and the Caribbean). The seminar especially attends to how studies emerging from Black life might call for, demand, transdisciplinary (or undisciplined) and multimodal forms of scholarly work. Focused on scholars and artists who work across scholarly writing, studio arts, film, fiction, photography, and/or book arts, we examine the work of Elizabeth Catlett, Kevin Adonis Browne, Lisa Gail Collins Simone Leigh, Joshua Myers, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Deborah Thomas, among others. We also look at the significance of sociality, retreats, and rest as forms of Black study. In addition, we explore experimental forms of writing related to Black study highlighting elements like the footnote, redaction, erasure. Students are responsible for weekly response papers, co-leading one presentation of the readings, and creating and presenting on a final research project.
ART_HIST 470 Studies in Architecture: Land as Archive: The Aesthetics of Depletion and Refiguration
Activated by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, the status of the ruin, and by extension the fragment, have gained new significance as “sites that condense alternative senses of history.” This seminar turns to the refiguration of these artifacts as potent mechanisms to reflect upon the ways in which land, and the contest over land, have been written into and out of histories of the built environment. Recent critical movements in scholarship have called forward a vital notion of the land as an archive of forcibly obscured stories, demanding new aesthetic and ethical engagements with the residual, the fragmentary, and the weathered spaces modernity. Through a series of readings and case studies drawn from across the globe, that cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the present, that track what might broadly be called infrastructures of extraction, this seminar will explore how aesthetic media forms—architecture, sculpture, photography, print, film, and even computational media, have contributed to material and imaginative processes of depletion (and dispossession). It explores, in turn, how scholarly attention to these relations create radical spaces of care that provide grounds for naming new possibilities for equitable planetary futures.
