ART_HIST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Black Portraiture
In recent decades, portraiture of Black individuals has taken on heightened visibility, its prominence ebbing and flowing across museum collections, major exhibitions, public art commissions, popular culture, and contemporary debates about race and representation. This first-year writing seminar examines Black portraiture as a cultural, social, and political practice from the advent of the twentieth century to the present. Encompassing a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, and comics, the course will critically question what portraiture promises, what it obscures, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
A central emphasis of the course is the process of writing. With scaffolded assignments, peer review, and sustained revision, students will develop facility and confidence in articulating complex ideas about race, portraiture, and material culture in written form. We will interrogate the role of art criticism and the art market in shaping the value, reception, and institutionalization of portraiture. Through museum visits and close engagement with artworks, students will develop skills in first-hand observation, visual analysis, and the formal description of objects, grounding their writing in sustained encounters with artworks. Students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of recurring approaches to producing and theorizing the likeness of Black subjects, while also gaining insight into the cultural and political stakes of portraiture as a genre of representation.
ART_HIST 240 Introduction to Asian Art: Art and Architecture of South Asia
This survey serves as a first introduction to ancient, medieval and modern/contemporary artistic practices of South Asia, its relationship with East Asia (China, Japan), Central Asia, and Europe. Key examples of art and architecture will focus on a selection of artistic traditions, styles, built environments (archaeological sites and monuments) and media (prints, painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography). Course materials will take up a thematic as well as object/site-oriented case-study based approach, drawing upon the role of religion, cultural interactions, trade, and entanglements of art with imperialism, colonialism, modernization and war and current issues around museum display and exhibitions. The survey is aimed at developing skills of visual literacy, analysis, and awareness of art-historical debates and will provide opportunities to engage with close reading of objects and their larger historical, cultural, and scholarly contexts.
Contemporary art names a field of cultural practice defined by its relation to time—by being of, responsive to, and in dialogue with the social, political, and economic realities of a given moment. Proceeding in a roughly chronological fashion from the 1960s to the present, this introductory course surveys key artworks, exhibitions, movements, and debates that have shaped contemporary art across media and geographies. The course will emphasize the movement of artworks, exploring how meaning and value are produced across sites of encounter ranging from artist studios, galleries, museums, alternative art spaces, community centers, and the street to publications, the internet, auction blocks, and the domestic interior. Through this lens, students will examine how artworks are displayed, interpreted, and contested as they move through public and private, local and transnational contexts. Together, we will grapple with the illuminating and challenging questions artists ask of their audiences, examining how artworks can function as critical reflections on society and its values. By examining artistic responses to concerns including love and community, political conflict and catastrophe, and issues of attention, citizenship, humor, and justice, the course foregrounds contemporary art’s potential to alter our ways of thinking and being. Assignments will include section presentations, short writing responses, a midterm exam, and an open-format final project.
ART_HIST 301 Art of Revolution & Empire: Empire and Revolution in Russia and the USSR
This course examines the art and visual culture of the Russian revolution in the context of empire, from the revolt against tsarist empire in 1905, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that led to the formation of the Soviet Union, to the Stalin Revolution of the 1930s that aimed to establish an anti-imperialist socialist empire. Artists of the Russian empire were among the first to invent abstraction in the 1910s, and, after 1917, Soviet artists were the first to experiment with the avant-garde slogan “art into life.” With particular attention to woman artists and artists from Ukraine and other regions of the Russian empire and the USSR, we will study 19th century realism and Impressionism, Neo-primitivism, Cubo-futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, photomontage, photography and experimental film, and the invention of Socialist Realism as modern public art.
ART_HIST 317 / HUM 317 Monsters, Art, and Civilization
Griffins, sphinxes, demons, and other fabulous creatures appear frequently in the art of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean world. They stand at the intersection of the normal and abnormal, the natural and unnatural. Why did these images become so widespread, and what cultural functions did they serve? Can we connect their invention and dissemination with key moments in human history and cross-cultural interaction? What was the role of material representations of the supernatural in preventing and healing disease, and in coping with other human misfortunes? Why have they become a significant subject in the study of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and their neighbors?
This course explores the supernatural subject in ancient art with new perspectives drawn from art history, history, anthropology, cognitive science, and archaeology. Employing art historical methodologies of formal and stylistic analysis and iconographic interpretation, we will examine a wide range of objects and representations (including architectural sculptures, figurines, seals, amulets, and other media) along with ancient texts that help us understand their meaning and function. Since these objects and their images largely formed the visual culture encountered in the daily lives of many individuals, we are able to engage with numerous objects belonging to non-elite members of society and that remain outside the established canon of histories of ancient art. We are also able to understand how ideas about the supernatural developed in response to specific circumstances of environment, history, and culture.
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 keynote transformations in architectural culture during this period: We will explore how the era of revolutions, from the late 18th to the early 19th century, 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.
This course will explore seven centuries of architecture and urbanism in North America’s largest city. First founded in 1325 as Tenochtitlan, the city served as the ceremonial and political center for an expanding Mexica, or Aztec, empire that commanded vast territories across Mesoamerica. Two centuries later, following the Spanish invasion and conquest of the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan was transformed into a new kind of center and renamed Ciudad de México. As capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain—a realm that encompassed modern-day Mexico, parts of the Central America and the USA, as well as islands in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—Mexico City became the crossroads for global commerce and exchange connecting four continents. Nineteenth-century independence from Spain and early twentieth-century revolution led to Mexico City’s further physical as well as cultural transformation into the megalopolis of 22 million inhabitants we can experience today. This course will trace how the ecology and terrain of this remarkable place has evolved over time. We will consider everyday buildings and public spaces as well as monuments, both surviving and lost. From streets, parks, and boulevards to stepped pyramids, basilica-plan churches, and sports complexes designed for the Olympic Games, the course explores architecture and urbanism as a reflection of Mexico City’s complex history from a global vantage.
Required: Attendance and participation, including contributing to class discussion and writing (and sometimes sketching) weekly responses to readings and/or visual prompts. Participants should plan on one weekend outing (Friday or Saturday TBD) in Chicago.
ART_HIST 388 / MENA 290-6-1 / ANTHRO 290-0-3 Special Topics in the Art of the Middle East and North Africa: Tomb Robbers, Smugglers, and Millionaires: Looting and Trafficking of Antiquities In The Middle East
Often referred to as the cradle of civilization, the Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations, whose physical remains provide invaluable insights into the development of human societies. However, this rich cultural heritage is constantly threatened by looting and illicit trafficking, especially during times of political and economic instability. Looting devastates cultural heritage, erasing invaluable historical records on humanity's shared history and depriving communities of their cultural identity.
In this course, we will explore the complex and multifaceted issue of looting and trafficking of antiquities in the Middle East. We will survey the rich archaeological heritage of the region and the historical significance of its antiquities as well as the history of looting and destruction of cultural material since antiquity. We will examine the historical, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to the illicit trade of cultural heritage, including poverty, conflict, and the demand for antiquities in the global market. We will consider the organized criminal networks involved in the trafficking of antiquities, from local looters to international dealers. We will investigate specific instances of looting and trafficking in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, and the efforts to recover stolen artifacts. Finally, we will discuss international laws, conventions, and ethical considerations related to the protection of cultural heritage. Through lectures, guest speakers, readings, and discussions, we will gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and complexities involved in protecting cultural heritage in the Middle East. The course includes an optional field trip to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum at the University of Chicago to experience artifacts from the ancient Middle East firsthand.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Art & the French Revolution
The French Revolution is often described as an origin point of modern liberal democracy, epitomized by its famous motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Yet its realities were far more complex—and far less idealistic. The French Republic confronted crisis after crisis as it struggled to integrate the working classes, women, immigrants, and racial and religious minorities into the new nation. At the same time, France’s Caribbean colonies and their hundreds of thousands of enslaved people posed fundamental challenges to the Revolution’s universalist claims, ultimately paving the way for the expansion of French imperial power under Napoleon. Amid these upheavals, France’s revolutionaries turned to the arts as indispensable tools for building political community, producing citizens, and visualizing Revolutionary values.
This undergraduate seminar examines how art and architecture both responded to and actively shaped the political and social transformations of the French Revolution. In addition to canonical artists and architects, such as Jacques-Louis David, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the course examines popular visual and material culture, including political cartoons, festivals, and costumes. While centered on Paris, the seminar also explores revolutionary art-making in colonial contexts, including the Caribbean and Egypt. Students will develop skills in close visual and material analysis, alongside the historical and theoretical knowledge needed to understand how artworks functioned as sites of revolutionary struggle and political experimentation.
ART_HIST 395 / ANTHRO 390-0-39 Museums Seminar: Museums and Responsibility
In 2020, ICOM (International Council of Museums) ratified an updated definition of “museum,” which states: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.
In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, a question that undergirds the ICOM definition, through a close look at some of the most pressing issues in museums today. Topics will include the restitution and repatriation of artworks; the threatened sale of museum collections to cover debt; the role of museums in the global climate crisis; and collaborative curatorial practices that build and sustain community relationships. Among the questions that will be raised and debated in the course are: what responsibilities do museums have for the care and stewardship of their collections? What do museums owe to individuals and communities with connections to the objects currently in their care? What obligations do museums have to donors, founders, and funders? What makes museums good neighbors in the communities where they are based? How should museums take account of their histories and their sites? We will focus on several case studies through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and engagement with current Block exhibitions—Hamdia Traoré’s Des marabouts de Djenné and Muslim Portraiture in Mali and Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill.
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: Landscapes of Healing in the Premodern World
This graduate seminar examines how healing was conceptualized and practiced across the premodern world, with particular emphasis on the art, architecture, archaeology, and material culture of the eastern Mediterranean and the global Middle Ages. The course adopts a broad definition of “landscape,” encompassing natural formations (springs, mountains, caves), built and institutional environments (baths, gardens, hospitals, infirmaries, madrasas, monasteries), sacred spaces (shrines, tombs, pilgrimage sites), and urban settings where healing occurred in daily life. We will explore how landscapes of healing were shaped and materially expressed through objects, ritual practices, and embodied experience. Seminar content investigates the multi-layered intersections between people and the built environment in pursuit of treating physical, mental, and spiritual disorders and illnesses. Graduate students will engage with critical and theoretical readings, debate methodological approaches and models, and participate actively in discussions. The seminar culminates in a substantial written paper or project that situates interdisciplinary methods and the chronologies of healing landscapes within broader premodern contexts.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Refusal
This course examines "refusal" in 20th and 21st century art, theory, and politics, mostly in the US, beginning with earlier short stories: Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (with his famous "I prefer not to") and Franz Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." The idea is to get at modes of resistance and negation that might be quiet, obdurate, modest, slow, sometimes withdrawing from view or barely legible. Topics include the labor, care, and negotiations involved in the production of so called passive resistance; the deployment of silence, slowness, and immobility; artists' refusal of representation, of making objects, or of making art at all, in the case of individual artist projects but also strikes and boycotts; "anti-work" theory and practice; Arte Povera and analogues; activist practices of sitting in and occupying (in civil rights, environmental, and anticapitalist activism); techniques of reduction, withdrawal, coded language, obstruction, blockade, boycott, sit-ins and die-ins, cancellation, slowdowns, and stoppages; queer/resistant temporality and care; forms of withdrawal that might include utopia, asceticism, voluntary exile, and withdrawal, or escape, fugitivity, and petit-marronage. Readings may include work by Theodor Adorno, Homi Bhabha, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Freeman, David Getsy, Fred Moten, Kathi Weeks, among others; readings and art and artist examples are open to the interests of the class. This is not intended as an endorsement of these modes of resistance over more confrontational approaches, but an interest in exploring them as a body of work that resonates across the divide of art and politics.
This graduate seminar provides an overview of the methods and practices of teaching in art and architectural history. This course serves graduate students by doubling as a quarter-length series of pre-professional practica, devised to prepare you for a time when you will be designing and instructing your own courses and preparing application dossiers. You will learn not just how to lead a productive section and how to assess student work effectively, but also how to help students think and write in visual terms, how to guide them to a more critical mode of reading, how to direct them in independent research, and how to ensure that they work to the best of their potential. This seminar will also provide guidance on how to develop and articulate your own scholarly and pedagogical approaches, including in teaching statements, fellowship and job applications, and interviews. Throughout the quarter we will also be talking about the job market, the interview process, and the art of a persuasive and compelling job talk. Over the course of the quarter, you will be devising a class that you would like to teach some day in your field. You will make up paper assignments and exams for that class, and eventually you will draft a syllabus and part of your first lecture for that class. Your final project will be a “teaching portfolio” which will incorporate your syllabus, assignments, and a “teaching statement” explaining your personal philosophy of teaching.
