ART_HIST 226 / MENA 290-6-1 Art and Visual Culture of the Islamic World
This course surveys the diverse arts and visual cultures of the Islamic world from the seventh century to the present day. Following the rise of Islam as a new faith in the Judeo-Christian line, the Middle East developed a dynamic cultural order that integrated earlier traditions, including those of Byzantium and Iran. Our course traces the emergence and development of art, architecture, and archaeology in Islamic regions, beginning in the Arabian Peninsula and extending to the Mediterranean, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Iran, Turkey, Central Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent. We will start with the Ka‘ba in Mecca, the revelation of the Qur’an, and the significance of calligraphy in Islam, analyzing how Islamic art and visual cultures have engaged and connected with local, regional, and global traditions for over a millennium. We will investigate monuments, urban planning, architectural styles, portable objects, calligraphic designs, paintings, and prints that have circulated among dynasties, kingdoms, and empires across time and space. Contemporary artistic and visual expressions in Muslim-majority regions continue to thrive today by drawing on historical practices and adapting traditional forms. Through calligraphy, figural representation, or geometric patterns, the arts and visual traditions of Islam offer significant insights into human creativity, artistic exchange, and cultural heritage.
ART_HIST 260 / ART 270 Introduction to Contemporary Art
This slide-lecture survey course is designed to give both art majors and non-majors an introduction to the myriad forms and concerns of art from the 1960s to the present. We will begin in the present and work our way backwards, looking first at the impact of globalization on the conditions underlying art making, exhibiting and viewing. Emerging paradigms will be examined, such as the superseding of images by information, and of art exhibition by communication and media platforming. We will consider some of the different ways that artists handle information and new media and technology, for example how they have appropriated relatively new forms like networks and databases. The social and technological changes associated with globalization and the artistic responses to such changes will lead us to track shifts in art\'s relationship to audiences and culture at large, and to question the relevance today of distinctions between high and low, margin and mainstream. With these developments as our framework, we will then review and update notions of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts, and question the status today of more traditional media like painting and sculpture, as well as re-evaluate the idea of the avant-garde and its long-held desire to merge art and life.
ART_HIST 322 / MENA 390-6-1 Art and Architecture of the 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.
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. Historically, textiles were 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; postwar Latin American artists such as Gego and Cecilia Vicuña, as well as the Arpillera workshops in Chile resisting the Pinochet regime; US feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s who upended the masculine art world 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, such as the Black quilters of Gee’s Bend.
ART_HIST 388 / MENA 290-4-1 Special Topics in the Art of the Middle East and North Africa: Babylon: Myth, Reality, and Memory
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. 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 Babylon firsthand.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Marie Antoinette: Art & Legacy
“Let them eat cake!” Few figures in Western history are as burdened by myth as Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), the Queen of France in the years leading up to the French Revolution of 1789. The ill-fated queen—married at fourteen, crowned at eighteenth, and guillotined at thirty-seven—has become shorthand for aristocratic decadence, frivolity, and excess. This course reconsiders Marie Antoinette’s controversial biography through her role as artistic patron, cultural tastemaker, and enduring muse. Moving beyond the apocryphal legend, we will consider how Marie Antoinette shaped the visual and material cultural of her own time through the study of painting, sculpture, fashion, garden design, and the decorative arts. How did this artistic output help construct (or defy) the myth of Marie Antoinette? How did this fiction influence art, fashion, film, and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present day? This course invites students to reconsider the artistic life and afterlives of Marie Antoinette and ask the question: doomed queen or misunderstood muse?
ART_HIST 401 Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar
Art history occupies a prominent place in the studies of the humanities. Whether one traces its origins to antiquity, the sixteenth century, or modern times, it is a discipline that has evolved and transformed considerably over the past century. This course takes stock of art history’s history with the objective of asking students interested in buildings, objects, and visual culture broadly conceived what art history has done and what it might do going forward. Participants will engage with scholarship from a range of historical periods and covering broad geographies. They will be assessed on preparation for and participation in weekly seminar meetings; an oral presentation centered on an object or building; a series of brief writing assignments in response to course readings; and a research prospectus on a topic related or adjacent to an envisioned dissertation project.
Intended primarily for first-year art history graduate students, Art History 401 also welcomes students from across the humanities interested in pursuing research topics that engage with visual culture and/or the built environment and for whom exploring the methods and approaches of art and architectural historians can be useful. Through collective learning, the course aims to offer a community building experience at the initiation of graduate study in the humanities.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Black Art in Minor Keys
In 2025, the pathbreaking Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh passed away as she was set to coordinate one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary art exhibitions, the Venice Biennale. Before her death, she organized a team of curators to carry out her vision for the Biennale (which opens in May and runs through November 2026). This seminar uses Kouoh’s central conceptual framework, “In Minor Keys,” as a provocation to reorient the study of contemporary art. Minor keys is approached as a set of overlapping frameworks—sonic, spatial, and social—through which artists produce meaning within conditions of historical violence, ecological crisis, and epistemic erasure. As a sonic and affective register, the minor key foregrounds tone, rhythm, and feeling. Drawing on Black expressive traditions, students will explore how artists mobilize mood, quiet, resonance, poetic persistence, the fugitive, and the withdrawn to generate affective worlds beyond dominant visual frameworks. As a spatial and ecological model, the seminar draws on Édouard Glissant to examine archipelagic thinking and the “creole garden” as figures for dense, interdependent worlds—artistic “oases” that sustain life within larger systems of power. The minor key, as a relational and social practice, highlights collectivity and “polyphonous assembly,” positioning art as a site for gathering, listening, and worldmaking. Finally, the seminar examines new models of curation inspired by the Biennale. We consider the poetics and politics of curating and art-making after loss, taking the posthumous realization of Kouoh’s exhibition as a case study in collective authorship, mourning, and continuation.
