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.
Many of the world’s most celebrated works of art and architecture and enduring styles were created in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In this course we investigate their artistic traditions, styles, materials and techniques, and built environments, focusing on the highlights—by general consensus—of these cultures’ artistic and technological achievements. Primary objectives are to analyze the key monuments that have influenced both Western and global art over the centuries, along with acquiring broader skills in visual literacy and an understanding of art historical methods and aims. Another goal is to gain insight into the specific historical contexts in which buildings, sculptures, and paintings were produced and reproduced, and the particular political, social, economic, and religious functions they served. Specific case studies will supplement introductory readings that address the development of art and styles throughout the region.
ART_HIST 320-3 Medieval Art: Late Medieval: Gothic Architecture and Art
From the towering heights of Chartres and Amiens to the pages of personalized manuscripts, late medieval architecture and art were vital forces within a rapidly changing world. This course investigates European artistic production from the rise of Gothic architecture in the Ile-de-France in the mid-twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages. Special attention will be given to the role of the senses in the search for knowledge, the complex interactions between European and other cultures made visible in their artistic production, the motivations behind the technical developments showcased in the great cathedrals and decorative arts, and the changing status of the artist.
This course examines works of art in all media produced in Italy and Spain during the Baroque era, with a focus on painting and sculpture. It pays particular attention to the social and cultural contexts of art objects, touching upon themes such as the impact of religious reforms on the visual arts; contemporary struggles with race, class, gender, and sexuality as reflected in objects and the built environment; and arts patronage as an expression of power. Rome, Madrid, Naples, and Seville feature prominently as settings, yet the course situates these places within a wider geographical framework encompassing other parts of Europe as well as Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Students will become familiar with works by a range of artists including Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Diego Velázquez, Jusepe Ribera, Luisa Roldán, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Juan Correa in addition to their modern interpreters.
ART_HIST 359 Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Architecture, Ecology, and Empire in 19th-Century Africa
This course studies the relationship between buildings, cities, and their ecologies to show that African architecture developed during the nineteenth century a wide range of climate design techniques—an approach we will discuss as environmentally modern and inscribed within an Afropolitan framework of globally facing architectural knowledge. Many contemporary architects worldwide today turn to sustainable building methods by tracing their precedents to African architecture, drawing on materials such as earth, clay, wood, and even coral. Often, however, these historical methods are relegated to a category of timeless building traditions that seem to have existed in Africa since time immemorial. This has the effect of freezing African architectural culture in time (what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls “socio-cryonics”). We will explore a history of African architecture from an Afropolitan perspective, spanning from the Age of Revolutions—marked, among other events, by the formation of the Sokoto Empire in 1804—until the early decades of the twentieth century, when European colonialism reached its peak. Throughout the quarter, we will study invention and change in African architecture with historical specificity, understanding how the nineteenth century was a period of environmental creativity in response to an ever more globalized world.
ART_HIST 389 Special Topics in the Arts of Asia: Painting Nature in British India
As the East India Company consolidated its authority in India in the eighteenth century, European officials, naturalists and artists sought to map the subcontinent’s landscapes and record the region’s flora and fauna. They often worked with Indian artists and draftsmen to devise conventions through which the natural world was observed, classified and represented. Through a look at landscape drawings, gardens and estates, and studies of plants, birds, and animals, this seminar takes the depiction of the natural world as a site of encounter among artistic traditions and differing modes of vision, where scientific inquiry and colonial power converged. Drawing on primary sources and recent scholarship, the seminar will investigate the trajectory of natural history painting from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mughal court painting to Company sponsored works, and the continuation of this genre within studio and academic art practices in the nineteenth century.
One of art history’s foundational tools is the practice of close — or, slow — looking. Yet, the institutional economies and media ecologies in which we live, work, and look push us at a punishing pace toward productivity and efficiency. In this course, we will consider slowness as both object and mode of inquiry, attending to its possibilities as feeling, action, and praxis. And we will do it slowly. We will spend extended periods looking at a single artwork. We will sift through archives. We will read one text—whether theory, poetry, or fiction—and then read it again. We will become bored and investigate that boredom. We will contemplate the deep time of the ground beneath our feet. In doing so, we will reconsider what comprises art and its histories, and what we might see, do, and feel by slowing down.
These explorations will be informed by theories of temporality, movement, and duration drawn from Black studies, disability studies, environmental studies, new materialism, and phenomenology. Through sustained engagement with performance, video art, conceptual art, land art and earthworks (and the works of the earth), we will investigate questions of embodiment, objecthood, and animacy.
This seminar is intended for upper-level undergraduates with coursework in the arts or humanities interested in developing original research questions and pursuing sustained, independent inquiry. Students will benefit most if they are prepared to invest time in reading and looking, and are curious about developing their own scholarly and/or creative practices.
This seminar provides an introduction to art historical research methods for undergraduates, particularly those interested in writing an honors thesis. The seminar will survey the history of Art History with a focus on debates and interventions within the field (e.g. feminist, 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 sources? What constitutes “evidence,” and how is the dominant perception of “evidence” shaped by art history’s origins?
ART_HIST 395 Museums Seminar: Japanese Woodblock Prints: From 1660 to the Present
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 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.
All classes are taught on site at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Objects and Materials Seminar focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects. The course considers key themes in the field of object studies by considering how materials, representational strategies, use, and conservation shape and are shaped by the life of the art object. This year's iteration will focus on materials from the Thoma collection that will be on loan to the Block for the exhibition "Pasados Presentes". The course is required for first- and second-year Art History graduate students at Northwestern.
ART_HIST 450 Studies in 19th Century Art: Visual Language of Protest
This graduate seminar examines themes and case studies in the visual language of protest from the early 19th century to the late 20th century with a focus on print culture, graphic arts, photography, film, and performance, with case studies chosen from local (Chicago-area), national, and international contexts. Activist themes could include abolition, labor organizing, revolution and decolonization, the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers, Indigenous, feminist, queer, antiwar, environmental, and anti-police violence movements. We will bear in mind relationships to conventional “fine arts” and discuss theories of collective action, violence, and communication. For those seeking a “breadth” credit in the nineteenth century, the topic of your final paper and your discussion leading day must fall primarily between 1789 and 1914; other students may choose to write on contemporary topics outside the chronological scope of the class. Assessments include participation in discussion, miscellaneous short writing prompts, a final research paper with a proposal and a partial draft, leading class for one session and presenting on the final paper topic. Students are invited to contribute ideas about specific case studies and historical and geographic areas of interest.
ART_HIST 480 Studies in Asian Art: Mughal to Modern
South Asia’s long 18th century was marked by the rapid fragmentation and violent end of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), the concurrent rise of Britain’s corporate arm, the East India Company, followed by British crown rule, the Raj (1860-1947). At the core of this transformation from court to Company to the Raj were artists who were tasked with materializing a colonial vision of India as they moved beyond the court to the city. This seminar brings parallel art histories of Late Mughal and British colonial and crown rule together to examine the complex modes of artistic experimentation in this period where artists built on the longstanding legacy of cosmopolitanism of Mughal court painting to bridge Mughal and Company tastes, participate in imperial art exhibitions, and service a marketplace for ‘industrial arts.’ From British surveys of India’s lands and people to the institutionalization of an ‘Indian’ art, this seminar will study interactions between Indian artists and their European counterparts across the genres of painting, printmaking, and photography to examine the nature of modernity within a colonial paradigm.
