An introduction to the history of painting, sculpture and architecture from the Old Stone Age through the ancient Mediterranean world to the end of the medieval period in Western Europe. Considers issues including technique, style, iconography, patronage, historical context, and art theory.

An introduction to the history of Western European and American painting, sculpture and architecture from the Renaissance through the baroque, rococo, and early modern periods to the late 20th century. Considers issues including technique, style, iconography, patronage, historical context, and art theory.

This course introduces students to the arts of Asia, covering a broad geographical span, including South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, as well as an extensive chronological frame from the prehistorical period to the present day.

An introduction to the art and architecture produced by the sophisticated and urbanized cultures of the Americas: the Olmec, the Maya, the Mexica (or Aztec), Chavín, Moche, Nazca and Inka. It focuses on how rulers and other elites, over time, used art and architecture to bring themselves and their societies into synch with the natural world, and how sacrifice, of one's self, of other humans or of non-human animals, was represented in art and commemorated in architecture.

An introduction to the art and architecture produced by the sophisticated and urbanized cultures of Africa.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics course as designed by visiting or permanent Art History faculty. For description, consult the department. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours under separate title.

Special topics course as designed by visiting or permanent Art History faculty. For description, consult the department. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours under separate title.

Transfer Coursework at the 1000 level. Departmental approval may be required.

Special topics in the history of art. Subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes.

An introduction to the art, architecture and visual culture of China, Korea and Japan from the beginnings to about 1200 CE. The course considers technique, iconography and style and will approach art works in theoretical contexts such as social functions and aesthetic discourses of art.

This course introduces students to the visual and material culture of China, Korea, and Japan from the medieval period to the present. We will focus on the East Asian tradition in painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and architecture. We also explore the social, economic, and intellectual forces behind the production, circulation, and appreciation of artworks. Among the topics discussed in class are art and politics, art and identity, transmission of Buddhist art, etc. Special attention will be given to the transcultural exchange among China, Korea, and Japan as well as the encounter between the East and the West.

A survey of art and architecture in the Mediterranean from the third through the fourteenth centuries, with a focus on the rise of Christian art in the late Roman world and the art of the Byzantine state.

A survey in which both modern and historical categories of experience are used to understand the art of the Middle ages, especially as it manifested itself in the most characteristic of all medieval forms, the church. Along a chronological and geographical trajectory from Early Christian Rome to Gothic Paris this course will move through topics such as memory, poetry, pilgrimage, the body, gesture, devotion, narrative and liturgy.

This course will examine painting, sculpture, architecture, mosaics, tapestries, metalwork, ivories, and stained glass windows of the late Middle Ages in Europe. Through weekly readings and discussions will also explore themes such as religion, women, the Classical tradition, and cross-cultural contact. Various critical and theoretical approaches to art history will be considered.

This course will study the cultural role of images, largely painting, in Spain during the period 1500-1700. Topics to be explored include: the pictorial use of mythological themes in the projection of imperial power, the importance of portraiture in the legitimization of the Spanish monarchy, the art market and the social status of the artist. While painting will be our main focus, we will examine other visual documents such as maps and read literary works that illuminate the functions of images in the period.

Through readings and site visits to museums and monuments throughout Rome, this course will examine the history and theory of archaeological and other public historical monuments, sites, and museums within an international framework. With a specific focus on Etruscan and Roman art history and archaeology, we will consider how issues of cultural heritage, preservation, and display impact the visiting of historical sites. We will also spotlight the growing field of museum education, considering methods used by museum professionals and other educators who teach using museum collections.

This course will explore the art and architecture of central Italy from ca. 1300-1500 CE, with a special emphasis on the art of the city of Rome. Through site visits and in-depth analyses of works by well-known artists, Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc. as well as lesser-known artists (especially those working in Rome), students will gain an understanding of the development and impact of the Italian Renaissance.

This course provides a survey of architectural history in Europe from 1400-1750, stressing a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of social and cultural context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Lectures will range from close examinations of specific monuments to broader engagements with architectural forms as they cut across time. Particular attention will be paid to the socio-cultural dimensions of architecture and the ways in which individual buildings and the built environment have shaped humanity’s experience of the world. Class meetings will focus on a range of issues, including civic and corporate identity, political and religious power, the status of the architect, the dissemination of architectural knowledge, building technology, construction techniques, patronage, and symbolic meaning.

An overview of the art and culture of the European courts between about 1300 and 1700, with a particular focus on the themes of love and eroticism.  Artists to be discussed include Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, and others. 

This course uses Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, drawings, and writings to explore the interrelation of art and nature in early modern Italy. Using Leonardo as a focus, the course is divided in two halves; the first half considers ways of seeing and picturing the natural world. The second considers the ways man changes the environment, including its practical and aesthetic uses. These themes are not easily divided, and in the early modern world their intersections had significant implications for intellectual thought, artistic practices, and manmade interventions in the landscape, be they fountains, fortifications, gardens or urban planning. Leonardo will be our interlocutor throughout the term, although the course is not intended to be a monographic study of the artist per se. Instead, we will examine Leonardo’s and his peers’ artworks as a way to investigate early modern conceptions of nature, its transformative potential, and the natural and built environment.

This course introduces students to the study of the visual culture of Renaissance Italy (1350–1600). By examining how artists, architects, critics, and patrons used and discussed artworks including paintings, prints, sculpture, and architecture, students explore themes such as the revival of antiquity, the study of nature, the training of the artist, the role of competition, and the public and private display of art.

This course surveys the visual and material culture of the Baroque world, roughly the period 1575-1750, considering the diverse locales, styles and objects of Baroque artistic production, as related to early modern notions of theatricality. The course is composed of two acts. First, we will investigate the visual culture of several key cities (Rome, Antwerp, Madrid, Mexico City, Munich and Versailles). In the second half of the course will focus on diverse spaces of baroque theatricality (churches, theaters, palaces, civic spaces and the art collection itself). Through these case studies, the course aims to explore how the local economic, religious, political and social contexts for artistic production interact with global networks of exchange and the performance of individual and national artistic identity.

This course explores the artistic production of the Low Countries, Germany and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including painting sculpture, manuscripts, metalwork, tapestries and printmaking. The course will focus on a range of topics, including: technical and iconographic innovations in artistic production, art's devotional function, the changing market for art in this period as well as the early impact of the Reformation on the visual arts in the Low Countries and Germany.

This course explores the artistic production of the early modern Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, focusing on key artists (including Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer), as well as emerging critical literature on the function and value of art/artists. This course will consider how art was bought and sold; how art was evaluated for its commercial and aesthetic value.

In this course we will explore art produced in Europe from the early18th century through the mid-19th century. We will consider the work, careers, and reputations of key artists such as Fragonard, David, Friedrich, Turner, Ingres, and Delacroix, among others, situating their work in relation to the political, socio-economic, and intellectual developments of the period.

This course will analyze art produced in Europe from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, with a particular emphasis on French painting. We will consider the work and reputations of key artists such as Manet, Monet, Cassatt, Seurat, and Cézanne, situating their work in relation to the political, socio-economic, and cultural changes that took place during this period.

In this class, we will explore the work, careers, and reputations of key Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, among others, by studying the rich collections of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, and by visiting exhibitions of 19th-century art in Paris and elsewhere.

This class will explore different artists’ representations of the various forms of pleasure and entertainment that were an essential part of Paris’s identity in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. We will study the work of some of the key artists of the period and visit some of the entertainment sites and activities that they featured in their work, such as the Montmartre neighborhood and the Eiffel Tower, as well as visit museum collections and special exhibitions related to the course.

An analysis of visual and material culture from the first European artists in the colonies to the onset of World War II. Considers the transformation of cultural forms from the old world to the new in developments such as the formation of a national iconography as seen in portraiture, genre painting, landscape painting and the development of a distinctive modernist tradition specific to the United States. This course will examine the ways in which art and material culture reflect the social, intellectual, and political life of the nation up to World War II. 

Explores the developments in the visual arts in the U.S. and Europe since 1950. Concentrates upon the social historical formation of artistic development beginning with the aftermath of World War II, and continuing to the present. Emphasizes movements such as Pop, Minimalism, Earth art and Postmodernism. Issues surrounding the objects will include poststructuralism, post-colonialism as well as African-American, feminist, and gay and lesbian strategies for self-representation.

This course will explore the developments in the visual arts in Europe from 1890 to 1945. We will concentrate upon the social-historical formations of artistic production beginning in the late-nineteenth century with Post-Impressionism and continuing into the first half of the twentieth century examining movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Russian Suprematism.

This course introduces students to the history of photography from the “invention” of chemical photographic techniques in the first third of the nineteenth century through the contemporary turn to the digital. The primary regions covered will be Western Europe and the Americas, with particular attention to debates about photography as an art, the role of technology in shaping photographic imagery, and the status of photography in fields such as journalism, science, politics, advertising, art, etc., in relation to social and historical contexts.

The course focuses on the sophisticated and urbanized cultures of the Americas: the Olmec, the Maya, the Mexica (or Aztec), Chavin, Moche, Nazca and Inka. Taking a contextual approach, it pays attention to the ways ancient makers constructed meaning by creating constellations of objects, often collations of buildings, sculptures and cashed offerings. It will also look at large scale environmental manipulations, meant to align human occupations with a divine design.

Renaissance and baroque architecture, painting and sculpture of the metropolitan centers of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies from the 16th to the early 19th century with a major emphasis on Mexico.

Intensive investigation of Aztec art as a fundamental manifestation of political and religious ideas. The course will examine the relation between art and sacrifice, and the role of ritual and performance in “activating” works of art and architecture. It will center on the art and architecture of the city of Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City, the heart of the empire in the past, and the current site of ongoing archeological excavations. Students will learn how to apply art historical methodologies to works of Aztec art, and share those results with a broad public through contributions to Wikipedia.

This course focuses on the art created by Maya artists from 300-900 CE, a time when Maya cities and royal courts flourished. These objects had long lives, continuing into the modern era, when they were eagerly collected and displayed, particularly in the US and Europe. We will study how and why Maya art was first made, and then look at how and why it found its way into modern collections. We will learn about the legal regimes of collecting, and how they have changed over time. We will focus on how Maya art is collected and displayed today, with attention to the ethical questions around collecting practices, and the role of the art market in collection formation. Students will gain hands-on experience in working with local collections, particularly the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and practice designing a virtual exhibition of Maya art of their own, taking into consideration the contemporary praxis and politics around Indigenous arts.

This Art History course examines contemporary art in a global context. We will begin by considering early contemporary art, from the late 1960s and 1970s, focusing on issues, theories, and artworks emerging in selected geographic zones: Latin America, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Western Europe, the United States, and Eastern Europe. Next, we will consider artists working worldwide from the 1980s through the present, examining emergent mediums such as installation and social practice, and themes such as collectives, the body, and activism.

This course introduces students to the study of modernity and visual arts In Latin America, from the late 19th-century through roughly 1950. We will trace the radical social transformations of this period and the art that reflected. resisted, or intervened In these processes. emphasizing key themes: the formation of collective Identities (and the intersections of race, class, and nation); the impact of social and political revolutions and counter-revolutions; the reception and reconstitution of European avant-garde art; and national, regional, and universal definitions of artistic traditions.

This course introduces students to the study of visual arts In Latin America from the 1950s through the present. Examining Latin America as part of transnational networks. this course explores artistic innovations in response to the still-developing modernist canon of Latin American art. This course investigates radical formal transformations of the art object over this period and the particular social and political contexts of Latin America within which such transformations took place.

This course introduces students to the study of visual arts and architecture in Brazil from around 1500 through the present. This course foregrounds the development of Brazilian art resulting from a historically-contingent intertwining of indigenous, European, and Afro-descendent cultural traditions, as an artistic tradition inextricable from transnational networks. This course investigates the formal transformations of art and architecture over this period. paying close attention to he particular social and political conditions within which Brazilian art took shape.

This course explores the production of visual and material culture related to the African American presence in what is now the United States from the eighteenth century through the mid twentieth century. The course considers visual materials made by African American artists and artisans as well as materials by non-African Americans that feature African American subject matter (and the relationship between these two types of visual production). We will work to understand the objects featured in this course within both the specific context of the history of African American art and visual culture and the larger context of American art history in general. Arranged roughly chronologically but more strongly guided by a thematic and topical approach, the course aims to communicate basic content information while providing students with an understanding of the kinds of dominant questions and concerns engaged by current African American art scholarship.

Does it necessarily make sense to consider the work of artist of African descent together as a unit (in other words, should this course exist?)? What persistent themes, issues, and debates inform the work by African diaspora artist? What makes art "Black" (or "African" or "African American")? Is an artist of African descent necessarily a "Black artist"? Do artist of African descent have a particular obligation to make artwork that advances a black cultural or political agenda? Is not doing so in and of itself a political statement? How might a landscape or Abstract Expressionist work be racially charged? How do vectors of identity other than race inform the work of African diaspora artist? How does the artwork studied in this course fit into the context of other art histories? Through these questions and others, this course explores the major themes and issues that have occupied artists of African descent as well as examines individual artists' motivations and intentions.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Special topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects will vary and may not be available every semester. Individual topics will be listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

An experiential learning process coupled with pertinent academic course work. Open only to juniors and seniors in good standing. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Open to qualified juniors and seniors with approval of instructor and chair of department. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Open to qualified juniors and seniors with approval of instructor and chair of department. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

For especially qualified seniors with approval of the faculty director and the Office of Academic Enrichment. Students must have a minimum of a 3.400 overall grade-point average and a 3.500 grade-point average in the major.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

This course will provide a capstone experience for undergraduate majors in art history through an investigation of the various places Western art has been made, exchanged and critically evaluated, from the late medieval period to today. Each week, students will consider distinct space-for example, the studio, the academy, the auction house-its definition, history and conceptual impacts on the history of Western art. Students will analyze the material and intellectual culture of each of these spaces, utilizing key case studies drawn from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

In this capstone seminar, we will examine key works of controversial modern art from the 19th century to the present. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the scandals that surrounded the work of Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Richard Serra, Maya Lin, and Sally Mann, among others. 

This seminar explores key moments in the relationship between art and science in Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to the present. We will analyze a range of topics that span time and place, such as Leonardo de Vinci's anatomical drawings and interest in optics. Enlightenment theories of perception, Impressionist and neo-Impressionist painting, and abstraction in the 20th century, among others. 

This course will examine some of the most popular medieval Christian pilgrimage centers of Europe. We will focus mostly on Santiago de Compostela and Rome, with brief looks at other pilgrimage centers such as Jerusalem, Assisi, and Canterbury. Topics to be covered include the cult of the saints, the pilgrimage roads, architectural settings and their decoration as well as reliquary shrines and related works of art, images and their use in imaginary or mental pilgrimage.

This seminar will focus on the relationships between gender and the production and reception of medieval European art and architecture. Topics to be explored include images of women, works of art commissioned by women, images made for women, architectural spaces designed for women and/or men specifically (i.e. monastic architecture), women as artists, etc. Comparative material known to have been made for/by men specifically will also be explored as we consider the meaning of the concept of gender. Feminist theory and various contemporary critical approaches to gender and medieval art will enhance our exploration of specific works.

This course will examine the art and architecture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance in Italy from approximately 1250 to 1350 A.D./C.E. We will focus particularly on the rise of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century and their impact on art and the narrative of the Renaissance.

According to the conventional geography of art history, “colonial” art was produced in peripheral spaces, lacking political (and consequently artistic) autonomy. An art history that centered metropolitan and imperial capitals inevitably cast on “colonial” art as something less than –in quality, in originality—that of these centers. New paradigms, however, have emerged in the wake of critiques of a Euro-centric world order, and the practice of art history shaped by it. This course focuses on recent art historical scholarship and exhibitions, almost all from the past decade, that deals with colonial art and the new paradigms of research and theory being developed for it. While much of the course will deal with colonial Latin America, we will also look to other colonial situations, including British India, Australia, and Ghana. During the last weeks of the course, we will also look at the work of post-colonial contemporary artists, who see themselves as the inheritors and interrogators of colonial legacies.

How did the visual arts and sciences interact in the Early Modern period? In what ways have these interactions defined and ruptured boundaries between empirical investigation and artistic practice? This new seminar on the rise of printmaking c. 1500-1800 investigates print as a new technology and artistic medium. Printmaking allowed for changes not only in art production, but in intellectual inquiry. What new representational techniques emerged? What is the rhetoric of the illustrations themselves? Topics include the study and representation of anatomy, botany, and the celestial spheres in print, and how their artistic representation fundamentally changed our understanding of the natural world. In tandem with these new technologies, optical instruments such as microscopes and telescopes opened previously invisible worlds to scrutiny. We will discuss the intellectual, social worlds such devices and images inhabited.

The ways in which our society figures in relation to the natural environment has never been so urgent. This seminar studies the history of that entanglement through an examination of the significance and meaning of “landscape” in art, literature, architecture, and landscape design. This course studies how conceptions of landscape, evident in physical forms as well as poetic and artistic representations shaped the ideological and natural terrain of Europe from antiquity to the 18th century, with particular emphasis on the period of 1450–1800. The course stresses a critical approach to landscape through the analysis of social and cultural context, expressive content and function, style, and theory.

Within his lifetime Michelangelo Buonarrotti (1475–1564) found himself inexplicably hailed as "Divine". This seminar investigates the work of this Renaissance titan and the impact of his art production on Renaissance art theory and its aftermath. Topics include his early training, specific uses of media (drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture), major projects (the David, the Sistine Chapel frescoes, the architecture of St. Peter's) case studies of specific competitions and rivalries (Leonardo vs. Michelangelo and Michelangelo vs. Raphael), and themes such as artistic collaboration and the non-finito. The final classes will be devoted to art theory and reception, including Michelangelo’s own writings on art and the legacy of the artist's biography generated by Giorgio Vasari and Condivi, concluding with his 19th-century reception in France.

This course examines the visual and material culture of the Dutch Golden Age, centered in Amsterdam, as the product of global forces. Rather than solely tracing the domestic consumption of international goods or the ways in which Dutch demands shaped artistic production in Batavia (Indonesia), Brazil, South Asia and North America, this seminar critically examines concepts of influence, exoticism and cross-cultural exchange. We will focus on objects and art works produced in , imported and exported through Amsterdam. By investigating the economic realities that enabled the flourishing of Amsterdam as cultural center, this course seeks to complicate readings of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture (particularly genre scenes and still-lifes) as culturally introspective.

This course considers the uses, technologies and theories of the early modern copy from the miraculous icon to the forgery, the emulative imitation to the workshop replica, and the pastiche to the reenactment. Copying was a crucial part of artistic pedagogy; the early modern period is characterized by imitation and emulation of classical art, architecture and literature, but the Renaissance also saw innovative technologies of reproductive art-making and new concerns with how to distinguish good copies from the bad.

This seminar considers the art and architecture commissioned and utilized by the Jesuit Order in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Society of Jesus embarked upon a worldwide project of evangelization. With missions and missionaries from Japan to Germany, Goa to Peru, we will consider how this missionary order both adapted to local contexts and attempted to forge a communal identity that stretched across the early modern globe.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

This Art History course examines the history and theory of Social Practice art, a recent mode of artmaking in which artists and art institutions collaborate with individuals and organizations to create community-specific works of art. Classroom readings and discussions will examine forms of Social Practice in relation to histories and theories of participatory, political, and activist art since the 1960s. This course includes a 20 hour service learning component with Prospect New Orleans, a citywide triennial of contemporary art with the social mission of connecting high art to the larger cultural landscape of New Orleans through community-specific works.

In-depth examination of Degas' works and career in light of various historical and critical approaches, ranging from formalism and iconography to sociopolitical and cultural studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Attention will be paid to male and female spectatorship and to relevant works by Degas' Impressionist contemporaries, including Cassatt, Gonzales, Manet, Morisot, and Whistler, as well as other artists including Daumier, Delacroix, Ingres, Tissot, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Additional comparative topics include academic art, photography, journalistic illustration, and Japanese prints.

This seminar explores the transformation of Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century into a great modern metropolis. Throughout the course we analyze the ways that the architecture, painting, photography, literature, and visual culture of the era shaped and reflected various facets of this modern city.

Examines the ways in which Abstract Expressionism has been interpreted, both from the view of American critics and historians and their European counterparts. Emphasizes the extent to which formalist criticism evolved around Abstract Expressionism, and that only recently have scholars challenged those apolitical reading of this art, considering the political and economic factors which contributed to its international predominance on the global stage. Artists will include De Kooning, Frankenthaler, Hofmann, Krasner, Newman, Pollock, and Still.

Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are credited with expanding the field of visual art at mid-century in terms of content and media. As members of the Neo-Dada group, alongside composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, they charted a course out of abstract expressionism that pointed away from painting as an exclusive artistic practice, and toward a reinvigoration of subject matter that culminated in pop art. Johns and Rauschenberg were both intimate partners and business partners, and their commercial design-work often brought them into partnership with Andy Warhol, who would make his mark as a pop artist a few years later. Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol were queer men who negotiated their sexualities in different ways during the McCarthy era when homosexuality in New York city was a crime. This seminar will examine the development of each artist’s work within the context of postwar American art and criticism while charting the strategies and codes each artist employed—even the persona’s they adopted, whether it be Jasper Johns, the “Organization Man,” or Andy Warhol, the “Cool Cat”—to locate discursive space in the conformist culture of the 1950’s.

Examines both European and American conceptions of postmodernism, as it originated in post-structural and psychoanalytic theory. Emphasis will be place upon artists working since 1980, including Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Warhol and the politically based art project of Gran Fury, the Guerrilla Girls and the Names Project. Interpretive strategies will be taken from readings in European literary theory, with emphasis place upon the shift in criticism in art-making, away from Europe, toward an ideology formed around the issues of racial, sexual, and gender performance of identity.

This course will examine art industry best practices for the acquisition of art objects for institutional, investment and private uses, as well as explore the central issues for collection management. We will explore art industry platforms for art acquisition: galleries, art fairs, auctions (brick & mortars. online), and private dealers. The course will stress methods for due diligence in acquisitions including research on provenance, authenticity, and research strategies for identifying stolen or forged objects.We will examine how monetary value is determined across art industries, from the retail gallery to the insurance company. Writing assignments will focus upon research methods for art objects and antiques, incorporating strategies of collection management such as condition, conservation, and best practices for art storage and maintenance.

This class examines the materials and technologies used to make art in the Ancient Americas to understand how worldviews are expressed in matter. It covers a wide sweep of indigenous empires (Maya, Aztec, Inca, Olmec, Chavin, Moche) and media (jade, gold, feathers, ceramic, paper, flint, obsidian, shell, and bones). It considers Indigenous categories of art and materials—as expressed in language and the facture of objects themselves—as a way of decentering traditional art historical categories of “art” and part of a decolonizing practice. By moving to center Indigenous categories we will be moving away from normative Euro-American theory, which posits that to make the work of art, human minds exert their will over inert matter, and human beings are radically separate from their environment. One approach to understanding Indigenous objects within the contexts of their origin are theories, sometimes called “eco-criticism” or the “new materialism” that posit new ways of understanding human animals, the environment in which they are immersed, and the objects that are the result of that integration. By the end of class, we will be able to explore whether the most radical of those ideas, and the most radically decolonial of them, perspectivism, can be extended to the work of art.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Advanced topics in the history, criticism, or theory of art. The subjects of the seminars vary according to the needs of the students and the scholarly interests of the individual instructor. Specialized topics are listed in the Schedule of Classes. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

This course examines the production of maps during the medieval and early modern periods. The expanding world required firsthand observation, oftentimes aided by tools, as well as effective means of transcribing and interpreting terrain. Key to map production, the use of optical devices and measuring instruments, i.e., the compass and rule, magnetic compasses, astrolabes, and sextants, shaped habits of visualization formed through the use of pen and ink. In turn, artistic representation provided an expressive pictorial idiom for synthesizing the quantitative assessment and visual apprehension of land and sea. Emphasis will be placed on recent literature applying the most current methodologies applied to the analysis of maps.

This course introduces funeary art and ritual in ancient China from the Bronze Age to the Medieval Period. By examining the architecture, mural paintings, and mortuary objects produced for e the funerary purpose, student will inquiry into the mortuary rites that reveal the complexity of social relationships, the intersection of art and politics, and the tension between the public and the private.

This seminar considers the role of art and visual culture in constructing. reifying, representing and, in some cases. challenging ideas of race and national identity in relationship to the joint enterprises of colonialism and Empire. Concentrating primarily on the 18th and 191h centuries (but with some temporal projection in both directions to consider both precursors and postcolonial reverberations) and exploring examples from the British. Spanish. and French empires. we _will consider a diverse array of material­ drawings, paintings, prints. sculpture, decorative arts. fashion, museum display, private collections, photography and film-in order to think about the ways that visual and material culture informed colonial identities and supported imperial enterprise and also could be used to resist them. Students are encouraged to offer perspectives and bring in supplemental material that expands the scope of the course dialogue and to pursue their own particular interests related to the concerns of the course in their final papers/projects (included exploring different time periods or colonial empires). Finally, while race will be the primary vector of identity explored. its inevitable intersections with gender, class, and sexuality will necessarily receive attention.

How does American art and visual culture implicitly and explicitly reify notions of America as a "white" nation, and how has this changed over time? How have images shaped and been shaped by historic moments of racially-implicated upheaval or conflict (e.g. Westward Expansion; the abolition movement, the Civil War and Emancipation; periods of mass immigration)? How has the idea of what it means to be "American" been defined against the racialized images of American "Others"? Can contemporary artists of color successfully appropriate and re-deploy racist imagery? This seminar considers these and other questions in investigating constructions and representations in American art and visual culture from the 16th century to the present. We will explore the ways in which these images are implicated as both products and producers of fundamental mythologies about the United States as a nation and about what it means to be "an American" (and who gets to be one). (Counts as Capstone)

This course investigates the depiction of interracial contact and the mixed-race body in modern Western art, primarily American and British. (Counts as Capstone)

Exploring a wide range of art and visual culture including painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance and popular culture, this course explores contested visions of the Civil War from before the firing of the first shot at Fort Sumter to the present. In addition to the period of the war itself, our study will necessarily look both backward and forward, including consideration of the art and visual culture surrounding slavery and abolition, emancipation, and Reconstruction and reunion, as well as narratives romanticizing the culture of the Old South.

In the first semester of this 2 part course (ARHS 6877) we investigated a wide range of art and visual culture including painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, and public history sites to explore contested visions of the Civil War and related issues including slavery and abolition, Emancipation, Reconstruction and reunion, and narratives romanticizing the culture of the Old South. This semester, you will use that foundational knowledge to work with your peers to develop an online exhibition of art and material culture that engages these concerns.

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

This seminar engages with core themes and concepts of art theory and critique as they are applied in art and visual culture. Through class discussions and end-of-term presentations, we will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are contributing to or cultivating their own discourses. Our goal is to debate the arguments presented by philosophers, curators, and artists to develop our understanding of these theoretical tools such that we gain confidence in our ability to scrutinize contemporary artistic practices, the connectivity and conversations with art of the past, and the relationship with our own artistic practice.

This course will serve as an introduction to the history and contemporary scholarly landscape of Africana Studies as its own interdisciplinary intellectual enterprise with a distinct history and scholarly legacy and underpinned by unique critical and methodological approaches. It is designed for students who are prepared for graduate-level study but who may not have had the opportunity to take Black studies coursework as undergraduates and to expand the depth and breadth of knowledge for students who do have formal Black studies training by through more critical engagement with foundational texts and current work by contemporary thinkers. Africana studies embraces interdisciplinary methodologies for the study of Africa and its diasporas across the globe, as well as for the critical study of race and anti-Black racism. It centers Blackness and the critical study of race, amplifying the significance of Black history, the beauty of Black creativity, the power of Black resistance, the commitment to Black freedom, and the insight of Black critical perspectives. While the study of Black people will be centered in this course, students will become familiar with the ways that interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational grounding of Africana Studies provides frameworks to make sense of all of humanity.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited non-earned credit hours.

Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.