ART_HIST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: The Art of Propaganda
What is “propaganda” and how can we differentiate it from “art”? Do all forms of art with a political message necessarily fall into the category of propaganda? And can abstract art become a tool of political persuasion? Is propaganda merely about political manipulation or would commercial advertisement also count as visual propaganda? From mass-produced World War II posters to TikTok videos of social media influencers, from Soviet propaganda movies to Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica (1937), this course will put diverse examples of modern and contemporary art and visual culture to the test of propaganda. During this course students will learn and practice visual analysis, applying this critical skill to a broad range of visual media across mass culture and “high” art produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, including painting, posters, photography, film, monuments, architecture, clothing, and social media platforms. The course will include a class visit to the Art Institute, a film screening, as well as a walking tour around Evanston.
What is contemporary art? When is contemporary art? For whom is contemporary art? Where is contemporary art? And…why does contemporary art matter? This undergraduate slide-based survey introduces majors and non-majors to some of the central artists, themes, works, and debates comprising the rich and varied history of contemporary art (roughly 1960 to today) in multiple media, with a particular focus on the social and political engagements that have informed artistic developments during those decades, as well as how they are historicized in relation to other art, geopolitical conflict, and the institution. The ways in which artists have approached, contested, reflected, and reconfigured the problems and possibilities of institutions—be they social, governmental, academic, political, commercial, media-based, or the art world itself—is a central theme around which the course will find critical traction and build historical context. In addition to cultivating an understanding of what has made particular genres and instances of artistic practice significant to art history, this course allows us to think about how globalization, technology, current world conflicts, and social media, for example, have shaped artistic production, art criticism, and the art market. It also asks us to reflect upon the temporality of our present and what it is that is “contemporary” to our “now.” Assignments might include short writing assignments based on local art exhibitions of international artists, weekly readings and online viewings, a midterm, and a take-home final exam.
ART_HIST 320-3 Medieval Art: Late Medieval: Gothic Art and Architecture
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 cultures made visible in their artistic production, the motivations behind the technical developments showcased in the great cathedrals, and the rise of concepts such as chivalry and courtly love.
ART_HIST 360-1 20th Century Art 1: European Modernisms, 1900-1945
This lecture course examines modern art and culture in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, a period marked not only by ongoing European imperialism and colonialism, but also by the end of major empires (such as the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires) and the birth of new nation states within Europe. How did artists in Europe engage with the experience and legacy of colonialism? How did they respond to the rupture of old political regimes and the consequent rise of extreme political ideologies both on the left and the right? We will study the key modernist movements, including Primitivism, Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Activism, Bauhaus, international and Soviet Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, socialist realism, and Zenitism. Focusing on both the major European centers of the avant-garde and the less canonical, “other” Europes, we will explore how artistic practices related to new technologies, changing gender structures, revolutions, mass-scale wars, and a new type of mass commodity culture.
As the capital of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 500 years, Istanbul flourished as one of the largest and most culturally diverse cities in the world. Multilingual, multiethnic, and multiconfessional, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan society inhabited a bustling port city at the crossroads of three continents whose syncretic architecture and urban design reflected both the social diversity and political authority of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman dynasty transformed the ancient Byzantine metropolis of Constantinople into the material embodiment of its imperial ambitions over Europe, Africa, and Asia. Yet these top-down efforts to recast Istanbul in the Ottoman image did not go unchallenged by Istanbulites themselves, who imagined alternative social orders for their city and reappropriated urban spaces as sites of public resistance.
This course explores the art, architecture, and urban history of Ottoman Istanbul from the city’s conquest by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 to its occupation by the Allied Powers at the end of World War I (1918). The course studies Ottoman Istanbul’s urban life in a wide range of spaces, from mosques, churches, palaces, and royal mansions to marketplaces, public baths, and coffee houses. In addition to key monuments like the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace, we will also study manuscript paintings, calligraphy, photography, public festivals, urban design, and large-scale engineering projects. We will pay special attention to the relationship between the city and questions of class, politics, gender and sexuality. We will also consider Ottoman Istanbul’s connections to other global centers of art and architecture, such as Cairo and Paris.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Contemporary African Art
This course examines the contributions of African artists to contemporary art practice and discourse from the 1980s to the present. Students will explore the critical networks, strategies, politics, and institutions that have shaped and supported the making, circulation, and reception of African art practices in recent history. The course will strive to analyze objects from multiple vantage points, considering the ways in which the meaning and value imputed to African art practices shifts across local and international contexts. Students will gain substantial insight into the role of museum exhibitions, art biennials, publishing platforms, and transnational collaborations in defining the field of contemporary African art. We will question how artists today interrogate geopolitical power arrangements and engage issues related to gender, identity, and sexuality. We will also explore how artists grapple with the insights and limitations of theories ranging from decolonization, feminism, modernism, and globalization to ideas of Posthumanism and the Anthropocene. The course will address a spectrum of media including film, installation, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and sound.
ART_HIST 390-0-3 Undergraduate Seminar: Chicago and the Making of the Modern World
This undergraduate seminar will try—and given the enormity of the topic, undoubtedly fail—to come to grips with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition was central to the city of Chicago’s ambitions for rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but its larger importance in the project of imagining a new American role for the twentieth century cannot be overstated. 27 million people visited the Exposition (the vast majority coming by rail) at a time when the population of the United States was only 62 million. This World’s Fair showcased global cultures, new inventions (the Ferris wheel, the movie theater, numerous products that have become household names), art and architecture—and the racial, colonial, and gendered ideologies of the Jim Crow era. In the seminar, within the wealth of possible topics, we will look at Ida B. Wells's crusading journalism, the founding collections of the Field Museum, Buffalo Bill Cody's “Wild West” show, the fair’s Beaux-Arts architecture and its broader impact on Chicago, the Woman's Building, the development of the mythology of Christopher Columbus, violently racist human spectacles, political intrigues, and the fair’s aftermath. In addition to working with primary visual and textual materials available digitally and in local collections, we will read literary works such as Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
ART_HIST 390-0-5 Undergraduate Seminar: Black Feminist Ecocritical Art Histories
The seminar explores the work of scholars and artists who engage and produce Black Feminist approaches to ecology, the relationship between the human world and nature. It examines Black Feminist perspectives on colonialism, indigeneity, and slavery and forms of knowledge related to the environment—from provision grounds and gardens to nature-centered cosmologies—created by Black women during enslavement. The class centers on the work of contemporary artists across the African diaspora who take up and reimagine these histories in their efforts to chart new and renewed approaches to environmental interrelation, sustainability, and justice. Readings include writings by Suzanne Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and a consideration of art by Deborah Anzinger, Firelei Báez, Nadia Huggins, Deborah Jack, and Amanda Williams, among others. Students are responsible for weekly response papers, co-leading two presentations of readings, and creating and presenting on a final research project.
ART_HIST 395 / ANTHRO 390 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.
What constitutes a museum’s responsibilities is a question that undergirds ICOM’s definition. In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, with art museums as our focus. 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? What responsibility do museums have to their histories and the history of museums generally? In the course we will address these questions through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and short writing assignments. Several case studies will be highlighted. The course will be held at the Block Museum and will include interactions with Block staff and engagement with The Block’s current exhibition, Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology.
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: Labor in Medieval Art History
Despite the nineteenth-century romanticization of medieval craft production, medievalist art history has traditionally prioritized patrons and theologians over makers as the “creators” of artworks and for half a century looked to reception over facture as the locus for interpretation. Even the material turn, with its return to object-centered analysis, has shied away from questions of making in favor of methodologies that privilege object agency. These preferences have largely been shaped by the biases of the medieval textual record, which tends to obfuscate the place and nature of labor in discussions of art and architecture alike. This course seeks new avenues for addressing the role of labor (human and non-human, free and unfree) in medieval art and architectural production by bringing together archaeological research alongside medieval archival and descriptive sources. In addition to considering previous art historical attempts to engage this question, we will also look to methodologies and debates surrounding key issues such as craft specialization in archaeological literature as well as to methods such as critical fabulation that may open space for telling the stories obscured in the archive. A series of guest speakers specializing in different geographic regions of Afro-Eurasia will help us consider both the interregional nature of labor flows and the variable nature of source materials and previous research on these topics across the different subdisciplines of African, Chinese, European and Islamic art history. All required readings will be in English, but some research projects may require expertise in other languages.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: 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. The seminar especially attends to how studies emerging from Black life might call for, and demand, transdisciplinary and multimodal forms of scholarly work. Focused on scholars, archivists, collectives who work across scholarly writing, studio arts, film, fiction, photography, and/or book arts, we examine the work of Romi Crawford, Simone Leigh, Joshua Myers, Theaster Gates, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Deborah Thomas, among others. We also look at the significance of sociality, art school modalities, retreats, and rest as forms of Black study. In addition, we explore experiential forms of writing related to Black study highlighting elements like the footnote, redaction, and erasure. Students are responsible for weekly response papers, co-leading two presentations of readings, and creating and presenting on a final research project.
ART_HIST 470 Studies in Architecture: Broken Earths: Landscape in the Third Ecology
Recent critical movements within architectural and landscape studies have proposed that the unfolding climate crisis, together with planetary urbanization, calls attention to the need for new methodologies that rethink the damaged ecologies of the Anthropocene in aesthetic analysis. Returning to well-known moments in landscape history, this seminar will examine how post-Enlightenment modes of knowing and seeing the world, rooted in eighteenth and nineteenth century political economic discourses, continue to inform habitual distinctions between natural and built environments, in contrast to traditional ecological knowledge. Such distinctions lay at the heart of an imperial technique, both discursive and material, that was used to turn nations and overseas colonized territories into landscapes, “turning,” in Jill Casid’s formulation, “the pays into a paysage.” To do this, land was “emptied out and then repossessed.” The story of such dispossession has been a subject of recent decolonial and ecofeminist scrutiny within architectural and landscape history. Thinking with these movements, this seminar will tackle the problem of writing reparative histories of architecture and ecology in our present moment. We will find fertile ground for our investigations in the Block Museum’s upcoming exhibition Actions for the Earth.
