ART_HIST 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Black Portraiture
Portraiture by Black artists has gained widespread prominence and visibility in recent decades, whether in the form of national portraits such as those of Barack and Michelle Obama, large-scale public art commissions, or through attention to prison photo studios that document self-expression and familial relations among incarcerated subjects. One of the most popular and potent sites of cultural, social, and political engagement, “Black portraiture” has emerged as an expansive category of inquiry across the fields of art history and cultural studies. In this seminar, we will engage a range of approaches to Black figurative representation from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will analyze how artists and ordinary subjects have used film, painting, photography, and sculpture to generate representations of themselves and others in order to address issues including but not limited to beauty, class, gender and sexuality, racism and antiblack violence, modernity, and decolonization. Students will learn how to interpret, discuss, and write about portrait-based objects in terms of their material form, circulation, reproduction, sites of display, and patronage.
ART_HIST 232 Introduction to the History of Architecture, 1400 to the Present: History of Architecture
How does the built environment shape social meaning and reflect historical change? In this introductory-level course, we will survey the human designed environment across the globe, from 1400 to the present day. Through in-depth analysis of buildings, cities, landscapes, and interiors, we will observe how spatial environments are created and invested with meaning. From Tenochtitlan, riverine capital of the Aztec empire, to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Palazzo Medici in Florence, from the Palace of Rudolf Manga Bell in Douala to the Colonial Office of the Bank of London, and from Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House in São Paulo to David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., this course will introduce students to the changing technologies, materials, uses, and aesthetics that have helped define architecture’s modernity across time and geographies. Through detailed visual analysis and the study of primary source documents, students will become familiar with architectural terminology and historical techniques of architectural visualization. Through written exercises and guided slow looking, students will learn how to critically analyze and historically interpret the built environment at various scales.
ART_HIST 255 Introduction to Modernism: Survey of modern art c. 1850-1950
This lecture course offers an introduction into one of the most debated terms of art-historical scholarship: modernism. Against its legacy as the hegemonic artistic discourse of the West, this course will study modernisms in the plural and survey some of the artistic forms, methods, ideas, and concepts that emerged in dialogue with multiple global modernities. The class will focus on the period between c. 1850 and 1950, which was defined by faltering empires; old and new forms of colonialism; revolutions; nationalisms; mass wars and mass cultures; as well as radical social movements such as feminism. Modern art allowed artists to express, critique, and at times radically reimagine their surrounding realities. The lectures will pay particular attention not only to the various artistic forms that modernisms took, from abstraction to realism, but also to the diverse contexts in which they flourished. Whereas in Paris or Moscow modern art developed through rebellion against the established norms of art academies, in Hanoi or Tashkent modernisms began and blossomed within French and Russian colonial art academies. Overall, the course will examine some distinct episodes in modernisms, not only in Western Europe, but also in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, among other places.
ART_HIST 339 / ENVR_POL 390-0-26 Special Topics in Renaissance Art: Art and Nature in Renaissance Europe
This course surveys European Renaissance approaches to the idea of nature, and the relationship of art and nature. We read primary texts in translation and examine artworks from the early 1400s to the late 1500s, in Italy and Northern Europe, with attention to the ways in which exploration and colonization reflected and also altered European attitudes toward nature. Nature can mean plants and animals and landscapes in this period, but it also has many different definitions, and the class will defamiliarize the modern received definitions. We consider the Renaissance as a moment of origin for later ideologies that promote the human domination of nature (with all its negative consequences for both human beings and extra-human life) but we also look at alternative ideas and traditions within and outside of the European context that point to more holistic notions of the interconnections of living (and, sometimes, nonliving) beings. To the extent possible, course will be taught as a "flipped classroom," with video lectures to watch on your own along with short readings followed by ample time for in-class discussion.
This course examines works of art in all media produced in Italy and Spain during the Baroque era (ca. 1600–1750), with a focus on painting and sculpture. It pays particular attention to the social and cultural contexts of art objects, touching upon major 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, and Juan Correa in addition to their modern interpreters.
Paris acquired its reputation as a global center of art in the second half of the nineteenth century. But art-making in Paris did not happen in a vacuum. Between 1848–1900, French artists were active players in the city’s numerous crises and social transformations, including utopian popular revolutions, foreign occupation, and massive urban reconstruction projects. Nineteenth-century Paris was also the capital of an empire that stretched from North and West Africa to the Caribbean and Polynesia. The foreign bodies and objects that filled the city as a result of these imperial conditions dramatically shaped the evolution of French art.
This course explores art in Paris at the intersection of modern politics, colonialism, and capitalist industrialization. In addition to avant-garde painting movements such as Impressionism and its “post-Impressionist” challengers, we also examine Orientalism and Primitivism alongside academic sculpture, universal exhibitions, and reproductive technologies like photography and the illustrated press. Some of the artists we examine include Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.
ART_HIST 389 Special Topics: Arts of Asia and the Middle East: Painting the Orient
For British artists and travelers in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India was part of the distant Orient. Where it was standard practice to embark on a grand tour of European sites, India offered a taste of the exotic East. As maritime trade with Asia boomed, the sights of Hindoostan became objects of popular curiosity in Britain and Europe. Europe’s mercantile interests opened the door to professional artists such as Thomas and William Daniel, William Hodges, and Johann Zoffany who made their careers through their Indian expeditions. On the other hand, British women such as Emily Eden and Fanny Parkes who traveled and lived in British India, produced their own sketches and impressions. In this course we will examine how artists and amateurs documented the life, customs, and landscapes of a region that would eventually become part of Britain’s Victorian Empire. Through a look at painted canvases and personal diaries, we will unravel how images while being documents of discovery, also sat at the core of networks of commerce, fashion, dispossession, and even violence.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Global Medieval: Problems and Possibilities
This course has two parts. For the first two thirds of the class we will read key texts in the emerging field of global medieval art history in order to familiarize students with the broad outlines of the historiography and current debates. In the second half of the course, each student will choose a key location or route (to be selected the first day of class with help from the instructor) and prepare several short weekly presentations on it in relation to topics such as architecture, portable objects, patrons and artisans. These presentations and their attendant research will build to allow each student to create a final 15-minute long presentation (a standard length for conference panel papers in the field) and are intended to help students develop their skills as public, scholarly speakers as well as to give the class as a whole a set of case studies for comparison.
ART_HIST 391 Undergraduate Methods Seminar: Methods and Historiography of Art History
For thinking is always firstly thinking the thinkable—a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable.” In the spirit of these words by philosopher Jacques Rancière, this seminar will embark on thinking with and against some of the major texts that have shaped art-historical writing in the past and the present. We will study the histories and methods of art history to investigate the origins of art-historical thinking as well as some of the Eurocentric concepts and values that lay at the core of art history as it emerged as an academic discipline in 19th-century Germany. The seminar will also focus on recent and ongoing debates and conversations that have critiqued some of the foundational assumptions of the field. We will examine how scholarship on art and visual culture has engaged with the approaches and theories of Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, critical race theory, queer and trans histories, decolonialism, environmental studies, and global and transnational histories. The class will meet on Friday afternoons and will include optional museum and exhibition visits around Chicago.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Black Printed Matters
How have Black artists used or developed print forms to advance political interests, combat racial and social injustices, and cultivate community? How might we historicize the interface between art history and Black vernacular print cultures? This graduate research seminar explores the various ways in which printed matter shaped and materially manifested in the practices of Black artists during the long twentieth century. Topics will include artist/writer collaborations, artist’s books, pamphlets and political posters, underground activism and publishing networks, bookstores and collectives, libraries in and as art, etc. We will engage the work of historically important presses as well the practices of active publishing platforms, including Chimurenga (Cape Town), BlackMass Publishing (New York), and The Funambulist (Paris).
ART_HIST 480 Studies in Asian Art: The Other Avant Garde
Recent scholarship has highlighted the emergence of a cosmopolitan Avant Garde in 1920s the city of Calcutta ignited by a 1922 exhibition of works by Bauhaus artists such as Klee and Kandinsky. Further, scholars have studied a parallel push for a pan-Asian aesthetic emerging out of intense exchanges with artists from Japan. This seminar looks at the long history of these experimental encounters by taking a backward glance into the spaces of British imperial exhibitions in 1903 and 1911 that brought the so-called traditional and experimental paintings and craft objects together. Broadening the arena of modernist approaches, the seminar considers how these exhibitions reconfigured Mughal history and design to revitalize nationalist and revolutionary art practices. Assessment for this seminar will include reading facsimiles of 19th and early 20th century exhibition catalogues and writing two exhibition reviews.
