DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

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 survey provides an introduction to some of the central artists, themes, works, and debates comprising the history of contemporary art (roughly 1960 to today), with a particular focus on the social and political engagements that have informed artistic developments during those decades. 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 include short writing assignments based on local art exhibitions of international artists, weekly readings and online viewings, regular canvas posts, and a flexible-format final exam. No prior knowledge of art history or contemporary art is required.

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This course places the revolutionary developments that took place in Italian art and architecture from 1300 to 1527 within a broad historical and thematic frame. This entails scrutiny of particular artists - Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Mantegna, Botticelli, Bramante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and others - and particular works of art - paintings, sculptures, prints, and architecture. Emphasis falls on the most active and influential art center, Florence, but the political, social, and artistic environments of Rome, Siena, Mantua, Milan, Ferrara, Urbino and Venice are also considered. The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the social and physical contexts of early Renaissance art, as well as an introduction to a range of art historical analyses and interpretative methods. In pursuing this goal, issues of production and reception, gender and representation, religious and political ideologies, public and private space, memory and likeness are addressed.

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This course surveys the field of new media art, or digital art. It considers Western art and artistic practices employing digital computational technologies from the room-sized mainframe computer to today's mobile and ubiquitous media, from the 1960s to the present. We will attend to the work of a variety of artists working in a host of emergent genres (net art, glitch art, GIFs, etc.) in order to gauge the ways in which digital media has changed, continues to change, and has failed to change contemporary art, culture, and experience more broadly. Topics to be studied include new media art's vexed relation to the art world, networked sexuality, and Chicago and Midwestern ties to new media art. The course will include visits to fall 2018 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the VGA Gallery, and the Block Museum.

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PLEASE NOTE: This course is cross-listed with American Studies 301-20; for American Studies, it serves as a core seminar. Art History majors will be admitted to available seats by permission of the instructor (please send an email to rebecca.zorach@northwestern.edu explaining interest and background).

"Chicago 1968" typically refers to the tumultuous events surrounding the Democratic National Convention, but this is not the full story of this momentous year. This course studies 1968 (defined broadly as the late 60s/early 70s) through political events and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Black Arts Movement (an interdisciplinary movement in the visual arts, literature, music, theater, and film) along with the Chicago Imagists and Chicago Surrealists, media activism, the women's movement, and the community mural movement. We will examine primary texts (novels, poetry, newspaper articles) images, film and video, and archival materials. Students should expect to work collectively and individually and to do rigorous primary historical research (with guidance).

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The seminar is intended to acquaint students with the work of William Morris and to evaluate his position in the history of modern art, poetry, design politics and environmentalism. For this purpose, we will look at, read and discuss Morris and his works from four different vantage points: 1) in the history and theory of ornament; 2) as an entrepreneur and professional artist in late Victorian England; 3) as a theorist and critic of art, design and politics; and 4) as an environmentalist, ecologist and architectural preservationist.

We will read texts by Morris, Pevsner, Thompson, Salmon, Naylor, and Eisenman, among others.

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This course offers an introduction to the analysis of art and visual culture. The course will review research tools, cultivate analytic and writing skills, and survey a broad spectrum of themes and issues that inform current work in art history. The course will give some attention to classic, field-defining texts, but more to recent critiques, issues pertinent to scholarship in a globally and historically broad range of subfields, and approaches drawn from feminist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race theory.

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Aniconism is often defined as the absence of any material representation of living, divine, or mythical beings. Widely recognized as aniconic phenomena - both in antiquity and in cross-cultural perspective - are built monuments, such as pillars and steles, and natural formations, such as uncarved stones. In ancient Near Eastern studies, aniconism has traditionally been examined within the context of biblical texts prohibiting the making of cult images, or "idols," and has played a significant role in analyzing artistic and religious practices in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In recent decades, aniconism has attracted fresh attention among scholars engaged with a wide range of historical periods and geographical regions, with significant results. These investigations have newly emphasized how nineteenth-century scholarship profoundly shaped subsequent studies, promoting the idea of an "aniconic age" that was widely adopted by scholars of ancient Greece, the Near East, and early Buddhism. Drawing on innovative approaches introduced from anthropology, religious studies, art history, and media studies, and new investigations of ancient written sources, this course explores current directions in the study of aniconism within multiple cultural spheres: ancient Greece, Egypt, the Near East, and the early Islamic world. What does "aniconic" embrace, and how do we demarcate it from other representational modes? What are the advantages and limitations of cross-cultural comparison? Topics include analysis of key concepts such as image, representation, figuration, and abstraction; the coexistence of aniconic and figural approaches to representing the divine; the agency and efficacy of material and scale; aniconism and the spiritual experience of vision; comparative approaches to classification; and aniconism and the natural environment.

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The seminar is intended to acquaint students with the work of William Morris and to evaluate his position in the history of modern art, poetry, design politics and environmentalism. For this purpose, we will look at, read and discuss Morris and his works from four different vantage points: 1) in the history and theory of ornament; 2) as an entrepreneur and professional artist in late Victorian England; 3) as a theorist and critic of art, design and politics; and 4) as an environmentalist, ecologist and architectural preservationist. We will read texts by Morris, Pevsner, Thompson, Salmon, Naylor, and Eisenman, among others.

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This course offers an introduction to the analysis of art and visual culture. The course will review research tools, cultivate analytic and writing skills, and survey a broad spectrum of themes and issues that inform current work in art history. The course will give some attention to classic, field-defining texts, but more to recent critiques, issues pertinent to scholarship in a globally and historically broad range of subfields, and approaches drawn from feminist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race theory.

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This research seminar examines the relationship between architecture, resources, and territory in 20th century modernization projects in Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. We will explore the conditions in which architecture has become a tool of development (a concept which we will address critically), and the functions it assumed in the ordering and managing of labor, natural resources and industry. While modernization projects are usually considered in terms of engineering and large-scale infrastructure, the architectural lens will offer a tool for a nuanced social-cultural analysis of the epistemological assumptions and value systems that undergird these projects. We will examine the role architecture played in the consolidation of "development thinking" in the shift from late colonial projects to the Cold War, specifically in reformulating the colonial relations between resource extraction and production, and the new emphasis placed on the maintaining of the "smallness" of small scale societies in terms of village habitation and vernacular forms of production.

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