DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

This course explores modern architecture, design, and urban planning from the late 19^th century to the early 1970s. Focusing primarily on the modern movement in architecture, we will situate key figures, objects, and design practices within broader political, cultural, social, and economic contexts. Among the themes we will explore are how the major world wars, the Soviet Revolution, colonialism and decolonization influenced the production of architecture; how aesthetic considerations such as the relations between form and function were imbricated with questions about technology and labor; how architectural modernism became the International Style and how this internationalization took place in various parts of the globe, beyond Europe and the US.

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The materiality of art is evident—and central to how art looks, how it means, and how it endures. This new course is intended as an introduction to the materiality of objects and works of art made during the early modern era (c. 1400-1700) and to concepts for understanding and interpreting them. Works in a variety of materials—ivory, wax, woods, feathers, shells and mother-of-pearl, oil paint, lacquer, metal, fresco, stone, porcelain and earthenware—populate a series of case studies drawn from European, Mesoamerican, and East Asian workshops. In addition to learning about what goes into making an early modern work of art, students will trace the geographies of materials, and the ways in which materials, format, and durability all affect the viewer’s experience. Students will read, analyze, and discuss current research on the makings of art, on theories of the materiality of art, and problems in art conservation—and will participate in close examination of works in museum and special collections. Our specific focus is on the materiality of early modern art works, and on what sorts of experiences that materiality represents. How were the materials sourced? acquired? prepared? valued? appreciated? This course will introduce students to some of the central topics in early modern art history as it is practiced by scholars/historians *and* by archaeologists, museum curators, archivists, and conservators. Students will be introduced to a wide data set of objects and art works, and will learn how to analyze, articulate, discuss, and research aspects of their materiality. Rather than focusing on memorization, this course encourages using concepts from a set of assigned readings to reflect on the objects we discuss together. Students will work in small groups and as a class to advance their own vocabulary for and understanding of early modern materiality.

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The course will study “The Age of Revolution” in Europe with heavy emphasis upon artistic and political developments in France, but developments in the German states, England, and Spain will also be discussed. Major themes are the rise of an art for the public, art and revolution, art and empire, the invention of Orientalism and Romanticism, caricature and the press, new image technologies including photography and lithography, and the rise of landscape painting and portraiture. The key artistic practices studied in the course are those of David, Goya, Ingres, Daumier, Géricault, Delacroix, and Constable. The course subtitle may as well be: Sex, Violence, Politics, and the Land.

 This is Professor Clayson’s last 300-level class.

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How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, social life, and time and space? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. We will pay close attention to the work of key media theorists, including (but not limited to) Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Donna Haraway. We will also analyze works of art, sound, film, and literature in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of how media matter.

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Recent scholarship has broadened the canon of “black art” produced in the long 1960s looking anew at how the politics of the era was manifest in art and art history.  This course examines debates that surrounded black art during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements as well as new efforts to redefine, to relook at, “the political” in art and visual culture of the period, from abstract art to the artistic strategies of the Black Panthers. The class will be attentive to how gender, sexuality, and geography informed formulations of black art and alert to the limits of conventional narratives of art in the 1960s. The course interrogates how the unfinished political and artistic projects of the 1960s continue to shape memory, activism, art, and art history today. Readings will include work by Naomi Beckwith, Susan Cahan, Huey Copeland, Margo Crawford, Darby English, James Meyer, and Michele Wallace.   

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This seminar centers around two basic but difficult to answer questions: What is art history? And how did it get that way? Our aim will be to identify and question the validity of current disciplinary boundaries, and to begin to unravel how these concerns came to shape the field. Intended for undergraduate majors.

Evaluation Method
Class participation
Research project
Writing assignments

Other (see below):
Weekly reading responses; research paper composed of cumulative writing assignments; active participation in seminar meetings.

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 the interpretation of Japanese prints into the 20th century.

Connoisseurship will feature strongly in this class taught from a curatorial point of view. As this class will be conducted largely 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.

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This seminar is designed for second year graduate students to rework an existing seminar paper into their Qualifying Paper. Organized around a series of assignments, it will be conducted as a workshop, focusing on both style and content. We will work on maximizing the effectivity of the paper’s arguments by considering its narrative structure and the use of sources and images. While the primary aim of the seminar will be to perfect the communicability and rigor of the arguments, this process is also designed to reflect on and distill our individual voice as writers and scholars.

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This seminar examines early modern European modes of knowledge-production by zeroing in on the idea of the “elemental.” From geometry to medicine and alchemy, almanacs and handbooks of prognostication to natural history (including colonial natural history), the Newberry’s collection includes books that deploy the notion of an “element” (and the “elemental” or even the “elementary”) in many different ways. We will emphasize the four traditional elements (earth, water, fire, and air), gaining an overview of premodern European categories of material knowledge. Held in conjunction with the “Renaissance Invention” exhibition and the symposium, “Elemental Forces,” (May 7-9), students in the course will have the opportunity to present their research in a workshop meeting with visiting scholars.

Enrollment is limited, by competitive application. The application deadline is November 1, 2019. Compete this online application form to apply: https://www.newberry.org/renaissance-center-graduate-seminar-application.

SCHEDULING NOTE: There will be a two-week break during the seminar. Class will NOT meet March 19 and 26, but will reconvene for the final class on April 2.

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This seminar examines scholarship and visual practices that address different understandings of the fugitive and fugitivity. This scholarly terrain ranges from an interrogation of historical incidents and processes of flight of the formerly enslaved to theoretical considerations of ongoing states of fugitivity that characterize the political positioning of black subjects in Western societies. Fugitivity will be complicated through and against an interrogation of concepts like the wayward, maroonage, errancy, and escape. The class is particularly attentive how these terms and concepts might shape and be shaped by an interpretation of the visual and visual materials.  What might it mean to produce scholarship attentive to concepts of fugitivity? Authors we will engage include Tina Campt, Hannah Crafts, Avery Gordon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Barnor Hesse, Jessica A. Krug, Richard Iton, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Neil Roberts.  Students are responsible for weekly response papers, co-presentations of weekly readings, and a final research presentation and project.   

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