ART_HIST 240 Introduction to Asian Art: South Asia - Art, Architecture and Empire
This survey serves as a first introduction to ancient, medieval and modern/contemporary artistic practices of South Asia, its relationship with East Asia (China, Japan), Central Asia, and Europe. Key examples of art and architecture will focus on a selection of artistic traditions, styles, built environments (archaeological sites and monuments) and media (prints, painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography). Course materials will take up a thematic as well as object/site-oriented case-study based approach, drawing upon the role of religion, cultural interactions, trade and entanglements of art with imperialism, colonialism, modernization and war and current issues around museum display and exhibitions. The survey is aimed at developing skills of visual literacy, analysis and awareness of art-historical debates and will provide opportunities to engage with close reading of objects and their larger historical, cultural and scholarly contexts.
ART_HIST 319 / CLA 390 / HUM 395 Special Topics in Ancient Art: Constructing Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean World
How did individuals define themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world, and how did they express their affiliation with multiple and diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other collective social identities? How did groups portray perceived differences between themselves and others? What do we know of the construction of gender identities, race, age, and class distinctions? What dynamic roles did dress, hairstyle, body decoration or ornament, and personal possessions play in establishing and expressing individual and collective identities?
This course explores evidence for self- and group-fashioning in Greece, Rome, and their neighbors in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. We examine a wide range of textual and material sources, including works of art, archaeological contexts such as burials and religious institutions, biographies, autobiographies, and legal documents, including dowries. We also consider culturally significant modes of self-representation and commemoration, such as portraits and funerary monuments, along with the collecting and transfer of objects that represented accumulated social entanglements, such as heirlooms.
While the Roman Empire disintegrated in the west, its traditions continued and evolved for centuries in the east under the auspices of the Byzantine Empire. This course examines the formation and development of Byzantine art from the foundation of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the 4th century to the city’s fall to Ottoman forces in 1453. Special attention will be given to the debates that redefined the nature of the religious image in the Iconoclast controversy, the use of images in Orthodox practice, the networks of cultural exchange and competition that linked the Byzantines to their Muslim and Christian neighbors and spread their artistic influence from the Italian Peninsula to Rus, and the modern political controversies that have entangled the Byzantine artistic legacy in Turkey and the Ukrainian war.
ART_HIST 350-1 19th Century Art 1: 1789–1848: Late 18th Century – 1848
Focusing on the “Age of Revolutions,” this course broadly takes up the history of Paris and French art from the late eighteenth-century to approximately 1848, with some forays across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Covering the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and the French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, we will look at how popular culture, fashion, race, technology, colonialism, empire, and politics coalesced in the artworks of Jacques-Louis David, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Antonio Canova, Théodore Géricault, and Honoré Daumier, among others. Professor Emeritus Hollis Clayson has described this course as “Sex, Violence, Politics, and the Land.”
ART_HIST 368 Special Topics in Modern Art: Art of Revolution and Empire: Russia and the USSR
This course examines the art and visual culture of revolution in the context of empire, from the revolt against tsarist empire in 1905, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that led to the formation of the Soviet Union, to the Stalin Revolution of the 1930s that aimed to establish an anti-imperialist socialist empire. Artists of the Russian empire were among the first to invent abstraction in the 1910s, and, after 1917, Soviet artists were the first to fulfill the avant-garde slogan “art into life.” With particular attention to woman artists and artists from Ukraine and other regions of the Russian empire and the USSR, we will study 19th century realism and Impressionism, Neo-primitivism, Cubo-futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, photomontage, photography and experimental film, and the invention of Socialist Realism as modern public art.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Photography and Africa
This course examines the role of photography in shaping and transforming ideas of Africa—its peoples, cultures, and geographies—from the late nineteenth century to the present. Across colonial and post-colonial contexts, we will examine how artists, amateur and professional photographers, exhibitions, and publications variously register and respond to social, cultural, and political changes on the continent. Through course readings, lectures, and study room visits to the Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Block Museum of Art, we will engage a range of forms including advertisements and popular magazines, colonial ethnography, film, modern and contemporary art, and photojournalism.
ART_HIST 390-03 / ASIAN_AM 380-0-2 Undergraduate Seminar: Asian Caribbean Visualities
The Asian diaspora has a long history of migration to and within the Caribbean, inaugurated with the system of indentured labor established by European colonial governments. Today, many Caribbean nations—including Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, and Guyana—are brimming with food, art, music, and other cultural expressions that bear strong traces of Indian and Chinese influence. Despite the profound impact of the Asian diaspora on this region, the Caribbean has been primarily understood, theorized, and historicized in terms of its African and European descendants. In this course, we will explore the overlooked history of Asian Caribbean visuality by analyzing how Asian-descended Caribbean artists address race, colonial histories, and cultural erasure. These artists include Sybil Atteck, Albert Chong, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Wendy Nanan, Andil Gosine, Nicole Awai, Suchitra Mattai, and Richard Fung, among others. Their work will be contextualized with sustained critical attention to: the history of indentured labor to supplement plantation labor after Emancipation; the cultural politics of interracial relations and Afro-Asian solidarity movements; diasporic communities in the U.S., U.K., and Canada; and the intersections of race/ethnicity, queerness, and gender.
ART_HIST 401 Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar
The historical juncture at which we presently find ourselves—wracked by the compounding catastrophes of the global pandemic, ecological disaster, and postcolonial neoliberalism—demands a radical rethinking of art history as an academic discipline. The urgency of redressing art history’s lingering complicities with white supremacy, coloniality, and the profit motive propels us to reconsider foundational questions: What is art? What is history? What is an object? What is scholarship? What is a method? What is an archive? This seminar addresses these and other questions from perspectives both within and beyond art history, including Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory, new materialisms, among others. Rather than assimilating subaltern voices into a hegemonic “global art history,” the seminar begins with the premise that art history needs rebuilding from the ground up. The goal is to work proactively and collectively towards new horizons of art historical scholarship by attending to a diverse body of methodologies that offer dynamic ways of reconceptualizing art historical narration, (inter)disciplinarity, canonization, and research. While theory and historiography will be the abiding focus of the course, students will also be asked to bring in specific examples of art, architecture, and visual and material culture to ground our discussions in practices of object analysis.
ART_HIST 440 Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art: Marble
Writing in the mid-16th century, Francesco da Sangallo stipulated in a letter that when one spoke of sculpture, one spoke of marble. This connection between sculpture and (white) marble only strengthened over the course of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. Yet as we know, Ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures and buildings were painted in vibrant, bright colors. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, polychrome marble blocks were used to create richly patterned architectural structures. This seminar will take on and challenge the Western conception of “white marble” by revisiting its history as a foundational material in the history of Europe Art, from Antiquity to the present. Topics will include the physical qualities of marble, marble quarries, the role of color (both applied and natural), the political and aesthetic debates surrounding antique and modern polychrome sculpture, and the relationship between the aesthetics of white marble and dangerous ideas of white supremacy. The class will also be taught in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago's landmark retrospective on Camille Claudel.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Black Art and Archives in Chicago
This seminar provides a selective introduction to the history of Black visual and media arts in Chicago since the early 20th century, an overview of digital and physical archives that support research in these fields, and discussion of related research tools and methods. All final projects will involve working directly with an archive, with outcomes that could include traditional research papers, digital scholarship, and/or creative projects.
