History of Art

Students explore the cultural and artistic responses to the major modern, social, and political revolutions between the end of the 18th and 20th centuries. The focus is on rarely covered artistic responses to political, social, and religious revolutions of the 20th century. Historical, political, philosophical currents and their impact on … Read more

This course introduces students to the art of the African diaspora, defined here as transnational networks of forced and chosen dispersal of people of African descent. By definition, diaspora rejects the category of the nation-state and accompanying nationalisms. Instead, we take mobility, migration, and flux across borders as a starting … Read more

What is Sound Art? Imagine mind-bending sound pieces created with a piano filled with nails/bolts/nuts/screws, a floor tiled with LPs, a secret tone playing underneath a grate in New York City for 30 years, or nothing but the echo of a space. The course will provide a solid knowledge of … Read more

What hot-button issue isn’t to be found in the oeuvre of Andy Warhol -sex & celebrity, money and civil rights marches, camp & kitsch, race & violence? Yes, drugs, too -but our emphasis will be on material culture and visual and artifactual evidence. Embracing the totality of Warhol’s art and … Read more

In this course, we analyze several individual practices and group movements from 1945 to the present. Instead of adhering to the distilled summaries of a textbook, we engage art of this period at less of a remove. Students come to comprehend the difficulty and subjectivity involved in formulating a history … Read more

Introduction to the History of Art is a wide-ranging, multi-vocal introduction to the fundamentals of Art History and to many of the major moments, movements, artists, and works in the history of global art. Mindful of, but by no means limited by, traditional chronological and geographical approaches to the examination … Read more

In this course we trace the physical, physiological, and psychological investigations of experimental filmmakers over the last seventy years. Studying these three trajectories-matter, body, and mind-reveals “film” to be a complex interplay between what Paul Sharits described in 1969 as “celluloid, two-dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets … Read more

This course will explore the transition from modernist thought as exemplified by the Abstract Expressionist movement to such postmodern notions of appropriation, parody, and fragmentation as they manifest themselves in the art of the 1970s and beyond. We will focus on such concepts and genres as minimalism, performance, video, installation … Read more

Drawing on scholarship from the disciplines of history, art history, anthropology, and folklore, we consider the role of cloth in human experience. We will examine the use of traditional textiles in a range of historical and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on exploring social and symbolic functions as they relate … Read more