Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
Fall 2024 UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
Ancient Mesoamerica (today’s Central America, Mexico, and the Southwest United States) boasted some of the world’s largest cities, expansive trade routes, and complex systems of writing. Beginning with the Olmec in 1500 BCE, turning to the Maya and Teotihuacan, and ending with the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521, this course examines how Mesoamerican cultures used art and architecture to craft a distinctive visual identity, forge sprawling empires and powerful city-states, and communicate with the gods. From ball courts to pyramids, and jade to feathers, the art and architecture of Mesoamerica tell a vivid story of cross-cultural exchange and artistic innovation. Through close analysis of objects, architectural plans, and historical texts, students will hone the ability to write cogently about what they see, as well as describe the place of Latin American antiquity in the crafting of modern political and social identities.
CRN#: 37766
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00PM – 3:20PM
Place: Watkins 1000
This course provides an in-depth study of American art from roughly 1850-1900 with special attention to cultural and artistic issues in the context of industrialization. Topics include artists such as Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, James Whistler, Henry Osawa Tanner, Augustus Saint Gaudens and Mary Cassatt, as well as contributions to a broader visual and material culture by figures such as illustrator Thomas Nast, photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, furniture designer Gustav Stickley, and others. Key themes for the course include: the role of the fine arts in American society, tensions of class, gender, race and ethnicity in Native American art, and place of American art and culture in an increasingly globalized world. This course is also open to all sophomores.
Contact advisor Eva Larios for enrollment permission: eva.larios@ucr.edu
CRN#: 38009
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 11:00AM-12:20PM
Place: Arts Screening Room 335
This course will study European art of the “long” nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War. By looking closely at major works of the period we will discuss ideas and concepts of modern European art and their world-wide reception. Topics covered include Neoclassicism, Realism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism in painting, sculpture, print, and decorative art.
CRN#: 38010
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30PM-1:50PM
Place: Arts Screening Room 335
FALL 2024 GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES
This seminar interrogates the history of art history through readings of texts that were foundational to it. It engages, among others, with theological, philosophical, historical, psychoanalytical, iconographical, stylistic, and poststructuralist accounts of artistic objects, from Plato and the Middle Ages, to the Enlightenment and the institutionalization of the field in the 19th and early 20th-century, all the way to Benjamin, Warburg and Foucault, as well as with their role in the discursive formations of the subject of art history. The seminar thus provides students with an understanding of the “deep time” of the discipline and prepares them for the study of 20th and 21st-century methodological approaches discussed in AHS 251B.
CRN#: 10044
Meetings: Tuesday, 3:00PM-5:50PM
Place: Arts Seminar Room 333
In sixteenth century Mexico, the confluence of the Little Ice Age and the Spanish invasion triggered drought and waves of infectious diseases that reduced Mexico’s Indigenous populations by 85%. This seminar examines the dramatic changes to Indigenous landscapes of the Americas resulting from man-made interventions and meteorological events from roughly 1492 to the present era. We will analyze the various methodological approaches to the interpretation of landscapes, and collectively interrogate discourses around the natural, human/non-human, and place & space underpinning art history. Furthermore, we will think critically about how discourses of “race” and settler-colonialism are imbricated with the development and study of landscapes in the Americas, and how Indigenous communities have used relations to land/water to contest displacement and dispossession.
CRN#: 38013
Meetings: Monday, 9:00AM-11:50AM
Place: Arts Seminar Room 333
Winter 2025 UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
This course surveys the art and visual culture of North America, primarily in the United States, from European contact to the present. Beginning with imagery of the first New World encounters, we trace the roles played by visual expression in the conceptualization of American culture during the colonial, revolutionary and antebellum periods, the Civil War, southern reconstruction and westward expansion, the Gilded Age, Modernism, the Great Depression, the pluralism and media culture of the later twentieth century. While the course runs roughly chronologically, most lectures are thematic. Some offer in-depth analysis of a topic by focusing on one or two artists while others amalgamate broader sets of objects and issues Among topics considered will be the development of various modes of representation (from painting, sculpture, and photography to more everyday forms such as design, illustration, cinema and other media); the emergence of American artistic institutions including schools, museum; and criticism, the role of the visual in constructions class, race, and gender; issues of local and regional expression; and the relationship between art, nation and identity.
CRN#: 53622
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 11:00AM-12:20PM
Place: Watkins 1000
This course is an introductory survey of the art, architecture, and visual culture of Latin America from the colonial to the contemporary period. We will begin by examining the introduction and adaptation of European artistic models into the Americas as well as the transformation of Pre-Columbian art as a result of contact between these cultures, analyzing a variety of materials and media including urban planning, religious and secular architecture, paintings, sculpture, manuscript drawings, and prints from the colonial period (1492–ca. 1820). The second half of the course will be dedicated to studying material from the nineteenth century to the present, examining the role of the arts in the building of independent nations, how Latin American artists and architects responded to international avant-gardes, and conclude by considering current trends in contemporary art from the region.
CRN#: 52120
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday 3:30PM-4:50PM
Place: Arts Screening Room 335
500 years ago, the Aztec (Mexica) capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Spanish invaders. This course uses material culture to examine Mexico’s tumultuous transition into a Christian settler colonial society within the Spanish Habsburg’s global empire. Central to this course will be the study of the physical materials through which Indigenous communities contested, negotiated, and transformed European artistic, sociopolitical, and religious practices. From toppled pre-Hispanic temples to corn-paste crucifixes, fig-bark (amatl) paper to vibrant red cochineal dye, and feather mosaics to imported ivory, Mexico’s organic and inorganic materials supplied a diverse settler colonial society a unique range of resources to intervene in global artistic discourses and devise local solutions to drought, disease, and dispossession. Written assignments will incorporate primary (archival) textual sources and analysis of objects and images. Prerequisite(s): sophomore, junior, or senior standing; or consent of instructor.
CRN#: 57198
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30AM-10:50AM
Place: Arts Screening Room 335
This course is an introduction to the art and architecture of Muslim dynasties in South Asia from the eighth century conquest of Sindh by the Umayyads to the eighteenth century when the Mughal Empire was significantly diminished and other, smaller polities were coming to power. Moving across the Indian Subcontinent, this course maps the movement and settlement of religious, political, and intellectual elites through this vast region. The buildings they commissioned — immense forts, monumental tombs, highly ornate mosques — and the artistic objects they produced — illustrated manuscripts, metalwork, ceramics, textiles —illustrate the different motivations that underpinned artistic production in South Asia.
CRN#: 57199
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00PM-3:20PM
Place: Arts Screening Room 335
Winter 2025 GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES