Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
SPRING 2026 UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
MODERN WESTERN VISUAL CULTURE traces the historical development of today’s world of images from its nineteenth-century origins, and introduces key aesthetic and theoretical issues which have defined twentieth-century visual culture across painting, photography, film, architecture, and video.
CRN#: 75586
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 8:00AM-9:20AM
Place: Watkins 1000
Explore the radical art that changed everything. From avant-garde provocations to institutional critique, this course traces the movements and ideas that shattered conventions and shaped contemporary art. We’ll examine abstraction, Pop Art, performance, and conceptual practices in a networked context — with emphasis on interventions that expanded who gets to make art and what art can do. You’ll discover how artists responded to their cultural moment and why their work still matters. Expect bold gestures, challenging ideas, and art that breaks boundaries.
CRN#: 76517
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00PM-3:20PM
Place: Watkins 1000
500 years ago, the Aztec (Mexica) capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Spanish invaders. This course uses art and architecture to examine Mexico’s tumultuous transition from Aztec rule to a colony in Spain’s vast global empire, ca. 1450-1620. 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#: 77024
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30AM-10:50AM
Place: Art Screening Room 335
Do we live in a “postmedia” world? This course explores experimental contemporary art and media practices from the 1960s to the present. Departing from modernist models of “medium specificity” that distinguished different artforms, later generations of artists interrogated, melded, deconstructed, or expanded the means of aesthetic and conceptual transmission. Topics include communication technology, ecological systems, perception and embodiment, screens and moving images, artificial intelligence, and more.
CRN#: 77025
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 12:30PM-1:50PM
Place: Art Screening Room 335
This course explores key moments of the development of European art between 1870 and 1945, a period of artistic experimentation and cultural change. By examining movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstract Art, the discussion will highlight how artists like Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and others redefined the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Through an analysis of major works and artistic philosophies, the course provides insight into the radical shifts that shaped modern visual culture and continue to influence contemporary art.
CRN#: 77336
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00AM-12:20PM
Place: Art Screening Room 335
SPRING 2026 GRADUATE-LEVEL COURSES
This seminar investigates nineteenth-century European painting in relation to theories of perception, cognition, and affect drawn from cognitive psychology, empirical aesthetics, neuroscience, and biologically informed approaches to art. Centering on seminal works of the period, the course examines how accounts of vision, attention, and emotion can deepen our understanding of both the making and reception of nineteenth-century art.
Students will engage with key texts from the cognitive sciences alongside art-historical scholarship, evaluating their significance for rethinking artistic practice, spectatorship, and historical interpretation. The seminar is intended for students interested in cross-disciplinary approaches and in exploring points of contact between art, scientific inquiry, and visual experience. No prior background in psychology or science is required.
CRN#: 77027
Meetings: Tuesday, 2:00PM-4:50PM
Place: Arts Seminar Room, 333
FEEDBACK IN SYSTEMS ART: 1960S TO TODAY
What happens when art “talks back”? This seminar investigates art history from the Cold War to today through the lens of loops, circuits, signals, and mechanical extensions of body and mind. In concert with postwar systems discourse, artists defined, designed, and critiqued feedback systems of all kinds; to do so, they utilized disparate mediums, from overtly “technological” forms like computer art and automata, to performances and interactive social systems, to communication tools like televisual networks, poems, and manifestos. Readings in twentieth and twenty-first century art history and the history of technology examine feedback’s reverberations in topics such as militarism, technocracy, automation, feminism, colonialism, and climate change.
CRN#: 77028
Meetings: Wednesday, 3:30PM-6:20PM
Place: Arts Seminar Room, 333
SUMMER 2026, Undergraduate courses: SESSION A: June 22-JULY 25
An introduction to the history of art production and dissemination at the global scale moving from prehistory to the present. From cave paintings to AI-generated imagery, AHS 007 WORLD ART: IMAGES, ISSUES, AND IDEAS uses the plural histories of art to make sense of the present by considering such issues as the use of artworks as historical documents; the evolving connection between “high art” and popular culture; and the relationship between artist, viewer, artistic tradition, and society.
CRN#: 74447
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:00-11:50AM (plus discussion section)
Place: Online Synchronous
Images, especially moving images, surround us, reflect us, affect us, and in some ways make up our world. Artist and author Hito Steyerl has said, “we cannot understand this so-called reality any more without understanding cinema.” As moving images morph once more on account of the nexus of the Internet, mobile technology, and “big data,” what will be the effect on art and our world? This course explores changes in visual art that coincide and intersect with the history of new media — specifically how combinations of images produce meaning in cinema, intermedia, and social media — and what changes this may effect and reflect in ourselves and our society. Although course material is largely historical, one of the primary goals of the course is for students to develop the skills and intellectual curiosity to be critical viewers of contemporary art and visual culture.
CRN#: 70002
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:00-11:50AM (plus discussion section)
Place: Online Synchronous
SUMMER 2026 undergraduate, SESSION B: July 27-August 29
Do you use TikToc? Do you watch online streaming shows?
Have you ever thought about videos being “art”?
Do you want to work in video production?
Have you ever seen a video in an art gallery and wondered what it was doing there?
If these questions caught your eye you need to take AHS 136: The History of Video Art this summer. This class looks at the origin of personal video, how it became and art form, and how it impacts
society today. Class will utilize streaming videos and follow an asynchronous format.
CRN#: 74450
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 1:00-3:50PM (plus discussion section)
Place: Online Synchronous