Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
Summer 2018 (Session A: June 26 – July 29)
What is the impact of emerging media technology on visual art?
Arguably, over the course of the twentieth century in the West, moving images became the dominant cultural form. 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 visual art and vice versa? 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. Although material is mostly 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 media.
CRN#: 70002
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 1:10PM – 4:00PM
Place: ARTS 335
Summer 2018 (Session B: July 30 – September 1)
Following the revolutionary period in Paris, Modern art emerged out of the opposition between past and present. The modernist attitude is synonymous with innovation, changes, a deliberate and radical rejection of traditions of western art and new innovative artistic practices led by groups of avant-garde artists. These artists challenged the aesthetic norms and conventions and introduced a new style in complete rupture with the establishment and bourgeois society. Through an historical examination, the course will focus on function and meaning of art, architecture and design from the 20th century and later and on the ideological issues in which they arose. Students will develop a broad familiarity with the rise of modern art, and will discover the fascinating stories, key works, and iconic figures of modern art, from its origins in European Post-Impressionism and avant-garde movements to international contemporary visual cultures.
CRN#: 72706
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 2:10PM – 5:00PM
Place: ARTS 335
FALL 2018
Among the most fascinating and mysterious works of art of Western culture are those from the very beginnings of human civilization and the great cultures of ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome. In a survey extending from the earliest painting, sculpture, and architecture of the prehistoric period to that of the final dissolution of Roman imperial power in the East in the fifteenth century (the Byzantine Empire), this class takes up the artistic, religious, social, and political factors that shaped the art of those great cultures.
CRN#: 10008
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 11:10AM – 12:00PM
Place: WAT 1000
The period from the artistic emergence of Early Christianity in the third century to the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth is one of the most dramatic of Western European history. In taking up the religious, liturgical, social, and political factors in the shaping of medieval art, this course moves from the initial Christian resistance to art, to its gradual acceptance by a fledgling Christianity, to its adoption by a Church almost synonymous over-night with imperial authority–but a hollow authority, an authority which in the struggle between Christian, pagan, and barbarian demands would culminate in its own implosion and the almost complete destruction of Western civilization.
CRN#: 25626
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 12:10PM – 1:00PM
Place: ARTS 335
FALL 2018 GRADUATE LEVEL
‘Methods of art history, just like pictures, can be dated. This is by no means a depreciation of pictures or methods — just banal historical fact.’ (F. Antal)
This seminar examines the historical foundations of art history through readings of its formative texts. The idea is to jump right in to the key debates that have defined our understanding of artworks and visual expression in the Western Tradition from antiquity onward. The course will begin by dissecting core writings on art, aesthetics and meaning by early philosophers and historians. We will then consider how these ideas enabled the codification of art history as a humanistic discipline during the nineteenth century and fueled its further refinement in the early twentieth. Rather than conceptualizing art history as a series of separate and distinct approaches, we will instead trace a few durable concerns have shaped its practice. Centrally, the seminar will interrogate an essential complementarity in art history: that artworks exist simultaneously as objects of living encounter and artifacts of historical meaning. Our purpose lies in examining how foundational thinkers balanced a desire to conceptualize the aesthetics of art (in the ancient Greek sense of “relating to perception by the senses”) with the need to place such expressive efforts in relationship to history.
CRN#: 10044
Meetings: Wednesday 1:10PM – 4:00PM
Place: ARTS 333