Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
SPRING 2020 UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
By examining a wide variety of buildings, gardens, and urban areas, with a special focus on the architectural and urban history of California, this course will cover formal, theoretical, material, pragmatic and conceptual aspects of architecture and urbanism. We will be concerned with both the formal elements of a site (what does a site look like and why does it look like this?) and the larger historical context that produced each site. Through close analysis of diverse sites and figures, including the California Missions and the Eames House, architects Julia Morgan and Frank Lloyd Wright, we will be able to understand some of the larger functions and significance behind sites, structures, and their makers. This course will emphasize several main themes including innovation, materials and technology, marking the landscape, the growth of urban space, and the shifting meaning of “architect” and “architecture.”
CRN#: 65728
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30AM – 10:50AM
Place: ARTS 335
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#: 65750
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 6:30PM – 7:50PM
Place: WAT 1000
For over two thousands years, the basis of Western artistic culture had been the art of ancient Greece.
In taking up the artistic, religious, social, and political factor which shaped the art of this great culture, this course focuses on the role of the city-state in the formation of Greek painting, sculpture, and architecture from the earliest days to the loss of freedom of the Greek city-states under Alexander the Great.
CRN#: 65774
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 11:00AM-11:50AM
Place: ARTS 335
How do artists conceive of themselves and their public persona? How does their self-perception reflect in works of art? Which myths and legends are behind the notions of what an artist is? And how do artists and theoreticians work with or against them? In addressing these and other important question of what artistic identity meant and how it was performed and represented in different time periods in the Western world, the seminar serves as an introduction to core concepts of artistic thinking and production. Ideas of creativity, artistic skill, and the role of self-fashioning in portraiture will be discussed. Through a close reading of texts and images, you will be introduced to strategies of (self-) promotion and mythmaking as well as their affirmation and deconstruction in later interpretations. The seminar will familiarize you with different text genres (biographical and autobiographical writings, psychoanalytical interpretations. key texts in the history of art), and it will cover a range of different art forms (sculpture, painting, photography, film, body art, artists’ books). The goal is to develop your individual skills in the analysis of different types of texts together with a formal analysis of significant works of art, to sharpen your understanding of different historical and intellectual contexts, and to deepen your insight in the history of artistic identities.
CRN#: 65775
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00AM – 12:20AM
Place: ARTS 335
Love is not blind. On the contrary, it is highly visual, and the visual arts have the capacity to enflame passion – an idea expressed by many artists, including Leonardo da Vinci. Hence, it is no surprise that an array of famous artworks from the Renaissance is dedicated to the celebrations of love, desire, marriage, friendship and family. While some of them convey strong moral messages, others are overtly erotic – and yet others amalgamate ideas of chastity and sexuality into highly ambiguous messages. Scenes of courtship and marriage, of nudity and amorous adventures, of erotic suffering and tender affection play a key role in paintings and sculptures, yet they also find their place on household items such as textiles, majolica, furniture, and jewelry. Print culture, on the other hand, becomes a place of the exchange of more or less explicit sexual imagery. This course will a) train your observational skills through visual analysis, b) introduce you to different approaches to the interpretation of artworks, and c) familiarize you with concepts and images of love and ‘Eros,’ their sources in Christianity and classical antiquity, their social and historical contexts, and their places and functions in Renaissance art and culture.
CRN#: 60057
Meetings: Thursday, 2:00PM – 4:50PM
Place: ARTS 333
Spring 2020 GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
Summer 2020 Session a (June 22-July 25)
Arguably, over the course of the twentieth century, moving images became the dominant cultural form in the West if not globally. 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 — and what changes this may effect and reflect in ourselves and our society. Although 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 media.
CRN#: 70002
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 1:00PM – 3:50PM
Place: ARTS 335
This course will study European art from French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War. We will examine how artists responded to the political, social, and industrial revolutions occurring across Europe, and the emergence of a new Modern art. Topics covered will be Neoclassicism, Realism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, architecture, sculpture and decorative art.
CRN#: 74009
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:00AM – 11:50AM
Place: ARTS 335
Summer 2020 Session B (July 27-Jaugust 29)
By examining a wide variety of buildings, gardens, and urban areas, with a special focus on the architectural and urban history of California, this course will cover formal, theoretical, material, pragmatic and conceptual aspects of architecture and urbanism. We will be concerned with both the formal elements of a site (what does a site look like and why does it look like this?) and the larger historical context that produced each site. Through close analysis of diverse sites and figures, including the California Missions and the Eames House, architects Julia Morgan and Frank Lloyd Wright, we will be able to understand some of the larger functions and significance behind sites, structures, and their makers. This course will emphasize several main themes including innovation, materials and technology, marking the landscape, the growth of urban space, and the shifting meaning of “architect” and “architecture.”
CRN#: 73799
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:00AM – 11:50AM
Place: ARTS 335
What does mean it to make art in an age of spectacle? How do we read media art in a totally mediated environment? This course serves as an introduction to experimental and intermedia art practices and critical concepts from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Though primarily examining American art from 1950s, 60s, and 70s with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary art forms and experimental film and video, we will look at their contemporary counterparts as well. We will explore how these practices can function as critique and, in some cases, resist dominant culture and even art historical discourse.
CRN#: 73951
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 1:00PM – 3:50PM
Place: ARTS 335