Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
SUMMER 2021: Session a (June 21-July 24)
An introduction to the artistic achievements of Indigenous North America, Oceania, and Africa and the ways in which they can be viewed. This class will cover historic to contemporary forms of art, and the social, political and cultural context of their production.
CRN#: 74447
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:00AM – 11:50AM
Place: Online Synchronous Offering
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, 1:00PM – 3:50PM
Place: Online Synchronous Offering
The story of Renaissance art has long been shaped around the lives and works of famous men, from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo Buonarroti. While women have practiced as artists across all media from antiquity onward, only very recently have they begun to reappear in our accounts — both popular and scholarly — of the era. Figures such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, have gradually reemerged in public consciousness through blockbuster exhibitions, films and even graphic novels!
In this course we will examine European women artists working between 1400 and 1650. Our primary focus will be Italy and the Netherlands, with comparative material drawn from England, Germany and other sites in Europe. Through a series of case studies we will explore how historical context, conceptions of gender and cultural attitudes towards women conditioned their experiences and artistic practices during this period. Among other topics, we will discuss: the main spaces of production where women worked—courts, convents and cities; how these artists navigated networks of patronage, marketing and gift exchange to build their careers; the achievements of women in particular genres of painting like portraiture and still-life, but also across a wide variety of other mediums such as needlework and printing; and the reasons for women’s omission from the canon of Renaissance art history. Ultimately, putting women artists and issues of gender back into the picture greatly enriches our understanding of this fascinating period.
CRN#: 74454
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 1:00PM – 3:50PM
Place: Online Synchronous Offering
SUMMER 2021: Session B (July 26-August 28)
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: Online Synchronous Offering
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, 1:00PM – 3:50PM
Place: Online Synchronous Offering
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: Monday and Wednesday, 9:00AM – 11:50AM
Place: Online Synchronous Offering
Fall 2021 UNDERGRADUATE CourSES
This entry-level course in the History of Photography will introduce students to ways of reading, writing and thinking about photographs through the theme of the body, and in turn to
consider the ways our attitudes toward the human body have been shaped by photographs, particularly as the emergence of postcolonial, feminist and gendered critiques in the late 20th century has forced a reappraisal of representations of the body in visual culture, reframing apparently innocent images as key articulations of power relations. Photography, as the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century, has necessarily been at the center of these debates. Our goal will be close analysis of a limited number of examples, rather than a broad historical survey, with emphasis on developing a critical approach to images in and out of the art historical context.
CRN#: 32343
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30AM – 10:50AM
Place: In Person, Watkins 1000
This entry-level course in the History of Photography will introduce students to ways of reading, writing and thinking about photographs through the theme of the body, and in turn to
consider the ways our attitudes toward the human body have been shaped by photographs, particularly as the emergence of postcolonial, feminist and gendered critiques in the late 20th century has forced a reappraisal of representations of the body in visual culture, reframing apparently innocent images as key articulations of power relations. Photography, as the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century, has necessarily been at the center of these debates. Our goal will be close analysis of a limited number of examples, rather than a broad historical survey, with emphasis on developing a critical approach to images in and out of the art historical context.
CRN#: 32347
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 11:00AM – 12:20PM
Place: In Person, Watkins 1000
FALL 2021 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: Thursday, 3:00PM – 5:50PM
Place: In Person, ARTS Screening Room 335