fall 2017 courses
Click on course title for syllabus PDF.
In this seminar, the genesis of the discipline of art history, its founding and continuing assumptions are examined through close readings of key texts in the discipline up until the period of high formalism in the 1950s. Readings are chosen from among the following thinkers: Kugler, Schnaase, Morelli, Riegl, Wolfflin, Focillon, Panofsky, and Warburg. Student reports focus on others. Discussions introduce issues regarding the rise of art history in universities, professional organizations, and conferences, and the relation between museum and academia. Formalism, contextualism, universal history, and the relation between nationalism and art are explored.
Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic?a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Crucial to this class is the artwork of practitioners like Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, AfriCOBRA, Aubrey Williams, Drexiya, Yinka Shonibare, and Renee Green. We will focus primarily on the visual history and cultural impact of the Middle Passage as discussed through the writings of Afro-Caribbean, West African, Black American, and Black British scholars. We will work with concepts like “native” visual forms, the coloniality of painting, Negritude, and the anticolonial imagination.
The feasibility of ‘Revolution’ as a probable means for activating a more egalitarian world has lost currency today, especially among artists and critics. In 1968, to be skeptical of Revolution was, indeed, working on behalf of oppression. No history of resistance is complete without a close examination of this global year of insurrection. This course interrogates the visual history of resistance from the 1930s through 2012. Our class will pay particular attention to photography and its impact on archiving and engaging resistance to systems of oppression. Some of this material includes works by John Heartfield, Tina Modotti, Guy Debord, the Third World Liberation Front, Black Panthers, and the current Occupy movements. Though we spend several weeks on historical events, our class will visit contemporary televisual mediums, performance art, and current movements and how they constantly confront the legacy of the 1960s. We will be reading a variety of material including primary archival sources, visual theory, and historical reflections by various activists. Assignments include in-class presentations, short critical response essays, and a final individual oral examination where students will demonstrate a depth of knowledge of course materials.