Art History (ARHI)

This course offers a broad overview of the history of architecture and urbanism from antiquity to the present day. Global in its perspective, the course proceeds chronologically through a series of important historical moments and monuments. Lectures examine works as experiential wholes and within their specific contexts. In this way, the emphasis of the course is not on a history of styles but on buildings as complex cultural artifacts. To link examples across time, place, and culture, the course emphasizes themes like ritual and belief, the patron-client relationship, architecture's relationship to power, materials and construction techniques, the authority of historical models, the architect as artist and professional, and the rise of modern cities. In addition to developing a broad knowledge of major monuments, theoretical ideas, and figures in architectural history, the class will also develop skills for engaging more critically with the built environment. Through readings, writing assignments, and class discussions, students will learn how to analyze visual forms of evidence and to read, think, and communicate about architecture through a critical lens.

University seminars will address a variety of topics in the history of art depending on the interests of the professor. These courses require several short papers as well as a final written exercise appropriate to the material.

This course will examine the origins of western art and architecture, beginning with a brief look at the Bronze Age cultures of the Near East and Egypt, then focusing in detail on Greece and Rome, from the Minoan and Mycenaean world of the second millennium B.C.E. to the rule of the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century C.E. Among the monuments to be considered are ziggurats, palaces, and the luxuriously furnished royal graves of Mesopotamia; the pyramids at Giza in Egypt and their funerary sculpture; the immense processional temple of Amon at Luxor; the Bronze Age palaces of Minos on Crete--the home of the monstrous Minotaur--and Agamemnon at Aycanae, with their colorful frescoes and processional approaches; the great funerary pots of early Athens and the subsequent traditions of red and black figure vase painting; architectural and freestanding sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods; the Periclean Acropolis in Athens, with its monumental gateway and shining centerpiece, the Parthenon; and finally, among the cultural riches of Rome, the painted houses and villas of Pompeii; the tradition of republican and Imperial portraiture; the Imperial fora; the exquisitely carved Altar of Peace of Augustus; the Colosseum; and the Pantheon of the Philhellene Emperor Hadrian.

This course will introduce you to the material culture of the ancient Roman world, from spectacular and familiar public monuments like the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine to more intimately-scaled, private objects like silver dining services, jewelry, and family portraits. Breakthroughs in engineering, the invention of new materials (like concrete), and the Roman genius for marrying cultural assimilation with innovation resulted in an art that has left a formative legacy in artistic production to this day. We will investigate the ways in which major achievements in modes of making such as sculpting, painting, gem-carving, and building dialogued with contemporary developments in Roman politics, society, and religion. In addition to developing your skills in visual analysis, this course will focus on training you to be critical readers and writers. This class includes visits to campus collections and area museums. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of Art History are required for this course.

This course explores how the disciplines of chemistry and the history of art are connected. Experience in either of these discipline is not required to register. Students will engage in interactive solo and group activities in the classroom, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, and the chemistry laboratories in Jordan Hall of Science.

This course provides a comprehensive survey of architectural history from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries. Global in scope, its purpose is to introduce students to the formative ideas, major monuments, and characteristic experiences of different building cultures that emerged during this time-span across several continents.

This course will survey the major objects, images, and monuments from Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East between circa 300 AD and circa 1400 AD. It will begin with the first examples of Christian art in the Early Christian period and end with the precursors of the Renaissance. The course will cover a fascinating variety of art historical, theological, and cultural topics relevant to medieval art: the origins of modern painting; politics and monumental art; pilgrimage, relics, and the cult of the Saints; manuscript making and the origins of the book; Iconoclasm; and the Crusades, among others. By the end of the course, students will gain concrete knowledge of the vibrant and varied artworks, figures, and concepts that have shaped the visual imagination of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. Students will further acquire "visual literacy" skills that will allow them to interpret images and "read" visual objects and texts together.

This class explores the development of art and architecture in the medieval Mediterranean world (ca. 300 to 1300). In this survey, our goal will be to expand the conventional understanding of medieval art by studying moments and sites of artistic interaction between Western European, Byzantine, and Islamic cultures. In the course of the semester, we will explore artworks and monuments in places such as Dura Europos, Palermo, Rome, Baghdad, Damascus, Venice, Jerusalem, Cordoba, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and Ravenna. Our discussions will cover a variety of themes, including the circulation of artifacts; the relationship between Christian basilicas and Islamic mosques; the problem of religious imagery; the rise of the cult of saints; and questions of cultural appropriation. Readings will include both primary sources in translation and secondary literature, and the class will introduce students to a variety of methodological approaches. The class will include visits to the Snite Museum, the Hesburgh Library Special Collections.

A study of the ways Christians and Jews represented their sacred stories in visual art throughout history. Examples include the decoration of worship spaces (churches and synagogues), tomb chambers and sarcophagi, liturgical vessels, pottery bowls and plates, gold glasses, and early illuminated books. Students will examine the differences and similarities between Jewish and Christian sacred art, noting the modes by which these two communities expressed their faith and reinforced their distinct religious identities, initially within the broader context of a pre-existing and polytheistic Roman culture and later in a dominantly Christian one.

This course will survey the major trends in the art of Italy and northern Europe from roughly 1300 to 1575. It will concentrate on such major figures as Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian in Italy, and the Limbourg Brothers, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Durer, Mathias Grunewald, and Pieter Brueghel in the north. It will consider such themes as artistic production and technique, public and private spirituality, naturalism, narrative, and the changing status of the artist.

This course provides an introduction to key works and themes in Western art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Focusing on a selection of key monuments, artists, and examples of art historical scholarship, and by looking back to classical values and models as well as forward to contemporary debates, we will explore various ways in which Western art has been made, used, and interpreted. The course will concentrate on building fundamental analytic skills necessary to the study of art, and will consider works of art both from an aesthetic perspective and in the context of the individual, cultural, social, and economic conditions of their production and reception. Topics will include an investigation of the history of the discipline, the use of objects, and a consideration of how the various practices and processes known as "art" have engaged society and the world. By looking at - and talking about - specific aesthetic phenomena, the course will survey the general history of modern representation and its alternatives.

This introductory course focuses on crucial developments in European art and architecture of the “long” nineteenth century. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies—including painting, sculpture, architecture, print and the decorative arts—it will explore intersections between art and political upheaval, industrialisation and colonialism, changing attitudes toward religion and the natural world, the changing role of the artist in society and the emergence of art institutions (academies, museums, universities). We will also engage in conversations about the ways in which art has constituted and challenged ideas surrounding gender, sexuality, race, class and the environment. Students will examine major movements of the period through the work of renowned artists—such as Vigée Le Brun, Caspar David Friedrich, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Camille Claudel—as well as artists traditionally excluded from the canon. Although focused on European centres of artistic production, a particular emphasis will be placed on transcultural interactions between Europe and the wider world. Finally, the course will introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques including formal analysis, comparative analysis and critical contextualisation. This course includes visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and will be exam based.

In 1419, a Florentine goldsmith designed a building that changed the history of Western architecture. It was the first structure since antiquity to systematically apply the formal vocabulary of ancient Greco-Roman architecture. This new experiment with old ideas took Florence and then Europe by storm. In this course, we will investigate the revival—and transformation—of the classical architectural language, the emerging ideas about architectural authorship, the ability of architectural forms and materials to convey particular meanings to particular audiences, and the deployment of architecture as an instrument of power.

This course explores the evolution of intaglio printmaking, a technique used to create original works of art, reproductions, and illustrations beginning in the fifteenth century and continuing to today. Using the collection of prints from the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, students will become acquainted with master printmakers, such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Degas, Manet, Mary Cassatt, Whistler, and others to serve as inspiration and instruction of their own work. After an introduction to engraving (Albrecht Dürer's Knight, Death and the Devil), the focus will be on the development of etching in the seventeenth century exemplified by Rembrandt's prints; innovations of the medium (color) and its subsequent decline in the eighteenth century; its revival in the nineteenth century emulating Rembrandt as an emblem of the avant-garde; followed by a period of boundary-busting experimentation in the twentieth century. Informed by these historical examples, students will explore traditional intaglio approaches and end with more contemporary photographic techniques in the development of their own portfolio expressing their own artistic vision.

What is a work of art? And how can we use works of art to illuminate themes vital to the complex, messy, and profoundly joyful experience of being human? This introductory class examines 25 artworks spanning the breadth of the globe’s cultures as prisms to explore the fullness of the human experience in worlds past and present. We will learn how to think through art to probe big questions relating to themes like power and social justice, the relationship between art and science, cross-cultural encounters and exchanges, and the nature of identity. This class features multiple visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art to foster skills in close observation, description, and visual analysis explored in class using real works of art. Fulfills WKAL; no prerequisites or prior knowledge of Art History are required for this course.

In this class, we will explore the urban topography of the city of Rome from the first century BC to the year 2000 AD, or roughly the period from the emperor Augustus to the projects by Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, and others to celebrate the Jubilee at the end of the second millennium. In our discussion of how buildings shape and are shaped to form the city, we will consider contemporary drawings, prints, texts, maps, and a range of other evidence. Special focus will be placed on critical strategies for understanding urban sites. In addition to the city of Rome, this course will focus on developing your skills as critical readers and writers.

This course surveys the art of the world from prehistory to the present. It centers on a sequence of art objects from the Snite Museum, the Hesburgh Libraries' Special Collections, and elsewhere on the Notre Dame campus, linking them to well-known monuments of art history from the University's Global Gateways in Beijing, Chicago, Dublin, Jerusalem, London, and Rome. Students in the course will gain a familiarity with the history of art and develop skills in visual literacy and critical thinking.

This course offers a survey of South Asian art and architecture from prehistory to the contemporary moment. Students will examine both canonical and lesser-known works of art including examples of early Buddhist stupas and sculpture, Hindu cave temples, monumental architecture and miniature painting of the Mughal era, “Company” painting, art and architecture under the British Raj, modernism, and contemporary art. Special attention will be given to intersections between art and religion (Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Islam), art and conquest, gender and sexuality, transcultural exchange and hybridity, the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism, and South Asian art in museums. Through a combination of close looking, critical reading, and class discussion, students will gain an understanding of the religious ideas, political events, and socio-cultural forces that have shaped the visual culture of South Asia across time. Finally, the course is designed to prepare students for more advanced courses in the department. Students will become familiar with the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques including formal analysis, comparative analysis, and critical contextualisation.

Silk embroidery. Jade carving. Stone sculpture. Woodblock printing. Ink painting. Brush calligraphy. This course offers an introduction to the broad field of Asian art through its key artistic techniques, artworks, and historical contexts. The semester is organized into units covering fundamental art processes that reveal the closely intertwined development of arts and culture across Asia. Through hands-on making activities, classroom discussion, and close examination of objects, we will explore a span of nearly three thousand years in China, Korea, and Japan. Over the course of the semester, we will also discover the surprising ways in which the study of Asian art can be brought into meaningful dialogue with approaches to contemporary art and with broader debates throughout the fields of art history, Asian studies, and the history of religion.

This course will introduce students to the visual arts and expressive cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. We will examine objects up-close at the Snite museum and use slides, videos, and musical recordings in class to root works more deeply in the historical and geographical context(s) of their production, display, and circulation. We will analyze canonical examples of monumental architecture, danced sculpture, and leadership regalia that define the field, while engaging with equal interest in the stuff of everyday life such as hairstyles, street fashion, even the music-blaring boom boxes of those often left at the margins of art history. Through the semester-long practice of looking at "African things" with curiosity and intention, this course will build students' skills in visual analysis, critical thinking, and comparative writing with the goal of increasing their awareness as global citizens and inspiring further engagement in cross-cultural experience no matter the context.

This course studies the art and architecture of Peru during the time of Inca dominance in the fifteenth century through the period of Spanish colonial rule in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It examines the ways in which the visual culture of the Inca was transformed in the wake of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Peru. It considers the persistence and transformation of indigenous American materials, techniques, object types and iconographies; the emergence of new iconographies and genres; and the foundation and development of Spanish colonial towns.

This course explores the art and architecture of the Aztecs, the Maya, and their predecessors in Mesoamerica -- a region that encompassed the territories of the modern nations of Mexico and Central America. It begins with an examination of the art of the Olmec, a culture that flourished around 1500 BC, and ends with a study of the built environment of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, in the early-sixteenth century. The course foregrounds the rich collection of pre-Columbian art from Mesoamerica in the Snite Museum.

This course studies painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in Mexico during the period of Spanish colonial rule, ca. 1520-1820. It begins with the art of the Aztecs, the indigenous culture whose powerful empire was centered in Tenochtitlan (today, Mexico City), and examines the ways in which visual culture was transformed in the wake of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early-sixteenth century. Among topics to be considered are the art and architecture of Spanish colonial missions, the persistence and transformation of indigenous American materials, techniques, object types, and iconographies; the emergence of new iconographies and genres; the visual culture of colonial governance, and the foundation and development of new towns.

What do the paintings and sculptures in museums and the manuscripts and antique books in archives tell us about our collective past? What do they tell us about how value, importance, and worth have been ascribed across time? As users of these cultural collections, how might we address inequities and silences within them? The first half of this 1-credit course provides a lightning introduction to the history of cultural collecting and its many issues. Through the Zoom window students will apply a critical gaze to the collections held in our campus repositories - the Snite Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections and University Archives - and in museums and archives beyond the Notre Dame campus. In the second half of the course, students will create a single online exhibition around the theme of diversity using our campus collections. This exhibition will be published on the Hesburgh Library's Digital Exhibitions and Collections page and students will be given curatorial credit for their work. The course schedule will begin with seminar-style meetings and move to individual work, one-on-one sessions with instructors, peer review and project evaluation.

How does art educate? What knowledge, ancient or new, is available to us in artifacts? This course is aimed at introducing practices of close-looking at art and artifacts in order to further understand them, individually and within their wider context, and unlock their wisdom. We will invite a broad understanding of pedagogical sources to consider how art and artifacts might "instruct" us as well as how we learn from them. Various art objects – paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs – will be experienced and examined across the rich array of campus collections and archives. Through close-looking and visual and comparative analysis we will expand our learning and develop our practices of devotion to art in ways applicable to other mediums of wisdom as well as art.

The course will focus on the relationship between artists and princely courts in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. Placed at the top of national organization networks in the political, economic, and cultural domains, European capitals offer a privileged place of observation to grasp the dynamics of this relationship. From their capitals, princes organized their political power through the implementation of a symbolic power that relied in particular on artistic production. Artists had the power to represent through images, to organize the spaces of power through architecture and to demonstrate rank through the pomp of the arts. The aim is to examine, through a series of case studies selected according to the period, the institutional context of the artists' attachment to the court and to show how they summon, in their art, the life and glory of their patron.

This course analyzes and traces the development of Greek architecture, painting, and sculpture in the historical period, from the eighth through the second centuries B.C., with some consideration of prehistoric Greek forebears of the Mycenaean Age. Particular emphasis is placed upon monumental art, its historical and cultural contexts, and how it reflects changing attitudes towards the gods, human achievement, and the relationship between the divine and the human.

This course examines the history of Irish art from the Great Famine to today. We’ll consider the major art movements in Ireland across the “modern” period, beginning with 19th century landscape painting and print culture and moving through the display of craft and industry at International Exhibitions in Ireland, Britain, and America. A major consideration will be the relationship between aesthetics and politics before and after the establishment of the Irish Free State. As we consider key questions of identity and representation across the last two hundred years of Irish history, our course will examine issues of historicism and revival, the notion of the west of Ireland in national myth building, and questions of stereotype, religion, environment, and technology. Our modules will cover major Irish artists and art movements—including figures such as Jack B. Yeats, Mainie Jellett, Sean Scully, Mary Swanzy, and Francis Bacon among others—but we will also have chance to question the formulation of a national canon for ourselves. This course will utilize collections in Chicago as well as Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and will teach core skills in visual analysis and historical critique. No background in Irish Studies or Art History is required.

Building on crucial insights of the “global turn” in art history, this course examines how the circulation of art and ideas, propelled by British expansionism, shaped cultural identities, artistic traditions, knowledge systems and arts institutions in Britain and its colonies from 1750 to 1950. Topics will include colonial collecting, period and contemporary debates around spoliation, cultural heritage, the formation of the British Museum and restitution, intersections between military conquest and landscape painting, relationships between colonial natural history, ecology and art, questions concerning race, representation and identity and the ways in which artists, including major figures like William Blake and J.M.W. Turner, grappled with empire and its deleterious effects. Although geographically and temporally focused on the British Empire, the course seeks to introduce methodologies that can be applied to different contexts and periods. Students are thus encouraged to think outside of the parameters of the course for their final projects (of which there is a choice between a formal research paper, a mock exhibition, or a creative work). This course includes visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.

This class explores the development of monumental mosaic and fresco in the Middle Ages through key monuments in places like Rome, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Palermo, and Venice. A central goal for the course will be to understand the ways in which mural paintings and mosaics distinguish themselves from other visual media in the medieval world. We will consider the relationship between murals and their architectural setting and how the relative size of wall paintings and mosaics impacts the way beholders relate to and understand them. We will also examine the many different functions of medieval murals, as media for story-telling, as liturgical instruments, and as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge, theological doctrines, or political propaganda.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bramante, and Raphael provide the basis for a study of one of the most impressive periods of artistic activity in Italy - the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome. It was Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary example that imposed extraordinary artistic and intellectual changes on an entire generation of painters, sculptors, and architects. Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, the new Republic of Florence, and the imperial papacy of Julius II recognized that the genius of Leonardo, Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and others, could be brought into the service of the State. Under Julius, the Papal State became the supreme state in Italy, and for the first time in centuries, the papacy ranked as a great European power. With the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's (redesigned on a colossal scale by Bramante), the Vatican Palace (its city facade and Belvedere by Bramante, and papal apartments decorated by Raphael), and the Papal tomb (designed by Michelangelo), Rome, for the first time since the time of the Caesars, became the center of Western art.

This course explores the considerable collection of Early Modern Italian art at Notre Dame's Snite Museum of Art. Taking a global view of the period, its content will be organized around three main topics: the ideal of lifelike (naturalistic) representation, the material and technical expertise required of artists, and the systematic emulation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Roughly half our meetings will be held in the galleries where students will practice careful looking and consider issues related to the facture, conservation, storage, and display of the artworks in question. Given its focus on the Snite collection, this course offers a selective but varied introduction to Italian art of the period, including subjects such as female portraiture, devotional paintings and sculptures, print culture, and small bronze statuettes.

This survey course will take a critical studies approach to the aesthetic, historical and ideological issues in avant-garde art, film, and media. This course will be structured around major phases of experimental, independent and radical non-narrative/non-commercial cinema from the 1920s to the present. In addition to considering new modes of production, we will address alternative forms of distribution and exhibition. We will also examine how these historical moments speak to contemporary calls to provide more diverse and inclusive modes of representation. Students will be required to attend weekly class lectures and discussions as well as weekly lab screenings.

What do the paintings and sculptures in museums and the manuscripts and antique books in archives tell us about our collective past? What do they tell us about how value, importance, and worth have been ascribed across time? As users of these cultural collections, how might we address inequities and silences within them? This course provides an introduction to the history of cultural heritage collecting and addresses major issues and questions in the field. Students will apply a critical gaze to the collections held in our campus repositories - the Snite Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections, and University Archives - and in museums and archives beyond the Notre Dame campus. Students will reflect on what they read and discuss and collaboratively will build an online exhibition around themes of diversity in our campus collections. This exhibition will be published on the Hesburgh Library's Digital Exhibitions and Collections page and students will be given curatorial credit for their work. Note: This course will include a full day of site visits tentatively scheduled for September 30, 2022.

Washington, D.C., is not only the seat of U.S. politics but also an extraordinary city for art, and this course will explore the relationship between the two. Through site visits to selected artworks, exhibitions, and monuments, we will examine the interplay of art and democracy, considering how artists have represented and challenged concepts such as citizenship, the nation, and social equality. Our objects of focus will range from presidential portraits and official memorials to contemporary video and installation art, and will touch on topics from westward expansion in the 19th century to recent social and political movements such as Black Lives Matter. The course will consider key questions: What makes a work of art, a monument, or an exhibition effective? How do artworks and monuments shape our understanding of history, and how do they influence our perspective on the present? Which stories and whose stories have been included in narratives of the nation? How do artists and works of art represent and put pressure on concepts of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity? What is the role of a national museum or a national monument? And what role should a government play in relation to the arts? We will make regular class and independent visits to a range of museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This course examines American visual and material cultures from the pre-colonial era to the present day. Providing a broad, historical account and considering a variety of media from paintings and sculptures to quilts, photographs, world's fairs, and fashion styles, this survey explores American art within the context of cultural, social, economic, political, and philosophical developments. In particular, it considers the role that American art has played in the formation of national identity and understandings of class, race, gender, and ethnicity.

Paintings, sculptures, books, and buildings were instrumental in evangelization the Americas in the wake of the Spanish invasion - and conquests of Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. In addition to introducing new kinds of objects and images to the native peoples of the Americas, evangelization in early-colonial Spanish America set forth new conceptualizations of how objects and images operated. Students in this course will study Aztec, Inca, and Spanish colonial visual culture, exploring the ways in which works of art and architecture gave shape to systems of religious belief.

This class examines architecture and urban planning in one of Europe's most dynamic eras. During that time, capital cities like Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and Madrid were created. Elites used palaces, country houses, and gardens to project their power and status. Astounding churches and monasteries were created to heighten the intensity of religious experience. Architecture in the form of theaters and observatories, libraries and universities, served the secular activities of the urban public.

This course will explore the history of art in the 20th century from a global perspective, focusing on several locations and movements that were crucial to the development of an avant-garde and its legacies including places such as Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, Zurich, London, Rome, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, and Mexico City. The course will examine a wide variety of figures, movements, and practices within the visual arts, situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments (e.g., abstraction, the readymade, conceptual art, feminist art) will be traced through the rise of mass-media technologies (such as photography and print media) alongside the aesthetic accomplishments of the avant-garde. Exploring the forces of feminism, capitalism, and urbanism, we will attempt to understand how artistic innovations fundamentally altered, negotiated, and framed the ways in which we understand and represent the world. Artists we will look at include Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dorothea Lange, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol. The curriculum will also include visits to the university museum. This course is largely taught in a lecture format and assessment is exam-based.

This survey course will introduce students to major developments in 20th-century art, primarily in Europe and the Americas. Emphasis will be placed on modernist and avant-garde practices and their tenets. The first half of the course will trace Modernism's unfolding in the avant-garde practices of the late- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second half of the course will address art production as the neo-avant-garde attempted to construct continuity and repetitions of the heroic modernist legacies of the past. We will consider issues such as the self-criticism of art, the myth of the artist-genius, the reign of abstraction, spirituality in art, race and gender, art and class, and art's intersections with mass culture. Artists we will study include Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. This course is a lecture format and grading is largely exam-based. The curriculum will also include visits to the university museum.

Building on recent ecocritical approaches to the discipline of art history, this course will explore human-environmental relations and changing ideas about the natural world from the industrial revolution to the present. Structured around four elemental modules and drawing on a diverse range of visual media including scientific ‘specimen’ prints, Romantic landscape paintings, contemporary photography, and installation art (with works by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edward Burtynsky), we will discuss natural history, landscape gardening, and land art (earth), global maritime trade, colonial expansion, and its visual culture (water), climate and disease (air), and the impacts of industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels (fire). Major themes will include interactions between science and art, the global movement of people, ideas, flora, and fauna through colonial networks, developments in environmental theory, indigenous perspectives, materiality (especially as it relates to natural resources), and art as a form of critical intervention. This course will include visits to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the Museum of Biodiversity, and Rare Books and Special Collections. Finally, the course will introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge-making techniques.

This course offers students an introduction to the theories and practices of contemporary art with a focus on artwork since 1980. We will investigate its varied, multi-faceted terrain, and examine key themes and ideas that have been explored in recent years. These include such topics as the artist as curator, the museum reconsidered, art and politics, the emergence of DIY approaches, and the rise of interest in new media and materials. Special attention will be paid to the way that new media and formats, like digital photography, sound, and installation, have changed the scope and reception of art now.

The 1950s, we're told, were America's "best" years: an idyllic era of suburban family togetherness, television shows like Leave it to Beaver, Disneyland (which opened in Anaheim in 1955), and really big cars. Magazine publisher Henry Luce and other mid-century American power-brokers promoted the postwar US on hegemonic terms: as a unified nation defined by a liberal political economy and by the expectations and desires of middle-class citizens united by the shared goals of upward social mobility and consumerism (white collar jobs, home ownership), college educations, family/suburban lifestyles, etc. This was called the "consensus model" of American identity. Not surprisingly, this ideal of America and these normative expectations about "being" American created a number of tensions in post-World War II America. First, the goals themselves were unattainable for some Americans due to the nation's persistent habits of racism, sexism, class preference, and homophobia. Second, some Americans felt restricted and restrained by expectations of middle-class conformity, among other things. This led to a number of counter-hegemonic cultural expressions: from art that came off the wall to artists who went on the road. This course examines those American artists and their rebellions, from artists like Jackson Pollock—who took his paintings "off the wall" and made them on the floor—to writers like Jack Kerouac, whose novel On the Road was published in 1957. It surveys American art from the Great Depression of the 1930s through the early 1970s, looking at art styles and movements including Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Beat, Funk, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Psychedelia, Earthworks, Feminist art, and the Black Art Movement. Themes include the "triumph of American painting" after World War II, links between art and politics, the development of postwar art theory, and intersections between the avant-garde, popular culture, and consumer culture. A special "Elvis Day" examines post-World War II youth culture and counter-hegemonic rebellion.

What roles do protest and dissent play in the making of America? Focusing especially on cultures of dissent including activist art, civil disobedience, radical action, and various cultures of struggle, dissent, and refusal, this course examines the practices, politics, technologies, and theories guiding America's foundational history of protest. Class includes lectures, discussion, essay assignments, and field trips.

American ruins are increasingly visible today, from images of urban decay and piles of debris in Detroit and Gary to movies and novels (The Book of Eli, The Road) depicting post-apocalyptic "ruinscapes" of abandoned towns, derelict factories, crumbling monuments, and deserted shopping malls, variously populated by zombies, vampires, and survivalists. Ruins typical signify "disaster," "failure," "defeat," and "the past." Why, then, in a nation that has repeatedly defined itself in terms of promise, progress, and success-the American Dream-are visions of ruin, real and imagined, so prevalent today? This class explores the history and meaning of American ruins, relating contemporary fascination with ruins ("ruin porn") to currently held attitudes about modernity, technology, citizenship, consumerism, the rule of law, and the environment. Course materials include novels, films, and photographs; coursework includes fieldtrips (to Detroit and Gary), essays, and discussion.

Public art is a major facet of modern and contemporary American culture and is often controversial: in the 1980s, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was criticized by some for being anti-American, in the 1990s, the Smithsonian cancelled an exhibit on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima after certain members of Congress said it was not patriotically correct, in the 2000s, the design and construction of the national September 11 Memorial (dedicated in New York in 2011) was beset by protests. This course examines the politics and aesthetics of public art in American from the perspectives of its producers and audience. What is public art? Why is it made? Who is it for? How and why does it embody tensions in American culture and society regarding identity, authority, and taste? Specific topics to be explored include American memorials and remembrance rituals, the development of the public art industry, community art projects (such as murals), national arts programs and policies, landscape architecture, tourism, museums, and national fairs. Our objectives are to recognize how public art shapes and directs local and national understanding of history and memory, self and society, in the United States. Course includes field trips; students will develop their own Wiki Public Art pages.

This course will take as its starting point nearby art collections and exhibitions in Chicago and the surrounding areas. This semester we will look primarily at paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing heavily on its strong holdings in modern and contemporary European and American art, each class session will be devoted to the careful research and analysis of one or two objects in the collection. We will read art historical texts that contextualize each work, allowing us to practice engagement at the visual, critical, and art historical levels. We will focus on looking at and writing on visual subjects, so discussion, writing, and participation will be essential components of the course. Some of the artists on whom we will focus include Monet, Cassatt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, O'Keeffe, Pollock, Warhol, and Sherman. At least one trip to Chicago will be a required part of the course.

This course surveys art made in Chicago from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine the rise of Chicago as an art capital through the founding of art academies and museums, the hosting of World Fairs, and the era of modern architecture after the Great Fire of 1871. We will analyze iconic artworks from Chicago’s diverse art scene which became home to the Black Arts Movement, Chicano Art Movement, Feminist Art Movement, and one of the country’s most ambitious public art programs. Students will develop skills in research, writing, and visual literacy. At least one trip to Chicago will be a required part of the course.

For more than 170 years, Notre Dame has been collecting objects. Paintings, footballs, geological specimens, religious relics, stuffed birds, and Native American clothing can all be found on our campus. By looking closely at an object - who made it, how it was made, who bought it, how it was used, and how it ended up at Notre Dame -- we will seek to understand the history of knowledge. This class will work intensively with objects from the Snite Museum and the Hesburgh Library, among other campus repositories.

Art and visual culture have shaped our conceptions of ourselves and others. This course examines contemporary art in a variety of media in order to understand how art contributes to, reflects, affirms, or critiques specific stereotypes of roles and values. It will feature work and theoretical writing that is engaged with issues related to identity in all of its various forms. Some topics include standards of beauty; gender and sexuality; race and identity; performance and multiculturalism; and class, social justice, and ethics. Many of the objects that are examined explicitly challenge conventional notions of "good" art, so aesthetic standards of value will be a key topic as well. No specific prerequisites are necessary, but it is useful to have some background in cultural studies, art, or visual culture. Assignments include exams and short papers.

PhotoFutures is a collaborative collecting group at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art that acquires contemporary photography for the University of Notre Dame. This is a zero-credit course. Designed for students of any major, this five-session co-curricular program combines issues related to museum collecting, contemporary photography, and socially-engaged artistic practice. Students will critique individual photographs and evaluate artists' portfolios, and also engage in critical discussions with the artists themselves, Raclin Murphy curators, and select faculty whose expertise provides different lenses through which to consider the photographs. Ultimately, students will develop their own collecting criteria to choose a photograph for acquisition that adds value to the permanent collection of the Raclin Murphy Museum and supports the mission of the University. The topic for PhotoFutures will be announced and more spots in the program will open up at the beginning of the fall semester. 0 credits

Have you ever put together a collection? Sea shells, Pokemon cards, or something of more value? What drives our desire to accumulate, order, and display objects in a systematic way? This course examines the social phenomenon of collecting objects in broad terms, but centers on the particularly complex European and American practice of collecting and exhibiting Africa—its objects, peoples, and animals—in a variety of exhibitionary complexes across time and space including: wonder cabinets, ethnology museums, art museums, World's Fairs, zoos, theme parks, and Hollywood films.

This course provides an overview of the historical development of Japanese civilization and culture from the prehistoric era up through the 19th Century. Students will acquire a basic knowledge of Japanese geography, historical periods, changing class structure and political organization. The main emphasis, however, is on the development of the fine arts, such as painting, architecture, gardens, and sculpture. The course also introduces students to the important and continuous influence of Chinese art, literature, Buddhism and Confucianism. Through readings of selected literary works (prose fiction, poetry, essays on aesthetics), students will learn how shared aesthetic values changed over time in relation to their social and political context.

This course traces the developments of contemporary art practice in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and subsequently expands beyond this physical location to include global borders and artworks that reflect on living in between cultures, races, and languages. Students will develop a toolkit for analyzing the way borders shape culture and identity (race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and ethnicity) in transnational points of contact. With an emphasis on printmaking, performance, photography, and film, the course will dwell on borders that respond to paradigms of fear and desire, contagion and containment, utopia and dystopia. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, and refine their ability to conduct original research. No pre-requisites or prior knowledge of Art History and Latinx Studies is required for the course.

This course surveys works of art produced by artists in Latin America during the 20th century. We will trace the development of the field through major figures and movements in the cosmopolitan centers of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, among others. One of the objectives of the course is to debate the geopolitical construct of Latin America, but also to understand the productive use of a category like Latin American art. Throughout the course we will be attentive the different national and colonial histories that have shaped artistic production in this region. We will examine painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance through various social lenses including identity, racial formation, class difference, gender inequality, state violence, and U.S. intervention.

This survey traces the developments of photographic practices in Latin America and its US-based diasporas. We will look at the origins of photography in the region (from early explorers to portraitists and artists) and how the medium helped shape ideas on nationalism, modernity, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and migration. Students will develop a toolkit for analyzing photographs from various social lenses attentive to the workings of race, class, and gender from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, and refine their ability to conduct original research. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of Art History is required for the course.

This lab is the required corequisite to the course ARHI 30351: Avant-Garde Art and Film. In this lab, students will view weekly screenings of films associated with the curriculum in ARHI 30351.

We usually think of field work and excavation as being the essence of archaeology, but much of what we know about the past is learned in the laboratory, where we study the artifacts brought in from the field. A rough rule of thumb states that two hours of lab time are needed for every hour spent in the field, so in reality, lab work may be even more important than field work in archaeology. This course is a laboratory class that will use many different activities to teach you about how archaeologists organize, preserve, and study archaeological artifacts to learn about the past. This class provides an in-depth introduction to basic laboratory methods for the organization, curation, and analysis of pottery, stone tools, metals, soil samples, and floral and faunal remains. By the end of the semester, you will engage in a hands-on application of course principles by conducting a research project on materials from Notre Dame's archaeological collections.

Museums are not only caretakers of cultural artifacts; they are also microcosms that reflect a society’s beliefs about the order of the world and, in turn, teach us about our place within it. This seminar considers the museum from its origins in individual collections and cabinets of curiosity to the rise of the modern public museum and its role in the present day. We will investigate how these institutions—including art, ethnography, natural history, and local history museums—have preserved, constructed, and erased cultural memory, identity, and knowledge. We will pay particular attention to recent efforts to reckon with the imperialist legacy of museums, including repatriation, artists’ interventions, and the inclusion of narratives, objects, and voices traditionally excluded from museum spaces. This course includes visits to campus and area museums and discussions with museum professionals.

This course focuses on archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections and studies to explore how people make, use, discard, and understand ceramic objects in their lives. Ceramics offer tactile and material expressions of culture, and signify and embody complex intersectional ideas about what it means to be human. Through hands-on projects with archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections from ND professors’ research projects, students will engage in experiential learning about gender, race, class, sexuality, political power structures, and identity. All peoples’ identities are grounded in intersectional axes of difference, and ceramics offer a tangible tool for exploring how people use material culture and technology to be themselves, interact with others, and build personhood in the past and present. Because ceramic remains are abundant in many archaeological sites, the study of pottery has a long history in archaeology. Analysis and interpretation of ceramics allows archaeologists to accomplish varied ends: to establish a time scale, to document interconnections between different areas, sites, or groups of people, and to suggest what activities were carried out at particular sites. How archaeologists study the connection between ceramics and people, today and in the past, is the focus of this course, and we will be using contemporary, prehistoric and historic archaeological collections from Jordan, Ghana, and the United States to enable students to explore the linkage between people and their ceramic material culture.

Japan is renowned for its modern comic book genre "manga," but humorous and action-packed visual-verbal stories populate its literary history. This course examines a specific period where the urban culture of Edo (modern Tokyo) is colorfully expressed in playful literature and woodblock-prints. We will examine questions of status and class, sexuality, materialism, and the role of technology in shaping the book. As a hands-on project, we will learn Edo period woodblock carving techniques and, as a class, publish our own comic book!

This seminar course offers an introduction to the history of contemporary artistic movements, practices, and experiences in Europe and North America from the post-World War II period to the 2000s, exploring their diverse forms and mediums. Following a chronological perspective and based on a selection of works considered turning points in the history of "contemporary" art, this seminar will examine the period through a set of key questions that reflect the major transformations affecting these movements, practices, and experiences, as well as the developments in art history and theory. In doing so, we will question the function of art in our societies; the stakes of contemporary creation in its diverse manifestations; and the role of artists confronted with the brutality of war, the violence of a fractured world, revolutionary events, rising protests, feminist struggles, civil rights movements, rapid modernization, consumer society, and the culture of spectacle, among others. This seminar course offers an introduction to the history of contemporary artistic movements, practices, and experiences in Europe and North America from the post-World War II period to the 2000s, exploring their diverse forms and mediums. Following a chronological perspective and based on a selection of works considered turning points in the history of "contemporary" art, this seminar will examine the period through a set of key questions that reflect the major transformations affecting these movements, practices, and experiences, as well as the developments in art history and theory. In doing so, we will question the function of art in our societies; the stakes of contemporary creation in its diverse manifestations; and the role of artists confronted with the brutality of war, the violence of a fractured world, revolutionary events, rising protests, feminist struggles, civil rights movements, rapid modernization, consumer society, and the culture of spectacle, among others. This seminar course offers an introduction to the history of contemporary artistic movements, practices, and experiences in Europe and North America from the post-World War II period to the 2000s, exploring their diverse forms and mediums. Following a chronological perspective and based on a selection of works considered turning points in the history of "contemporary" art, this seminar will examine the period through a set of key questions that reflect the major transformations affecting these movements, practices, and experiences, as well as the developments in art history and theory. In doing so, we will question the function of art in our societies; the stakes of contemporary creation in its diverse manifestations; and the role of artists confronted with the brutality of war, the violence of a fractured world, revolutionary events, rising protests, feminist struggles, civil rights movements, rapid modernization, consumer society, and the culture of spectacle, among others.

Open to all students. In this course the development of Greek monumental architecture, and the major problems that define it, will be traced from the 8th to the 2nd centuries BC, from the late Geometric through the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Among themes to be examined are the relationship between landscape and religious architecture, the humanization of temple divinities, the architectural expression of religious tradition and specific history, architectural procession and hieratic direction, emblem and narration in architectural sculpture, symbolism and allusion through architectural order, religious revival and archaism, and the breaking of architectural and religious canon.

This class explores medieval representations of scientific ideas and mythological stories.

This course will introduce students to Christian visual art from its evident beginnings (ca. 200), attend to its transformation under imperial patronage, and consider the aftermath of controversies regarding the veneration of icons during the eighth and ninth centuries. Working with both objects and texts, core themes include the continuity between Christian and pagan art of Late Antiquity, the influence of imperial ceremonies and style, the emergence of holy icons, the development of Passion iconography, and the divergent styles, motifs, and theological perspectives on the validity and role of images from the Byzantine East to the early Medieval West.

Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.

Paintings, sculptures, books, and buildings were instrumental in evangelization the Americas in the wake of the Spanish invasion - and conquests of Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. In addition to introducing new kinds of objects and images to the native peoples of the Americas, evangelization in early-colonial Spanish America set forth new conceptualizations of how objects and images operated. Students in this course will study Aztec, Inca, and Spanish colonial visual culture, exploring the ways in which works of art and architecture gave shape to systems of religious belief.

This course examines the archaeology of early Rome, from the Etruscans to the reign of Augustus. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the analysis and interpretation of Roman archaeological sites, monuments, art, and artifacts, related to prehistoric Italy, the Roman Republic, and the early Roman Empire. On the basis of material evidence, the course will trace the changing culture of the Roman people and attempt to reconstruct what life might have been like in the Roman Regal and Republican periods and during the "Golden Age" of Augustus. In addition to exploring a wide range of material evidence from both Italy and the provinces, including architecture, coins, inscriptions, sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and other artifacts, the course also considers the methods, results, and theory of archaeological research, particularly in the areas of field excavation and intensive surface survey. Major themes to be discussed in the course include Roman imperialism, acculturation (especially so-called "Romanization"), ethnicity, urbanism, engineering, paganism, the imperial cult (emperor worship), death and burial, politics, economics, and the discrepant identities of women, children, slaves, freedmen, and freeborn in early Rome.

A broad survey of purpose-built spaces for Christian worship, from the beginnings to the present. The course will attend to questions of form and aesthetics and the functionality of these spaces for liturgy or other church activities. Finally, the course will consider the social, economic, and political dimensions of church building projects. The class project will be a collaborative one: to build a website that includes various kinds of data (plans, photos, drawings, texts, etc.) that describe a set of twelve ancient buildings and their function.

A study of the place of the image in religious practice, beginning with pre-Christian critique of images and continuing through the broad Christian tradition. Topics include the role of images in Greco-Roman religion, philosophical censure of representational art, Jewish attitudes toward pictorial art, Christian repudiation of idolatry, the emergence of portrait icons, the iconoclastic controversies in the 8th and 9th centuries (both East and West), the theological defense of image veneration, and the various Reformation perspectives on the role of visual art in Christian worship and devotional practice.

Students in this course study digital art as a category of artistic production, digital art history as a set of research methods and modes of disseminating research outcomes, and the tools that offer new possibilities for creative practice and visual engagement with visual culture.

In this course we'll explore how smart-phones, ereaders, tablets, and laptops have changed the ways we engage films, television series, books, music, museums, and videos. We'll focus on how the production of art and entertainment is now shaped by the omnipresence of devices which can function, at any given moment, as personal stereos, movie screens, bookstores, TV sets, cameras, or photo-archives. How does that media adjacency within the box impact the relationship between what used to be distinct media but are now transmediated endlessly, for fun and profit. How has curation - practiced by artists, conglomerates, and amateur fans -- become a supra-medium which subsumes watching, reading, listening, and taking pictures into one of the most widely practiced forms of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century? How do we sort out the complicated interplay between media technology, consumerism, and identity formation in those devices? Featured phenomena: Recommendation mania and the listverse, The Song of Achilles and BookTok, the photos in your smart-phone, Wes Anderson and Accidentally Wes Anderson, Lost Children Archive, Questlove, algorithm culture, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, COVID and the "Make Yourself a Masterpiece" craze, WandaVision, playlisting as a way of life (not just a list of songs), The Carters "Apeshit" video, JR's La Ferita...

This course is intended for undergraduate majors in art history, but it is also open to other interested students by permission of the instructor. It focuses on the principal research methods and theoretical bases of art history, including connoisseurship, formalism, iconography and iconology, cultural and social history, and gender and race studies.

Coco Chanel once claimed that “Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends.” This seminar explores the nature of that necessity through the ancient Roman world’s many material expressions of luxury. Examining works ranging from gem-studded jewelry to ivory furniture adornments, from shimmering silver dining services to pleasure gardens planted with exotic species, we will consider a breadth of visual culture that both expands our understanding of Roman art beyond the canon of architecture, painting, and sculpture and raises important ethical questions. How could material luxuries express imperialist ideologies? Were the Romans concerned by the environmental costs of acquiring the latest status symbol? These questions will be explored alongside themes such as identity construction and spatializing power. Class sessions will be devoted to exploring case studies while developing skills in visual analysis and critical reading and writing. Fulfills WKAL; no prerequisites or prior knowledge of Art History are required for this course.

This class will explore the relationship between art and science in the Middle Ages. In particular, we will examine the ways in which medieval painters, sculptors, and architects engaged with the cultural phenomenon of "encyclopedism" by creating artworks that sought to capture all the world's knowledge in a single visual program. In our exploration of this topic we will consider a wide range of works, from medieval maps and scientific manuscripts to large-scale tapestries and the architectural programs of the great Gothic cathedrals. Central themes include text-image relationships and the role of pictorial techniques, such as allegory, personification, and analogy for visualizing complex ideas. We will also examine the representation of knowledge in medieval poetry and see how medieval authors employed ekphrasis to create visual artworks within their texts to serve as placeholders for encyclopedic learning. 3 credits

This upper-division seminar examines the emergence of the historical avant-garde in Europe in the early-mid twentieth century, roughly 1907-1940. Providing both a general thematic overview and a series of specific case studies, we will consider a set of figures, movements, and practices in the arts—including Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Surrealism—situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts in which they arose. We will explore the changing relationship of avant-gardism to bourgeois society, concepts of democracy, art institutions, and non-art forms of culture, such as mass culture, non-Western cultures, the forces of industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, and the rise of Fascism (and its aesthetics), among other forms of political radicalism. Paying special attention to the artistic accomplishments of painting, sculpture, photography, experimental cinema, and design, three questions will drive our analysis: What impact did dramatic geopolitical changes have on existing concepts of representation? What challenges did they pose for artists? What in turn did artists contribute to an understanding of the full consequences of new conceptions of time, space, identity, and community? The course will require visits to The Snite Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Browning Cinema at DPAC. Robust critical discussion and writing will form the core praxis of the class.

After a period dominated by radical experimentation among the historical avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 60s saw a resurgence, in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Latin America of provocative and multifaceted (neo)avant-garde movements. Providing a general art historical and thematic overview, this upper-division seminar will consider a wide variety of figures, movements, and practices within the visual arts-- from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, to Fluxus to Minimalism, to Performance Art to Installations, and more-- situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these developments will be traced through the mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their social and political presuppositions (from the old Left to the New Left, to the late modernist development of intersectional feminist theory and identity politics), and discussing their relation to pre-War counterparts and models. As such, central to these developments was the revival and renewed understanding of the radical legacy of European Dada, particularly that of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the ideas of the composer John Cage. One of the implications of the collective, heterogenous work that emerged in their wake, was a widespread challenge to the notion of medium specificity and of modernism in general, which gave rise to the very genesis of postmodernism and associated theoretical ideas.

The Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio dedicated his ten papyrus scrolls on architecture to the emperor Augustus in the late first century B.C.E., confident that his work furnished all the information an attentive reader needed to make competent decisions about building, from choosing a site to the fine points of interior decor. In addition, the form and structure of his treatise made a second, and no less ambitious, claim: that architecture should be considered a liberal art, requiring intellectual acuity above and beyond any technical skill. This course will investigate Vitruvius both as a man of ancient Rome and as one of the most influential writers of all time, showing how his aesthetic systems are rooted in ancient rhetoric - that is, in oratory and literature -, and how his pioneering treatise, thanks to its broad philosophical framework, innovative vocabulary, and systematic reasoning, became one of the most influential books of all time, including its role in shaping the curricula of the first universities. We will also investigate the ways in which readers from different centuries and different cultures have adapted (and often distorted) interpretation of the ancient text to fit different circumstances and views of the world, aiming to read him as clearly as possible, for his own time and for ours. We will be using the illustrated translation published by Cambridge University Press. Students who want to follow the text in Latin are encouraged to do so.

Conversations about environmental disaster, sustainability, and resilience that are everywhere in our news feeds today also shaped the buildings and cities from the Renaissance period in profound ways. How was nature conceptualized in the early modern world? And how did architects, engineers, and city-planners confront environmental forces like floods, earthquakes, and viral plagues? With a focus on Italy, this elective course explores how cities like Rome, Florence, Ferrara, and Venice historically dealt with its natural environments. We will begin by asking how "nature" was understood in the Renaissance period in relation to art and architectural history. Looking at primary sources like period texts, drawings, prints, buildings, and cities, we will trace themes like sustainability, environmental justice, and resource management. The goal for this course is to provide a framework for understanding how early modern societies faced environmental stresses, managed their natural resources, and addressed issues like sustainability.

Consideration of the theoretical and practical background of traditional architecture through a careful reading both of primary theoretical sources (including Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio, Vignola, Claude Perrault, and others) as well as influential pattern books; and the pertinence of both to contemporary architectural discourse and practice.

This is a topics course on special areas of modern art. The specific areas of study vary from section to section and from semester to semester.

This seminar concentrates on art made within the last forty years and looks at the everyday as it relates theoretically, materially, and historically to such practices. By examining artwork that takes the everyday as its source, subject, or material point of departure, we will consider how that realm is useful for its position as a place outside of the sphere of professional artistic practices. Looking at the use of amateur and domestic materials and objects in art, as well as works that mimic daily routines (eating, housekeeping, childrearing, playing, etc.) will play a large role in our investigations. Additionally, we will examine theories of the everyday and those problems that accompany attempts to concretize abstract ideas such as routines and habits. In so doing, we will aim to question those biases that conventionally accompany everyday experience that often deem it to be altogether mundane and apolitical, and look at how artists counter such notions by mining its common experiences for its politicized potential. Some of the artists we will look at include Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Anna Maria Maolino, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Ree Morton, Martha Rosler, Do Ho Suh, and Rikrit Tiravanija.

This seminar reconsiders 19th-century Western European painting within the context of the social, political, and intellectual ferment that shaped the continent - primarily, the political revolutions and the rise of industrial capitalism and the middle class in France, England, and Germany. Each week we will examine a specific set of concepts, historical ruptures, and major figures whose work ushered in the modernist era. These include artists associated with Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Symbolism. The themes of the course will thus address the relationships between tradition and formal innovation; gender and representation; the public and private spheres; and notions of the center and the periphery. Course requirements include a museum visit to The Art Institute of Chicago and the DVT Planetarium on campus.

In the wake of post-modern, theory heavy days of 1980s art production, artists took a pointed turn toward finding materially-driven ways to challenge and disrupt the conventions of art and its institutions. This seminar investigates three developments and diverging trends that take hold in the art of the 1990s: the loaded embrace of failure and resignation; the casting of a critical eye on the institutions of art; and the impulse to reintroduce handcraft into the process of making. A consideration of the Gen X context and social movements of the decade will frame our exploration, and aid in our thinking about how such different impulses could coincide to drive a new form of investigation of the parameters and politics of fine art. While amateurism uses the language of hobby culture and fandom to invade the professional territory of the museum, institutional critique transforms the artist into a curator and critic who turns the museum against itself. Meanwhile, the adoption of traditional forms of craft and skill, such as embroidery, beadwork, and weaving, fuels feminist-driven confrontations to the hierarchy of values of fine art traditions and renders the makers movement a charged and activist program. Looking across these different approaches will allow us to revise our understanding of art as a political act and vehicle for change. Some artists we will study include Mike Kelly, Cady Noland, David Hammons, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Elaine Reichek, Ann Hamilton, Anna Maria Maiolino, Shazia Sikhander, Do Ho Suh, and Sarah Sze.

The Elective Course introduces students to Cuba's cultural heritage and the magic and poetry of its Architecture and Urbanism and its cross-cultural, European influence, and immediate regional background. The course explores the formation of a multiracial nation, and particularly the history and urban evolution of Havana, the country's capital city, and considers the key role of architecture in its ever-changing construction. Through a holistic approach, the students will learn and understand the distinct features, similarities, differences, and synchronicities? in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism in Cuba, and examine how cultural identity has been a central organizing paradigm. A series of presentations will allow students to identify, recognize and discern the main features of Cuban architecture and urbanism and relate them to the universal culture. The Course will introduce students to the concept of cultural landscapes. Critical thinking will allow the students to relate research and theoretical content with historic preservation themes as well as practical design knowledge. The Course will focus on the study of Havana, Cuba's capital city and it will encompass the study of its past, its present and will even provide a vision for the future of Havana. The chronological study of Havana and its history and urban evolution will provide a comprehensive understanding of its rich heritage and cultural identity.

This seminar examines the relationship between art and social movements in Latinx communities from the civil rights era to the present. The course will focus on graphic art media that negotiates relations of power, constructs multiple publics, and fuels many of the debates around the politics of identity. We will consider notions of authorship (collective/individual), activism, display, dissemination, consumption, collecting, and technology. Students will learn to think critically and empathetically about how these collective modes of art-making foreground the politics of representation: what we see, how we see, who gets to control our image, and how can printed multiples challenge those narratives. Students will enhance their skills in visual analysis and writing, gain experience in collaborative printmaking, and refine their ability to conduct original research.

This optional, one-credit class is intended for junior and senior art history majors who are writing or considering (though not yet committed to) writing a senior thesis. This seminar-style workshop will feature a systematic approach to the various processes involved in writing a long research paper; this principally includes developing a topic, collating and sharing research, and comparing and critiquing writing methods and techniques. It will offer a variety of opportunities based on the individual's stage of development, which range from initiating a project and applying for funding for research to drafting a project outline and completing a chapter. Assignments will revolve around presentations and papers.

This course is intended for students in the art history program who assist professors with their research.

Specialized reading related to the study of Medieval art history under the direction of an individual faculty member.

Specialized reading related to the study of modern art history under the direction of an individual faculty member.

This project, to be coordinated with and approved by the DUS, is intended to demonstrate some evidence of in-depth engagement with conservation or associated fields such as: collections care, registrar, curatorial, exhibition design, gallery management, artist’s assistant, or materials analysis.

Independent study in ancient art history under the direction of an individual faculty member.

Independent study in Latin American art history under the direction of an individual faculty member.

The honors thesis, normally between 20 and 30 pages in length, is done under the direction of one of the regular art history faculty, who serves as an advisor. It is expected to demonstrate the student's ability to treat an important historical topic in a manner that shows his or her writing skills and methodological training. It is expected that the thesis will be suitable for submission as a writing sample for those students intending to apply to art history graduate programs.

The Senior Thesis, normally between 20 and 30 pages in length, is done under the direction of one of the regular art history faculty, who serves as an advisor. It is expected to demonstrate the student's ability to treat an important art historical topic in a manner which shows her/his writing skills and methodological training. It is expected that the thesis will be suitable for submission as a writing sample for those students intending to apply to art history graduate programs.

The Senior Thesis, normally between 20 and 30 pages in length, is done under the direction of one of the regular art history faculty, who serves as an advisor. It is expected to demonstrate the student's ability to treat an important art historical topic in a manner which shows her/his writing skills and methodological training. It is expected that the thesis will be suitable for submission as a writing sample for those students intending to apply to art history graduate programs.

The Senior Thesis, normally between 20 and 30 pages in length, is done under the direction of one of the regular art history faculty, who serves as an advisor. It is expected to demonstrate the student's ability to treat an important art historical topic in a manner which shows her/his writing skills and methodological training. It is expected that the thesis will be suitable for submission as a writing sample for those students intending to apply to art history graduate programs.

The Senior Thesis, normally between 20 and 30 pages in length, is done under the direction of one of the regular art history faculty, who serves as an advisor. It is expected to demonstrate the student's ability to treat an important art historical topic in a manner which shows her/his writing skills and methodological training. It is expected that the thesis will be suitable for submission as a writing sample for those students intending to apply to art history graduate programs.