Art History

Perhaps no single art movement within Western modernism is as constitutive and contested as cubism. While the artists under this label introduced crucial new paradigms for artistic production, they did so in ways deeply entangled with violent histories of European imperialism and colonialism. Accordingly, this seminar pursues three primary tasks. First, students develop a working understanding of cubism as it first unfolded in Paris between the years 1906 and 1917. Next, the seminar critically examines prominent theoretical models for interpreting cubist practices, among them formalism, social art history, structuralist semiotics, feminist critique, and postcolonial theory. Finally, the course turns to artists who both engaged with cubism—including Sonia Delaunay, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Wifredo Lam, and Faith Ringgold—and challenged its foundational tenets, premises, and exclusions.

This course examines images and photography to understand the role perspective plays in interpretation and meaning.

This course offers a study of the historical evolution of Greek art and its influence on the artistic processes of the Mediterranean. 

This course has two parts. The first part deals with the methodology of formal visual analysis through the study of paintings from nineteenth-century Britain. It provides the opportunity to apply this methodology by analyzing a specific painting and giving a presentation on its history and composition. The second part of the course involves an in-depth analysis of British photographs and the themes that they represent. It explores the politics of representation and as what is at stake in terms of ethics and positioning when pictures are taken, in the process when they are made, and in their conditions of production. Themes discussed include the representation of class, ethnic minorities, women, disabilities, poverty, national identity, and collective representations, particularly through the prism of portraits and self-portraits.

This course surveys current developments in curating art, examining expanded definitions of curating (in museums and independently post-2020); and the evolving local, global, and digital landscapes for curatorial work and activity today.
With a project-oriented focus, this course equips students with the contextual knowledge as well as the entrepreneurial skill to plan, develop, and deliver a curatorial project as well as situate it in a rapidly changing landscape. Topics include (but are not limited to) the curator as auteur, facilitator, mediator, and project manager as well as contemporary curatorial approaches and research methodology. Project-based learning throughout the course examines: initiating and defining curatorial projects; sourcing artworks in private collections for object-based exhibitions; building connections and relationships with contemporary artists; expanding exhibition formats and sites for curating (including "pop-ups"); writing curatorial statements and press releases; working in a sustainable and accessible way; fundraising and budgeting; marketing and publicity; and working with digital networks and platforms.

The course introduces students to a range of contemporary critical theories and debates on the body and identity. Students explore the body as a site on which social constructions of difference are inscribed, as well as how these constructions can be challenged and resisted. Bodies are regulated and self-regulated, marginalized, oppressed, erased, owned, visualized, textualized, and designed. The body is not isolated; rather, it extends and connects with other bodies, practices, human and non-human entities, and technologies. The course also examines the ways in which digital developments are reshaping our understanding of our bodies and question what it means to be human.

This course provides an introduction to iconography and iconology and considers the power of the symbol. It covers the foundations of aesthetics and philosophy of the image, hermeneutic methods, and analysis of images and artistic languages. The course discusses the creation, revolution, and destruction of images between East and West; iconological schools; and literal iconoclasms. Finally, it examines the origins of medieval aesthetics to the invention of art in modernity, considering subliminal, ancient, and contemporary iconoclasms.

This course offers a study of visual cultures and the theoretical insights garnered by the study of this interdisciplinary field. The course provides an introduction to the field of visual culture and explores topics including vision, visuality, and image in conjunction with varying conceptualizations of culture. Each subsequent unit deals with a “site” of visual culture that offers an object of study, a theoretical problem, and an interdisciplinary opportunity. Visual cultures from high to low are studied along with an examination of how these forms are quickly transforming and breaking barriers of category and genre. The principal sites of inquiry traverse fashion, gaming, museum exhibitions, medical imaging, comics, and cinema. This course requires that students have completed a course in the humanities as a prerequisite.

This course analyzes artistic heritage as a material manifestation of societal memory. It explores the interdependence between artistic heritage and the context of its creation and appreciation. 

The course examines the development of art in Britain, and its struggle to assert itself in the wider international art world. Students take as a starting point the careers of four artists who are central to the canon of British art, and whose work still sparks debate. These case-studies vary from year to year. Previously, they have included William Hogarth, William Blake, J.M.W Turner, Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Bridget Riley, Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid. Possible examples are Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Pauline Boty and Olafur Eliasson. Building through the course is a larger discussion about the idea of a tradition of British art, and the value and stability of an artistic canon. Is there such a thing as tradition, and if so, what are its themes and preoccupations, and where might it be tending?