Art History and Archaeology

This course delves into drawing as an expansive, exploratory practice that underpins all forms of visual art. Designed primarily as a hands-on workshop, the class is enriched with slide lectures, video presentations, and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will engage in individual and group critiques, fostering dialogue about their work. Beginning with still life and progressing to drawings of artworks, artifacts, and figure studies, the course investigates drawing as a dynamic practice connected to a wide array of visual cultures.

The architecture, sculpture, and painting of ancient Rome from the second century BCE to the end of the Empire in the West.

This course will explore extraordinary artworks made by Northern European painters, sculptors, weavers, and printmakers from about 1400 to 1590. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Holbein, and Bernard Palissy. The themes we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and the artist, Protestantism and iconophobia, the ascent of the printing press, the dissemination of humanism, familial relations, courtly politics, art and knowledge, technology, the persecution of witches, as well as exploration and the broad-based shift from a European to a global mindset. The course will focus on the patterns of visual culture and how those patterns develop over time. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.

This course examines the history of architecture between roughly 1400 and 1600 from a European perspective outward. Employing a variety of analytical approaches, it addresses issues related to the Renaissance built environment thematically and through a series of specific case studies. Travelling across a geographically diverse array of locales, we will interrogate the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture (civic, commercial, industrial, domestic, ecclesiastical and otherwise). Additional topics to be discussed include: antiquity and its reinterpretation; local identity, style, and ornament; development of building typologies; patronage and politics; technology and building practice; religious change and advancements in warfare; the creation and migration of architectural knowledge; role of capitalism and colonialism; class and decorum in domestic design; health and the city; the mobility of people and materials; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the media of architectural practice; the growth of cities and towns; the creation of urban space and landscape; architectural responses to ecological and environmental factors; and the changing status of the architect.

Students must registere for a required discussion section.

How do you represent a revolution? What does it mean to picture the world as it “really” is? Who may be figured as a subject or citizen, and who not? Should art improve society, or critique it? Can it do both? These are some of the many questions that the artists of nineteenth-century Europe grappled with, and that we will explore together in this course. This was an era of rapid and dramatic political, economic, and cultural change, marked by wars at home and colonial expansion abroad; the rise of industrialization and urbanization; and the invention of myriad new technologies, from photography to the railway. The arts played an integral and complex role in all of these developments: they both shaped and were shaped by them. Lectures will address a variety media, from painting and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts, across a range of geographic contexts, from Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid to St. Petersburg, Cairo, Haiti, and New Zealand. Artists discussed will include Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, J.M.W. Turner, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, C. F. Goldie, Victor Horta, and Paul Cézanne.

This lecture course, with two weekly lectures and additional section meetings, surveys the broad outlines of the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, introducing key concepts, such as multiplicity, impermanence, and transmediality, through a diversity of forms of visual expression in painting, sculpture, bronze, ceramics, lacquer, and architecture. The weekly lectures and discussions will explore interregional relations and influence in order to discover not only the features that make each geographical tradition distinct, but also closely interconnected. Among the key themes to be examined are the archaeology of ancient East Asia, the development of Buddhist art, the arts of landscape and narrative painting, woodblock prints, and finally East Asia after modernity.

Focusing on South America, this course examines contemporary art produced in the region known as Latin America and its diasporas, roughly since mid-1940s to the present. The first half of the class attends to two tendencies of the 1940s–1970s, abstraction and conceptualism, lionized through a slew of acclaimed group and solo exhibitions organized across the hemisphere in the last twenty years. We will analyze these two tendencies in the distinct social, political, and economic contexts of their emergence in various “centers” of the continent paying special attention to the ideologies of modernization, progress, and economic development; political upheavals including violent dictatorships and other crises; artists’ relationship to Western European and U.S. cultural centers, and transnational circulation networks; and the role of art institutions. To this end, we will pay special attention to how these trends have been historicized to date, and to what ends. The second half of the class will examine practices since the mid-1970s to the present in a comparative perspective: one, through the lens of identity politics and, two, analyzing the dynamics of the increased global dissemination of works from Latin America and by Latin-American descendants. Several visits to art institutions in NYC will be required as a part of the course.

Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

In this course, you will conduct independent projects in photography in a structured setting under faculty supervision.  You are responsible for arranging for your photographic equipment in consultation with the instructor.

This course will afford you a framework in which to intensively develop a coherent body of photographs, critique this work with your classmates, and correlate your goals with recent issues in contemporary photography.  

Students are required to enroll in an additional fifteen contact hours of instruction at the International Center for Photography. Courses range from one-day workshops to full-semester courses. 

Permission of instructor only.  The class will be limited to 20 students.

How have artists been informed and influenced by the natural world? This course will examine how photographic artists have responded to nature, ecology, and the environment. Augmented by literary texts by artists, scientists, poets, and ecologists, we will explore how close-looking might inform an artist’s practice regarding the living environment - its bounty - and its degradation. Readings include texts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Masanobu Fukuoka, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Akira Hasegawa, and others. Calling on a canon of photographic works from around the globe, students will study book-length photographic essays whose makers have seen art as a form of praise of the natural world and those who investigate the relationship between art and environmental activism. Susan Derges; Meghann Riepenhoff; Masahisa Fukashe; Pedro David; Stephen Gill; Ron Jude; Dornith Doherty; David Maisel, Zhao Renhui; Mandy Barker; Pablo Lopez Luz are some of the artists studied. The course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past two centuries to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how artists have depicted shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why they might question human centrality in the sentient world. Students will produce a semester-long photographic project on an ecological theme. This course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past century to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how contemporary photographers are depicting shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why some artists are beginning to question human centrality in the sentient world.

Worlding Otherwise is a studio course exploring how artists use game engines to craft speculative and ecological narratives. Using tools like Unreal Engine and Blender, students will visualize alternate futures, mythologies, and socio-political realities through creating immersive virtual environments. Key questions include: How might the game environment lend itself to storytelling? How can speculative fiction act as a method of critique? What can we learn from artists who blend technology with mythology and alternative futures? The semester culminates in a final project: a short cinematic piece, interactive environment, or hybrid installation created within a game engine.

This course takes a close look at visual art and performative culture by artists of Latin American descent in the U.S. or Latinx, Latina/o art.  The artists we will study trace their heritage to Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, along with other countries in Latin America.  We will consider how these wide-ranging and diverse creative expressions come to signify Latinidad while in the process transforming U.S. culture. This means examining colonial era histories that inform the work of contemporary Latinx artists including, but not limited to, histories of race and botanical illustration. We will also look at the histories and visual expressions of Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spiritual practices that have had a great influence on Latinx art production. Course themes include: physical and psychic borders, indigeneity, colonialism and racialization, gender and sexuality, and expanding notions of American art and identity. Class discussions will focus on close examination of theoretical approaches and individual works along with shifting ideas of representation.

This undergraduate travel seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory, with a focus on the institutionalization of handicraft in England. With a focus on the multiple legacies of designer William Morris for artists and activists working today, we will read formative theoretical texts regarding questions of process, materiality, skill, bodily effort, domestic labor, and alternative economies of production. In a time when much art is outsourced -- or fabricated by large stables of assistants-- what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, jewelry making, or woodworking? Though our emphasis will be on recent art (including the Black feminist reclamation of quilts, an artist who makes pornographic embroidery, a transvestite potter, queer fiber collectives, do-it-yourself environmental interventions, and anti-capitalist craftivism), we will also examine important historical precedents. Throughout, we will think through how craft is in dialogue with questions of race, nation-building, gendered work, and mass manufacturing. A trip to sites in London and Manchester (such as the textile mills that inspired Marx and Engels and several museum collections) will emphasize the contradictions of "slow" making within the accelerations of capitalism.

Advanced Senior Studio II is a critique class that serves as a forum for senior Visual Arts majors to develop and complete one-semester studio theses.  The priorities are producing a coherent body of studio work and understanding this work in terms of critical discourse.  The class will comprise group critiques and small group meetings with the instructor. Field trips and visiting artist lectures will augment our critiques. Please visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

Imperial art and architecture in Beijing—the capital of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (1271-1911)—have inspired awe and admiration in the Western world since the late 19th century. Despite massive destruction caused by foreign invasions before 1911 and rapid urban development after 1949, a significant portion of historic Beijing has survived, including imperial temples and gardens, princely courtyard residences, alleyway neighborhoods, and, most importantly, the Forbidden City—the magnificent seat of imperial power. Moreover, artifacts and artworks from the palaces of Beijing are now housed in museums across the Western world.

This seminar introduces students to the imperial art and architecture of Beijing through the lens of the reign of two Qing-dynasty rulers: the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1796) and Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Their artistic legacies have profoundly shaped modern understanding of the city’s imperial past. Over the spring break, students will travel with the instructor to Beijing to visit sites that were inhabited, commissioned, or even designed by these two rulers.

Through lectures in New York City and a field study in Beijing, the course encourages students to consider questions such as: How did art and architecture serve to reinforce and glorify Qianlong’s rule over the multiethnic Qing empire for much of the 18th century—a reign often celebrated as inclusive, efficient, and prosperous, yet also criticized as despotic, corrupt, and repressive? To what extent did Empress Dowager Cixi’s artistic patronage inherit or challenge conventional imperial traditions? And how does historic Beijing continue to shape the social and political life of its inhabitants—and influence broader national identity—in contemporary China?

The course features a study trip to Beijing, where we will explore imperial palaces, gardens, and temples to engage directly with the monuments discussed in class. Each student will prepare a presentation in advance, taking the lead as a guide during our site visits. These presentations will serve as the foundation for the final research papers.

In 1987, the queer-feminist Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa reflected on the politics of writing and rewriting histories. Mobilized by the social revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s, Anzaldúa sought to intervene in contemporary history, arguing that the act of retrieval—mining and sifting through our past—is necessary for sensing and creating uninhibited possibilities. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s understanding of the stakes of historiography, this course explores how artists have sought to reimagine queer-feminist pasts and enact latent futures. It focuses on the period from the 1970s onward, when the proliferation of mnemonic, time-based media, such as video, sound, slides, and photography, as well as ephemeral forms like performance and participation, emerged as significant material and conceptual foci for artists. Artists’ engagements with institutions crucial to the creation and circulation of history, memory, and knowledge—such as universities, the mass media, AI companies, and museums—are examined alongside enduring queer-feminist themes of education, motherhood, family, home, exile, kin, and futurity. Students will become cognizant of how contemporary art influences cultural, political, and social traditions and institutions, and how “old” and “new” ideas co-exist and conflict. The course offers an art historical perspective on contemporary art, mapping its relations to late modern art, while also foregrounding the question: how can we, as “contemporaries,” engage with art and art history in a way that responds to the demands of the present? Artists we examine include Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, Magali Lara, Jenny Holzer, Emily Kame Kngwarray, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, D. Harding, Simone Leigh, and Jesse Darling. Writers include Anzaldúa, Rosalyn Deutsche, Tina Campt, Aileen Moreton Robinson, and Ruha Benjamin.

Holland in the seventeenth century was home to some of the most innovative and influential printmakers in the history of art, most important among them, Rembrandt van Rijn. In addition, known for producing the most professional engravers, it became the main center for the issuing and distribution of prints in Europe. Held primarily in The Met’s Drawings and Prints Study Room, this class examines printmaking from this period in its many forms – from masterworks of Dutch landscape to political broadsheets. Reproductive printmakers and peintres-graveur, professional printmakers and amateurs will be considered. How prints were made, published, and sold will be explored. Students will learn how to identify techniques as well as quality of impression by examining original works in the collection of The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints. We will also look at the subject from the point of view of the museum curator – how works are collected and exhibitions created. 

This visual arts seminar explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP.  This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments. 

Images today can feel increasingly unstable, untethered to physical and interpersonal experience, and also unstoppable, generating and proliferating at accelerating speeds. What do we do with all this material? What are the global consequences of the mass circulation of images? And how do artists specifically make sense of the contemporary state of photography? This course invites students into a non-conventional, interdisciplinary approach to making, reading, critiquing, and relating to images. We begin with the fundamentally physical elements of photography—space, light, and lens—and end with the embedded histories, social relations, and personal narratives that photographs can trace or carry. We discuss case studies and readings by and about artists and theorists who research and make work across international contexts, exploring, for example, how early colonial histories of photography prefigure its contemporary conditions, and how images can echo or challenge patterns of displacement and resistance. We create artworks informed by this research, exploring how to physically manipulate, present, and disseminate images in hands-on thematic projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.

“Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.”,Michael Caine , We do not live our own desires. Pressing ourselves into heavy molds not made for our bodies compresses us, tears our skin, and bruises our features. It is hard to breathe. We sink. Weight harbors the downward pull. It attaches itself in many ways but there are countless ways to set it down, to be free. This takes practice and skill. The common task of this visual arts seminar is to distinguish ourselves from the weight we carry. Through a variety or reading, writing, and making activities we shall seek out and contact levity: that gravity that changes our bodies, make us light of touch, aerates and propels us toward the state of buoyancy. Not for the faint of heart.

This advanced lecture course is intended for students with little or no background in medieval art of Latin (“Western”) Europe. It provides a comprehensive introduction to a period spanning roughly one millennium, from Pope Gregory the Great’s defense of art ca. 600 to rising antagonism against it on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. Themes under consideration include Christianity and colonialism, pilgrimage and the cult of saints, archaism versus Gothic modernism, the drama of the liturgy, somatic and affective piety, political ideology against “others,” the development of the winged altarpiece, and pre-Reformation iconophobia. We will survey many aspects of artistic production, from illuminated manuscripts, portable and monumental sculpture, stained glass, sumptuous metalworks, drawings, and reliquaries to the earliest examples of oil paintings and prints. While this course is conceived as a pendant to Medieval Art I: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire (AHIS GU4021), each can be taken independently of one another. In addition to section meetings, museum visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, and The Morgan Library are a required component to the course. Students must register for a mandatory discussion section.

Pausanias’ Periegesis, ten books on Greece, is among the most important sources for the understanding of ancient Greek art and architecture, although his approach, methods, and ‘reports’ have been called pedestrian, accurate but unimaginative, naïve, purely descriptive, or even the product of ekphrasis He has been seen as an intellectual traveler, an antiquarian, an art historian or even a historian of religion. In whichever way(s) one would like to appreciate Pausanias and his Description of Greece, Classical archaeology and art history have to depend on him heavily, since the vast majority of works of art and architecture that he describes/mentions are either entirely lost or badly preserved. The seminar will attempt to bring together Pausanias’ text and the results of art historical and archaeological research in major Greek cities and sanctuaries. Despite Pausanias’ obvious interest in all things “ancient” and “Greek,” the seminar will attempt to understand the ancient traveler and author as a Greek from Asia Minor who wrote his work within the political, social, and intellectual frame of the Roman Empire during the Antonines. Ultimately, the seminar will seek to understand the art, architecture, and topography of Greek cities and sanctuaries through the eyes of a Roman.

The aim of this course is to examine the built environment of New York City as it enters – and helps define – the modern era. The scope of our study is the last quarter of the 19th century to today and the strategy to tackle the vast topic will be to highlight significant moments and monuments – for example, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central, Empire State Building, NYCHA housing, the U.N. complex, postwar Park Avenue, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and Twin Towers – and question “In what ways are they modern?”

The lectures and class discussion will explore the idea of modernity using multiple lenses, including technological advances, architectural style and ideology, products and sites of construction and real estate investment, and acts of government planning and social policy. Throughout, the urban dimension will be key in our critical analysis. Classroom sessions, for the most part, will be organized as lectures and discussions of assigned readings. There will also be sessions outside the classroom, including a visit to the drawing collection of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and to The Skyscraper Museum, as well as a walking tour of Midtown Manhattan.

Since the 1950’s, built environments across Latin America increasingly served as testing grounds for new strategies of urban solidarity in architecture. Writing on the rapid modernization of this period, social theorists in the region have identified solidarity as a distinct marker of Latin American modernity. This seminar examines the role of architecture in this recent history of Latin America with a focus on the cultural forms and social practices that fostered solidarity processes since the mid-twentieth century. Through interdisciplinary and cross-border collaborations, communities, architects, social thinkers, and policy makers combined experimental ideas of aided housing and public spaces with new social concepts in efforts to restructure Latin American cities reshaped by the “great urban explosion.” These social projects in architecture were closely followed by their North American counterparts and soon connected vaster Pan-American territories. Seen primarily as the pursuit of egalitarian and inclusive values in the built environment, we will examine the many forms that these constructs of solidarity in Latin America assumed in architecture during the following decades.

Conceived to look closely and critically at the projects, social concepts, and institutions behind solidarity programs and designs, this seminar will concentrate on two interwoven threads: 1. Architectural theories and projects that fostered community, cross-class, or state programs of solidarity in the design of housing, public spaces and services; 2. The social theories and institutions that supported these approaches in architecture. From self-construction to “superbloques,” and from self-organized social movements to state-sponsored pre-fabrication, we will investigate the strategies through which Latin American communities and professionals redefined collaborative practices and pursued ideas of emancipation, autonomy, and social citizenship. Adopting a comparative and relational approach, we will examine how these architectural concepts, technologies, and social theories subsequently informed Pan-American movements for housing and building aid across Latin America.

This graduate seminar examines the intersections of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) with the study of art, architecture, and visual culture. It asks how the Saidian critique—conceived in a literary framework—has been applied, adapted, and contested in the analysis of visual forms from the eighteenth century to the present. Foregrounding aesthetics as a political language, the course traces how “Orientalist” motifs and styles have been negotiated, re-appropriated, and hybridized, often complicating the very notion of an identifiable “Orientalist” aesthetic. We map sites where Orientalism is expected, where it proves elusive, and where the label itself obscures more than it reveals, while testing the usefulness—and limits—of Orientalism as an analytic for visual and spatial evidence. Along the way, we consider whether “Orientalism” functions as an artistic style; questions of authorship and intention in painterly practice and studio/market contexts; late Ottoman self-representation (e.g., Osman Hamdi Bey); neo-Orientalist urbanism and the redevelopment of Mecca; religion’s place in visual Orientalism (crusade imaginaries, typologies of the “Saracen” and the “Jew,” and “sacred photography”); the weaponization of Orientalist codes in propaganda and heritage destruction; the category of “Islamic art” and its historiography; and the museum—especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art—as a site where collecting, classification, and display mediate knowledge and power. The seminar closes by considering decolonial proposals that refine, extend, or challenge the Saidian paradigm for art and architectural history.

Sumptuous attire, aromatics, heady intoxicants, pleasure gardens, water sports, and the games of love and sex. Medieval South Asians marshaled these and other aesthetic practices to fashion the spaces they moved in, show themselves to one another, and make sense of their social worlds. In this seminar, we approach the Indian subcontinent’s extensive body cultures in three related ways. Considering a range of visual media, we explore how bodies were imagined and constituted alongside image theories from early South Asia, portraiture, and the construction of personhood through epigraphs. What physical features characterized the bodies of ascetics, divinities, human beings, demi-gods, spirit deities, and even the body of the cosmos? How did certain visual markers communicate emotional states and moral attributes, such as defeat, grief, piety, and purity? Diving into the spaces period bodies occupied, we investigate how somatic cultures forged the accessories and accouterments of material existence. In tandem, we unpack the aesthetic values and theories central to medieval India’s court cultures, from kāma, līla, and alamkāra to rasa theory. Students will be encouraged to research and write on body cultures specific to their own regional or cultural interests.

What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.

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Picasso’s work is the great kaleidoscope through which 20th-century art passes: from its beginnings in Cubism through which the world is given as though through cut crystal; to the commercial forms of collage; to the presage of surrealist anguish; and, finally, to an untoward neo-classicism. The result of this restless exploration is the invention of multiple formal languages, which need to be deciphered in spite of the perverse literature on the subject which insists on transposing this into the art-historical language of iconography. The literature is rich with the analytic struggles between the great Picasso scholars: William Rubin, Leo Steinberg, and Picasso’s biographer, John Russel. The skirmishes over the “iconography” of cubism extends to the interpretation of the work’s relation to “primitivism.” This controversy has given rise to yet a new vector on Picasso’s work: structuralism and semiotics.

Most simply defined, a "mural" is an artwork made directly on a wall. Its meaning can extend as well to wall-scaled works. A modern sense of the word often evokes the idea of a public or community-facing work at large scale, often made by a collective. That modern image does not often hold for premodern settings, but what is enduring in deep historical study is the fact of mural art as both social and spatial practice. This graduate lecture course is an exploration of the diversity of mural art made in cities and centers in parts of what is now Latin America during the long autonomous era—from about 2000 BC until the European invasions of the 1520s and 30s. Lectures will present case studies of wall painting, relief sculpture, and occasionally textiles that covered the facades and interiors of public monuments, temples, courtyards, and palaces at sites in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Colombia. A secondary throughline of this course will be how images and traditions of Pre-Columbian mural art have been brought into twentieth- and twenty-first-century muralisms and community practices, both in and beyond Latin America. The course's final assignment allows three options: a research paper, a digital project, or an interpretive project designed to be public-facing. While some background in this field is helpful, there are no formal prerequisites for enrollment.

Enrollment is capped at 25. Advanced undergraduate enrollment considered upon petition.

At a time when courses on clothing draw exceptionally large audiences in the humanities field, and when art museums depend increasingly for audiences and revenue on exhibitions of clothing, accompanying those exhibitions with increasingly ambitious catalogues, it has become pertinent for graduate students in a range of art history sub-fields, as well as in adjacent disciplines such as history, design, or anthropology, to become familiar with the newest options for the study of clothing.  Among the 10 most visited exhibitions in the 150-year history of the Met, for instance, 5 have been devoted entirely or in part to clothing.  The trend toward the incorporation of clothing in temporary exhibitions nominally devoted to painting, or to a period subject, as well as the installation of clothing in permanent galleries, will also be discussed. This seminar reads recent books or museum catalogues, chosen to offer a representative range of approaches, time periods and issues of rank, gender, race, geography, and politics.

What is beautiful? What is sublime? What makes a work of art good? What are artworks for? This course will address these and other questions with a focus on Western art and its evaluation by European thinkers from antiquity to more recent times. We will begin with Plato’s discussions of art in the Ion and The Republic and we will turn next to Aristotle’s defense of art in the Poetics. The course will go on to discuss writings on aesthetics by thinkers such as Aquinas, Vasari, and Bellori. We will then devote considerable attention to eighteenth-century contributions to the history of aesthetics and art criticism, as it was in this period that the term “aesthetics” was first coined and that the “philosophy of art” was invented. Many of the most influential and difficult notions in modern aesthetics, such as genius and originality, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will analyze the writings of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Hegel, and others. This course is appropriate for graduate students in art history, visual art, history, philosophy, music, English, and other humanities departments.

Over the last four decades, the emergence of digital design technologies has fueled debates about the fate of drawing in architectural practice. These discussions often presume a narrow definition of drawing as something executed by hand, typically with a pen on paper. As an architectural medium, however, drawing has historically encompassed a wide range of graphic acts of mark-making that engage a variety of scales, materials, and surfaces, long preceding the proliferation of paper and the authorial figure of the architect. Employing a longue durée approach that embraces a capacious and porous definition of drawing, this seminar seeks to reevaluate the development of architectural drawing in Europe. Rather than beginning in sixteenth-century Italy, as many standard narratives do, it ends there, offering a fundamentally different view of Renaissance practice. The seminar also seeks to deepen our understanding of architectural drawing through direct, object-based study, making use of the rich collections of Avery Library, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt, as well as the exhibition Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship (opening April 16) at the Met.

This graduate seminar explores the role of archives and “the archive” in the history and making of art history. How has the discipline defined its archives in the past, and how is it doing so now? How does one identify, navigate, and mine repositories of information for the purpose of art historical study? And what challenges or problems—theoretical, methodological, ethical—does such work raise? Our investigation will be grounded in and guided by readings drawn from a range of fields, including history, anthropology, critical theory, and queer, feminist, postcolonial, Indigenous, and critical race studies. Over the course of the semester, seminar members will also design and undertake an independent research project using one or more archives in the New York City area.

This graduate seminar seeks to address impermanence as a salient feature in the history of Japanese architecture by examining the construction, restoration, and relocation of temples buildings and images in Japan during from the Kamakura through early Edo period (13th-17th c.). We will explore how the inherent tensions between old practices of periodic rebuilding (shikinen sengū) at Ise and other Shintō sanctuaries, on one hand, and the intended durability of Buddhist temples initially built according to continental East Asian standards, on the other, produced malleable architectural and institutional idioms perhaps unique to Japan. Although buildings will provide the primary framework for the course, we will also delve into parallel phenomena in sculpture and paintings created specifically for interior spaces. Reading knowledge of Japanese and/or Chinese would be helpful for some reading assignments but not essential for the course.