Art History and Archaeology

The first half of the Introduction to Art History explores premodern art and architecture around the world, from cave paintings to Song dynasty landscapes and Renaissance sculpture. Lectures and discussion sections are organized around themes, including nature and naturalism, death and the afterlife, ornament and abstraction, gender and sexuality, colonialism and conversion, and ritual and divinity. Visits to museums across New York are also an integral component to the course.

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.

Today’s cell phones are equipped with cameras that far surpass those used by the pioneers of digital photography, offering superior resolution and multi-sensor capabilities that revolutionize how we capture and process images. This course explores the creative and technical potential of smartphone photography, focusing on accessible tools and workflows that empower students to produce compelling digital works. The curriculum emphasizes post-production and digital media techniques over traditional camera mastery. Students will develop foundational skills in Adobe Suite applications, including Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing and After Effects and Premiere for video production. We will also discuss the integration of artificial intelligence in modern photography, examining how AI enhances editing processes and opens new creative possibilities. A significant part of the course will address fundamental questions of light in photography, the use of RAW formats—offered by many smartphones but seldom understood—and the structure of digital image files. Students will also learn about post-production techniques for preparing images for print, as well as for projection or display on digital screens, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end digital photography workflow. Thinking Locally: Street photography serves as a central theme in this course, encouraging students to document the vibrant life of New York City through weekly assignments. A guided photo walk in Harlem will provide hands-on experience in capturing unique, candid moments. Ethical considerations will be a key focus, addressing topics like consent, privacy, and best practices for interacting with subjects. Discussions will be complemented by readings, critiques, and a guest lecture from a professional street photographer. By the end of the course, students will have transformed their understanding of smartphone photography, creating works that push the boundaries of accessible technology while building a strong foundation in contemporary digital media.

This course will explore the intersections between visual and intellectual culture in Northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Peter Paul Rubens, Maria Sibylla Merian, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Charles le Brun, and others. In addition, we will study visual and material culture, from philosophical prints to anatomical models of eyes, produced by less well-known artists and artisans. The themes and topics we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and knowledge; collecting; competing theories of vision, attention and discernment; and the shifting interrelations of art, religion, philosophy, and science in this period in Northern Europe. We will consider a broad range of objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architecture, gardens, shells, and flowers. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.

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 course will study the problematic persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed.

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.

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

What does the end of time look like? How have still and moving images made the Apocalypse available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? Why is the End so important in Western European and American culture and what role does it play in our imaginations? In this seminar we will explore the fascination with the end of time as articulated in a broad range of artworks from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). We will examine diverse proposals for the expected end of time, proposals often given urgency by the imminence of the Apocalypse (an anticipation sustained even in the face of constant deferrals).

This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings. For further info visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has always been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies clothing from the perspectives of anthropology, architecture, art, craft, economics, labor, law, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and sustainability. Issues include gender roles, local traditions, world-wide trade patterns, dress codes, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. 

Prerequisites: Course open to Barnard Art History majors only. Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in art history and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year.

This seminar explores contemporary art criticism written by artists, with a special focus on how their ideas help us understand today’s visual culture—across galleries, social media, digital platforms, and public space. You do not need to be an Art History or Visual Arts major to take part in this course. Students from all backgrounds are welcome, and the class aims to provide accessible entry points into thinking about art, images, and culture. Artist-writers approach criticism differently from academic scholars or journalists: rather than treating artworks as distant objects of study or market commodities, they write from inside the processes, politics, and lived experiences that shape artistic production. Their essays often address urgent questions about identity, power, technology, and representation. Many use new media—video, performance, social platforms, and digital images—to expose how culture is made and circulated today. Others directly examine issues of class, racism, gender, labor, and equity, helping us understand how art both reflects and challenges broader social conventions. Throughout the semester, we will read and discuss writings by artists such as Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Walead Beshty, Hito Steyerl, Hannah Black, and others who have transformed the field by confronting structures of inequality, interrogating institutions, and using critical writing as a form of artistic practice. Their work opens questions that resonate far beyond the art world. How do images shape public opinion and social movements? Who gets to speak and be seen in contemporary culture? What counts as “authorship” or “truth” in the age of digital reproduction? How can creative practices address histories of exclusion or imagine more equitable futures? Each week, we will focus on a single artist, pairing discussion of their writing with a presentation of their artwork. Assignments will give you practice reading closely, writing clearly, and developing your own critical voice. Whether or not you plan to pursue art-related fields, the analytical skills you’ll gain—interpreting images, unpacking arguments, understanding cultural systems—will be valuable for thinking about the media-saturated world we live in. The course fosters a collaborative, discussion-based environment where all students can participate fully and bring diverse perspectives to our conversations. 

Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism.

The fourth millennium BC was a time of tremendous innovation in monumental architecture, the organization of urban space and developments in the visual arts in southern Mesopotamia. As settlements grew into city-states, monumental architectural works transformed the landscape. New technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, stone sculpture and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city of Uruk, the place of the setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sculpted images and monuments began to be inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The lecture introduces students to these extraordinary developments in early art and architecture of ancient Sumer (southern Iraq). Lectures will discuss votive statues, portraiture, image rituals, and the visual manifestation of the gods. The lectures also introduce the extraordinary developments in architecture and monuments.

This course introduces you to the rich and diverse tradition of Chinese art by focusing on materials and techniques. We will discuss a wide array of artistic media situated in distinct cultural contexts, examining bronzes, jade, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the imperial, aristocratic, literary, religious, and commercial milieus in which they were produced. In addition to developing your skills in visual-material analysis, this course will also acquaint you with the diverse cultures that developed in China’s center and periphery during its five thousand (plus) years of history. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how native artistic traditions in China interacted with those in regions such as the Mongolian steppe, Tibetan plateau, and Central Asia.

The course looks at works produced in the more than 20 countries that make up Latin America. Our investigations will take us from the Southern Cone nations of South America, up through Central American and the Caribbean, to Mexico to the north. We will cover styles from the colonial influences present in post-independence art of the early 19th century, to installation art found at the beginning of the 21st century. Along the way we will consider such topics as, the relationship of colonial style and academic training to forging an independent artistic identity; the emergence and establishment of a modern canon; experimentations in surrealism, neo-concretism, conceptual art, and performance. We will end the course with a consideration of Latinx artists working in the U.S.

This bridge seminar welcomes graduate and advanced undergraduate students with backgrounds in art history or computer science (and related fields). We will interrogate intersections in artificial intelligence, machine vision, neural networks, visual culture, imaging, and art. Students will gain a foundation in the histories and technologies underlying the recent rise of neural networks and machine vision, as well as the more recent rise of generative AI, especially image generation. With this foundation, we will investigate a range of artistic, technological, mass-media, and legal developments in visual culture and AI. In addition to readings and seminar meetings, we will take advantage of the ample public and private AI-related programming at Columbia and in New York: lectures, exhibitions, screenings, studio visits with artists, etc. Students will also have the opportunity to work with custom generative AI models.

Admission by application only. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.

In the early 15th century, technical refinements in glazing allowed oil painting in the Netherlands to achieve its characteristic transparency and brilliance, while technical advances in glass tinning enhanced the reflectivity of convex mirrors in Northern Europe, and the new steel quenching technique, developed by Milanese armorers,made armor as reflective as a mirror. These reflective mirrors and pieces of armors became quintessential pictorial objects and contributed to the specular metaphor that underpins Renaissance painting. The seminar will explore how the “mise en abyme” operated by the reflection reveals the reverse side of painting, in terms of pictorial composition, mediality and artistic conception within a specific cultural context. Addressing materials from the early 15th to the early 17th century, the seminar will analyze how the detail of the reflection offers a specific lens through which to understand the challenges and transformations of painting in early modern Europe.

The course will be run as a seminar, with meetings devoted to discussions. Students will be responsible for introducing and commen]ng on the weekly readings. They will also be asked to carry out a research project, culminating in a class presentation and a final paper.

Prerequisites: The seminar is open to graduate students and upper-level art history major undergraduates.

“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar contrasts the ideas of four urban thinkers and actors who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern metropolis and brought them to bear in and on New York City. The protagonists are Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We discuss the urban and architectural issues that animated them—and frequently pitted them against each other—as they variously strove to imagine and affect New York’s built future. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s celebration of Manhattan’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course reassesses the legacies of these figures, placing them into historical context and exploring the changing social, political, and cultural forces and landscapes that shaped their thinking. What “usable past,” to invoke Mumford again, do they offer to urbanism today? Concerned with both realities on the ground and big ideas about how to build and inhabit cities, class discussions revolve around key texts supplemented by slide lectures, film excerpts, and case-study presentations. Students are expected to make site visits and to carry out primary research utilizing archival and material resources available around New York City.

This bridge seminar investigates the history of science through the study of artworks and monuments and the materials and techniques of their manufacture. Because the course’s method hinges on the marriage of theory and practice, in addition to discussions in the seminar room, several sessions will take the form of workshops with artisans and conservators (e.g. stonemasons, illuminators, gardeners), or “laboratory meetings” where students will conduct their own hands-on experiments with materials as part of Professor Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to: metallurgy and cosmogeny, paint pigments and pharmacology, microarchitecture and agriculture, masonry and geology, manuscripts and husbandry, and gynecology and Mariology. Discussion and lab experiments enhanced thanks to the service and experience of Naomi Rosenkranz, Associate Director, The Center for Science and Society, The Making and Knowing Project.

This seminar explores the history and evolution of conceptual art and conceptualism across four major cities in the Americas: New York, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santiago de Chile. Between 1966 and 1975, artists and curators working in distinct geographical and political landscapes simultaneously foregrounded the notion that the “work” of art was an “idea” rather than an act of object-making. Together, they expanded this concept, producing innovative dematerialized, ephemeral, installation, site-specific, and participatory artworks and exhibitions. Instead of viewing U.S. conceptual art as contemporaneous but ultimately distinct from Latin American conceptualism (as is often assumed), this seminar adopts a hemispheric approach.

Our focus will be on the alternative circuits formed by artists, curators, and critics, as well as the dynamic movement of ideas and the distinct local imperatives that have shaped these global connections. Our investigation will be limited to a critical decade, allowing us to develop a depth of context while underscoring the porosity of dematerialized art across borders. We will examine how translations and mistranslations of art terminology, such as “conceptual art”, “Conceptual Art,” and “conceptualism,” can expand or evade rigid institutional categorizations. We will engage with archival materials and listen to the voices of prominent and outlier artists and curators, including Oscar Masotta, Lucy Lippard, Seith Siegelaub, Nemesio Antúnez, Jorge Glusberg, Catalina Parra, Cecilia Vicuña, Juan Pablo Langlois, Art & Language, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the Rosario Group, to trace the contours of post-1960s conceptualism anew.

Required course for first-year PhD Students in the Art History Department.

The seminar introduces graduate students to works of ancient art and architecture held in museum collections. It explores the modern history of their study as antiquities, a category which required a detailed connoisseurship set within a framework of newly arising aesthetic and racial theories and classifications that accompanied imperial archaeological endeavour. The seminar’s focus is on Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, as ancient works in their original context and as extracted objects that mark an imperial trail. Students will also be introduced to the development of archaeological field methods within the colonial context, and archaeology’s varied forms of visual documentation which became instrumental to imperial knowledge production: architectural and scientific illustrations, excavation images, and archaeological photography, and by the early twentieth century, the introduction of aerial photography as a way of visualizing sites and ruins. Taking ancient works and their display as a starting point, the seminar also explores the ways in which archaeology and the collecting of antiquities were inextricably linked to the technologies and economies of empire and colonialism. Reading and discussions include museum histories and theories of collecting, as well as the history and theories of archaeology and ancient art. Permission of the instructor is required before registration. Please submit a seminar application to the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

This course considers visual culture in Britain in the context of Black European studies. The discipline of cultural studies, which evolved in postwar Birmingham, intersected with the rise of black consciousness throughout Britain in the 1980s. How did the interactions of intellectuals and artists at this moment in the late 20th century lead to the creation of strong postcolonial theory and practice? We will consider the role of medium (particularly film and video), feminism, issues of diaspora, migration, and globalization, and the emergence of Black European Studies. Readings include texts by Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer. We will look at visual production and film by artists such as Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, and Khadija Saye among others.