Art History and Archaeology

Discussion section for course: AHIS BC2528 Contemporary Art in New York City: 1968-1983

Discussion section for course: AHIS BC2528 Contemporary Art in New York City: 1968-1983

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.

This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the peoples living in Italy—the Etruscans, Italics, Greeks, Celts—from their emergence in the early first millennium BCE to their eventual absorption within the system of “Roman” art. While the arts of Etruria will form the backbone of the course, its conceptual focus will be on the densely entangled web that connected the diverse visual landscapes and creative practices of the Italian peninsula both to each other and to external centers of artistic production, from Cyprus and Carthage to Syria and the cultures of northern Europe. In addition to intercultural connectivity— imports and exports, convergences and divergences, parallels and unique features—special attention will be paid to the socio-political and religious dimensions of art and architecture. Both iconic and non-canonical objects will be examined, ranging from furniture and weaponry to anatomical votives and mythological paintings. This lecture is the first in a three-year cycle that also includes “Roman Art and Architecture” and “Rome Beyond Rome.”

The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses.

How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision?  Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions.

We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues.

Shaped by diverse histories of migration, racialization, cultural exchange, and community formation, Asian American art resists simple definition. This course begins by tracing the visual and material histories that prefigured the formation of Asian American identity, and explores how artists of Asian descent in the US have engaged questions of identity, race, politics, history, community, and aesthetics. Rather than treating Asian American art as a self-evident field, we will ask what the category makes visible or obscures, and how its study might revise established narratives of American art. Topics include early trade networks and chinoiserie, representations of Chinatown, Japanese American incarceration, modernism and abstraction, art and activism, cross-racial encounters, multiculturalism, and contemporary critical theories. Complementing the field’s longstanding emphasis on the West Coast, the course will pay special attention to the histories of Asian American art in New York.Shaped by diverse histories of migration, racialization, cultural exchange, and community formation, Asian American art resists simple definition. This course begins by tracing the visual and material histories that prefigured the formation of Asian American identity, and explores how artists of Asian descent in the US have engaged questions of identity, race, politics, history, community, and aesthetics. Rather than treating Asian American art as a self-evident field, we will ask what the category makes visible or obscures, and how its study might revise established narratives of American art. Topics include early trade networks and chinoiserie, representations of Chinatown, Japanese American incarceration, modernism and abstraction, art and activism, cross-racial encounters, multiculturalism, and contemporary critical theories. Complementing the field’s longstanding emphasis on the West Coast, the course will pay special attention to the histories of Asian American art in New York.

Between 1968 and 1983, New York City was radically transformed by mass social movements on the one hand, and the forces of Wall Street and real estate development on the other. Across the underground, SoHo lofts, and corporate boardrooms, artists learned to move, and if needed, hustle, to negotiate an urban environment that was not only rapidly changing but increasingly governed by market speculation. Starting with the social uprisings of 1968, we explore how canonized figures such as Donald Judd and Martha Rosler, alongside avant-garde artists Faith Ringgold, Melvin Edwards, and Juan Downey, whose innovations only belatedly received due recognition, broke with artistic traditions. Turning to everyday domestic goods, textiles, barbed wire, and Portapak video, these artists dismantled traditional objects and institutions while founding alternative, artist-run spaces and activist spaces. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, art in New York was radically transformed by an influx of finance. Downtown dealers Mary Boone and Leo Castelli manufactured an art boom through speculative wait lists, and the enterprises of art stars Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel thrived. Others lampooned the market-driven mutations of art, as seen in Lynda Benglis’s 1974 erotic interventions in Artforum magazine, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s critiques of white patronage, and Barnard alumna Laurie Anderson’s parody of televisual spectacle in O Superman (1981). We also explore other Barnard and Columbia alumnae, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her retooling of unpaid domestic labor, and Joan Jonas’s deconstructions of commercialized femininity. The course concludes in 1983 with the opening of Trump Tower and the simultaneous explosion of East Village galleries–and a critical reflection on how the legacies of these decades continue to shape the contemporary art of New York. In class discussion sections offer students close engagement with the course’s artworks in New York’s art institutions and through archives, spanning performance documentation, artists’ zines, magazines, and exhibition ephemera.

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.

The Western Hemisphere was a setting for outstanding accomplishments in the visual arts for millennia before Europeans set foot in the so-called “New World.” This course explores the early indigenous artistic traditions of what is now Latin America, from early monuments of the formative periods (e.g., Olmec and Chavín), through acclaimed eras of aesthetic and technological achievement (e.g., Maya and Moche), to the later Inca and Mexica (i.e., Aztec) imperial periods. Our subject will encompass diverse genre including painting and sculpture, textiles and metalwork, architecture and performance from about 1500 BC to AD 1550. Attention will focus on the two cultural areas that traditionally have received the most attention from researchers: Mesoamerica (including areas of what are today Mexico, Guatemala, and part of Honduras) and the Central Andes (principally Peru and part of Bolivia). We will also critically consider the drawing of those boundaries—both spatial and temporal—that have defined “Ancient American” or “Pre-Columbian” art history to date. More than a survey of periods, styles, and monuments, in this course we will critically assess the varieties of evidence—archaeological, epigraphic, historical, ethnographic, and scientific—available for interpretations of ancient Latin American art and culture.

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 seminar will focus on the invention of the public monument as a commemorative genre, and the related concepts of time, memory and history in the ancient Near East (west Asia), Egypt, and Greece. Public monuments will be studies in conjunction with ancient texts (in translation) as well as historical criticism, archaeological and art historical theories. The seminar considers ancient monuments in relation to, and in the context of, modern concepts of monuments, history and heritage and the debates surrounding them. The seminar also introduces these methodologies and debates to students.

This seminar examines how architecture was conceived, represented, and disseminated through drawings, prints, and books in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Bringing together the study of manuscripts, architectural drawings, printed treatises, and reproductive media such as woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, the course investigates the central role of the page as a critical site of experimentation and the production of architectural knowledge in the Renaissance. By breaking down traditional divisions between media, it seeks to elucidate interconnected graphic and textual practices. It also aims to understand how the mediation of architecture on the page conditioned its reception across a range of contexts. The weekly seminar is structured thematically and roughly chronologically, and will consist of discussion of primary and secondary sources, an examination of visual material, and student presentations. We will also draw on a variety of critical theory while also being grounded in an object-based approach, utilizing especially the rich collections of Avery Library.

This course offers an introduction to the history of design from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, with emphasis placed on the twentieth century. Attention will be paid to a wide range of design specializations, including industrial design and product design, fashion and textile design, automotive design, and graphic design. Proceeding in roughly chronological order, it will explore key themes in the history of design, including matters of taste and etiquette, social reform, the production of value, design education, branding and marketing, and recent trends in sustainable, speculative, and digital design. The course also considers the relationship between design and other modes of material production, including architecture, fine art, and craft.

In the past decade, public monuments in the United States have inspired rigorous, sometimes violent, debate. This seminar considers how America’s monumental landscape was constructed in the twentieth century and how it is changing in the 21st.  Through class readings, guest speakers and field trips, we will explore artists’ responses to public commissions and consider how these sculptures shape how people move through the spaces around them.  A spring break trip to Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Montgomery, Alabama will give first-hand experience of some of the most recent responses to colonial history, slavery and its legacies, and war.

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

In this seminar, we examine the centrality of print-based media for the Latin American avant-garde during the twentieth century, when artists turned to technologies of reproduction to forge geopolitical agency and sustain cultural exchange. As a theoretical precursor, we begin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Indigenous and viceregal artists mobilized the “logic of the copy” to reformulate invention and lineage within–and on the edges–of European prints. We then explore subsequent print-based experiments, from the early twentieth-century Parisian poèmes-peints and typographic matrices of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro to the anti-imperialist networks of Mexican graphic workshops which reached artists in Harlem and post-independence India. Throughout the course, experimental print and media shift our attention away from art historical ontologies that privilege European originality and influence toward a material culture strategically grounded in the copy, distributed authorship and solidarity. Students will engage in printmaking workshops and view works on site and in the collections of NYC museums and archives. 

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 course explores architecture in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The time frame starts with the conquest of England in 1066 and ends with the appointment of Gothic experts in 1399 to advise on the construction of Milan Cathedral towards the end of the Middle Ages. The first historical event coincides with the creation of architecture of a bewildering scale while the second reflects the end of building without architectural treatises or architectural theory - in a modern sense. The course will also introduce students to new digital technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry for the study of medieval architecture. No preliminary knowledge of medieval history or architectural history is needed, and no knowledge of digital technologies or specific computer skills is expected.

The monuments selected belong to a period that starts when architecture moved away from Roman antique models and ends just before the re-adoption of Classical standards in the Renaissance. In this course the originality of medieval architecture, its relationship with earlier and later monuments, and the dramatic effort involved in its creation will be discussed. Major themes of medieval society such as pilgrimages, crusades, piety, the cult of relics, and the social and intellectual context of the Middle Ages are also part of this lecture. In the first weeks, important concepts of medieval society and its architecture will be presented in combination with a number of new technologies recently adopted in the field. These introductory classes will offer the foundations needed to understand artistic and architectural developments in the Middle Ages. While the course will focus on architecture, different media are included when they provide valuable information on the artistic and cultural context to which buildings belong. New technologies serve as a basis for a critical discussion about the changes in method introduced by new media and technologies in the field of architectural history.

This seminar aims to understand Hadrian’s Villa by contextualizing it within the broader network of Roman imperial residences—palaces and villas alike—and by focusing on the relationship between architectural spaces and decoration on the one hand, and social practices and daily routines on the other. Basing on the findings of Columbia’s own excavations, special attention will be devoted to the cultic life at the villa, with particular emphasis on its non-elite inhabitants and the relationship between “high” and “low” forms of religiosity.

The scope of the seminar is interdisciplinary: applications of students from all departments are welcome. Familiarity with Greek and Roman art, architecture, and history is strongly recommended.

This seminar examines the radical transformation of the visual arts during the French Revolution. We will focus on how this moment of upheaval infiltrated artistic representations and cultural practices, along with the methodological consequences of this synergy for studying the period. Revolutionary reality never simply meant political reform; it was people’s entire relationship to the world that was transformed. The arts and, more broadly, the visual played a central role in this process. We will explore three larger themes: the relationship between current events and artistic production, especially in the case of painting and print; Paris as a space for new visual experiences, as a result of outdoor festivals and other public demonstrations; and the portrayal of new actors, such as the sans-culotte and the revolutionary martyr. We will be attentive to the fact that images occupy an ambivalent place in the historiography of the French Revolution: their proliferation makes it impossible to ignore them, yet they often play a marginal role as sources that can effectively help us interpret the period. With this in mind, we will read the work of historians, cultural historians, and art historians reflecting diverse engagements with images, along with primary sources focusing on the lived experience of the Revolution (Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Madame de Staël, among others). We will put a particular emphasis on what can be gained from careful visual analysis, looking at canonical works of art—including those by Jacques-Louis David, whose 2026 Louvre exhibition contributed new insights—as well as lesser-known productions, particularly prints and drawings.

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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The postwar analysis of contemporary art has jettisoned many of the fields of the discipline of art history: iconography; workshop; style, in favor of a reading based on the semiology of the sign. This has transformed the discourse on contemporary art, especially as that concerns Cubism and Abstraction. The course will focus on semiology and Barthes’ practice of it, with recourse to his major works: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, S/Z, Mythologies, and Camera Lucida.

How does diagramming make subjects available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? How do diagrams thwart understanding? We might think of diagrams as fixed forms of imaging that passively reflect existing notions, but by exploring recent work on diagramming by historians of art as well as scholars in the philosophy of mind, this course will study the ways in which diagrams can function as creative spaces in which thinkers can contemplate the possibilities of innovative juxtapositions and systems of organizing information.

In the last twenty-five years the historical study of museums has ballooned into a veritable separate discipline known as museum studies, which deals with the history of collections, the ideology of the museum as a public institution, and the politics of exhibitions. It is not the intention of this seminar to present an overview of this vast literature but rather to posit a set of questions proper to architectural history that intersect with both the history and historiography of the museum since the mid-18th century, with an overwhelming emphasis on the art (as opposed to the natural history, science, technology, history, or literary) museum.  The seminar intertwines two themes at vastly different scales: the inclusive one of the architectural history of the art museum as a building – including all aspects of interior disposition, display strategies and technologies, lighting, exterior form, and urban spatial disposition – and the more highly specialized one of architecture as a subject matter for collecting and display in the museum context.   Within art history the focus has been largely on the development of both the architectural and institutional structure of the art museum; but the fact that architecture overlaps issues of aesthetics, of history, and of science and technology, invites us to consider both the question of the architecture of the museum and architecture in the museum from a more comprehensive view of the museum type.  In both a set of questions recur: the idea of de-contextualization, of aesthetic experience divorced from use and daily environment, of classification and display, of education and/or vs. entertainment, or cultural hegemony and colonialism. 

This course proposes that a significant strand of contemporary art and exhibition-making activates the political and epistemic force of the 1955 Bandung Conference and its afterlives in the tricontinental and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a living methodology. We will examine how the Bandung Conference’s legacy of anti-colonial struggle, political nonalignment, and Third World solidarity gives rise to a new kind of art and a new kind of exhibition—both occupying an in-between position that refuses the terms of Western modernism and the socially engaged realism promoted by many on the left in the midtwentieth century. Rather than treating Bandung as a fixed historical event, we will approach it as a methodological orientation that produces this third space of practice and display, structuring how artists and curators alike rethink sovereignty and democratic cultural exchange.

Why and what do we draw? What were the tools and materials for drawing sacred architectural complexes in the lands of Islam (and beyond)? How were drawing used? And for which purposes or objectives? This course is design to give a large overview (from the early medieval times till the beginning of the 20 th century) of the different historical trajectories of the “Drawing of the Mosque” for different purposes, from the architect’s drawings to the manuscript illustrators’ ones, and from the pilgrims’ memorial drawing of sacred sites to the academic educational, scientific and also ideological ones. The course involved theoretical discussions based on readings and interactions with drawings and artifacts in the varied collections on campus (Butler and Avery libraries), as well as in the city (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

This seminar contributes to a larger project consisting of an exhibition and a catalogue devoted to early medieval Chinese pictorial stones in the collections of American museums. These stone objects, mostly dating to the sixth century CE, were originally panels from sarcophagi and funerary couches. They are carved with a rich variety of motifs, ranging from narrative scenes of filial offspring to apotropaic and mythical creatures. The occupants of these sarcophagi and couches were members of the elite during the Northern Dynasties (386-582 CE)—a period in northern China dominated by states founded by the Xianbei people from the Mongolian steppes—including Xianbei princes, Central Asian immigrants, and Chinese men of letters. Since their acquisition by American museums in the early twentieth century, many of these stones have become highlights of their respective collections and have played a central role in the study of early Chinese art. However, no special exhibition has ever been devoted to these objects, and a comprehensive, high-quality catalogue has yet to be published. In the seminar, by focusing on the exhibition and catalogue, students will develop crucial research and curatorial skills, including object study, archival research, writing catalogue essays and object entries, and exhibition planning. The final assignments of the program will be an exhibition proposal and catalogue essays and entries.