fall 2018 courses
Click on course title for syllabus PDF.
In this seminar, the genesis of the discipline of art history, its founding and continuing assumptions are examined through close readings of key texts in the discipline up until the period of high formalism in the 1950s. Readings are chosen from among the following thinkers: Kugler, Schnaase, Morelli, Riegl, Wolfflin, Focillon, Panofsky, and Warburg. Student reports focus on others. Discussions introduce issues regarding the rise of art history in universities, professional organizations, and conferences, and the relation between museum and academia. Formalism, contextualism, universal history, and the relation between nationalism and art are explored.
The history and theory of contemporary art is shrouded with allegories of fairness. These mythologies affect visions of justice, material routes of trade, questions of authorship, and the ethics of artistic capital. We will take the “fair” as a central point of departure for this class. World’s Fairs, gendered epidermal fairness, fair trade, and transactional artistic fares, all of these histories take the realm of the visual as their vehicles to just representations. How do we reconcile fairness in the history of contemporary art and the artist? What visions of justice prevent us from actualizing ethical relationships? How are exploitation and alienation central to artistic production? We will explore artistic genres across temporalities such as the 17th Century Dutch Art Market versus the shadow archive of Dutch colonial trade routes; World’s Fair exhibits and postcolonial performance responses; Victorian photographs and gendered affiliations; and finally, the figure of the intern and (artistic) collective responses to free labor (like the Carrot Worker’s Collective).
Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic?a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Crucial to this class is the artwork of practitioners like Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, AfriCOBRA, Aubrey Williams, Drexiya, Yinka Shonibare, and Renee Green. We will focus primarily on the visual history and cultural impact of the Middle Passage as discussed through the writings of Afro-Caribbean, West African, Black American, and Black British scholars. We will work with concepts like “native” visual forms, the coloniality of painting, Negritude, and the anticolonial imagination.