Art History (MA)

Explores ideas of the “normal” and “non-normal” in art and design today. Through readings, guest speakers, and projects, the class investigates both traditional and unusual depictions of bodies, race, and gender, along with the art and design practices developed in order to represent and understand them.

Credits: 4

Since the 1800s, the avant-gardes have tried to resist the delimited role of fine art in Western culture. In this course, students examine the strategies that avant-garde artists have used to reconnect their art practice with the more contentious areas of social and political life.

Credits: 4

Participants in this seminar propose, research, plan, and coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming to be undertaken the following semester (as part of the course, Exhibition II). These exhibitions will take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ARH5035 Or ARH5037

Participants in this seminar coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming based on the plans and preparations of the previous semester (conducted as part of the course, Exhibition I). These exhibitions take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ARH5025

In this seminar, students and the instructor co-curate an exhibition for the Neuberger Museum of Art. The class works on all aspects of the exhibition with the instructor and museum staff. Students learn about the various functions of departments, including curatorial, education, exhibition design, development, and public relations, putting exhibition theory into practice. Exhibition topics vary.

Credits: 4

An investigation of the historical development and function of museums. Students examine the growth of collections and exhibitions, along with the various roles that museums have played in relation to art history and society around the world. Central to this course and its final project is the question: “What should a museum be in the 21st century?”

Credits: 4

A rigorous examination of the historical, theoretical, and concrete concerns of curatorial practice. Course-work culminates in a complete exhibition proposal.

Credits: 4

Addresses the tension between art and document, or making and recording, in twentieth-century visual culture. The first half investigates the aesthetics and politics of documentary photography and film, including conflicts between realism and modernism. The second half examines the use of documents and documentation by postmodern art and subsequent transformations in the style, form, and truth-content of documentary practices.

Credits: 4

Takes a broad view of the aesthetic, historical, and conceptual development of modern and contemporary art and architecture of the Middle East. Topics include legacies of Orientalism; colonialism and decolonization; religion and secularization; relationships between art and nation-building; the rise of petrocultures; and questions of reception in the context of global contemporary art.

Credits: 4

Explores the history of twentieth-century architecture through the modern city, tracing the rise and occasional decline of the metropolis internationally. Students analyze how architects and urban planners proposed new visions of urban life and devised solutions for urgent social and political problems related to urbanization (e.g. public space, housing, gentrification, globalization).

Credits: 4

Explore the history of colors within global art history in a global context. Factors like the availability and cost of pigments, trade routes, religious and political meanings will be considered, along with the impact of industrial color production, globalization, marketing and digital technology on our understanding of colors.

Credits: 4

Train students in the myriad forms of writing required for a curatorial career through sustained focus on an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art and additional exhibitions at metropolitan area museums. Students produce several forms of written materials, including research precis, funding proposals, and wall labels, as well as consult with curators on and off campus. (57 words)

Credits: 4

Introduce students to digital tools required for a curatorial career from collections databases to social media. In addition to theoretical readings, students receive hands-on training with professionals at area museums, produce materials for their own personal brands, and write a reflection paper considering the role of digital technologies in their art historical and curatorial practice to date. (57 words)

Credits: 4

Explores a variety of Afro-Atlantic art forms from 1801, the founding the first multi-racial republic of Haïti to the present. Iconography, style, and materials are considered, along with issues of colonialism, religion, and gender. Students engage with both primary sources and recent scholarly analyses, as well as the collections at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Credits: 4

The major theoretical orientations and methodologies associated with art historical study are discussed and critiqued. Methods reviewed range from connoisseurship to the iconographical and social-historical. Theories surveyed include formalist, Marxist, literary, feminist, psychoanalytic, and new-historicist concerns that dominated 20th-century interpretative practice. Required for MA students.

Credits: 4

How and why do certain artworks become embroiled in major public debates, political scandals, and legal disputes? Beginning with the 1863 Salon des Refusés and continuing to the present day through an itinerary that travels the globe, students will examine the role of controversy in defining art, society, and how we imagine the relationship between the two.

Credits: 4

Examines the relationship between the traditional crafts and the upheavals of modernity. Beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century and continuing to the present day, students explore how craft is framed as protest against industrialization, as utopian model of labor and exchange, and as aesthetic transformation.

Credits: 4

Examine the display of objects in principle and in practice from the early modern through the modern era. Focus on the way meanings were created through acts of presentation across a range of sites, including scientific collections, cabinets of wonders, salons, stores, shop windows and museums.

Credits: 4

This course focuses on American traditions of art, looking at racial construction, class hierarchies, gender and representation, patronage and politics, as well as the impact of new technologies. Together we ask how did colonialism, notions of frontier, forced enslavement, ideas about domesticity, and other historical phenomena shape American conceptions of art and artists to 1914?

Credits: 4

A study of African American painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, drawings, photography, film, and vernacular and popular art. The course begins with the Afro-Atlantic era and covers images made by Southern artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as artists associated with the “New Negro” movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and postmodernism.

Credits: 4

Focuses on women artists and their place within the art-historical narrative of the 20th century. Students examine both the diverse practices of women artists and the reception of their work by critics, dealers, and collectors.

Credits: 4

Examines the history of photography within both the historical and the neo-avant-gardes. Special attention is given to photographic activities of the Weimar Republic, the Soviet avant-garde, surrealism, and American pictorialism, modernism, and FSA documentary work, as well as the postwar formations of the New York School, conceptual art, and photographic postmodernism.

Credits: 4

Treats the history of photography in a global framework. Topics include the transformation of photography as it spreads from Europe to Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East; the decentering of European modernism in postmodernism; the role of photography in colonialism and decolonization; and its role in fine art as well as vernacular portraiture, journalism, documentary, and other fields.

Credits: 4

Explores the ways in which ability and disability are conceived, represented, and negotiated in museum culture. Weekly discussions, visiting lecturers and screenings will examine key theoretical concepts, practical case studies, as well as the use of educational and internet-based media as assistive technologies. Specific topics will include: museums and the establishment of norms; the category of “assistive technology”; inclusive architecture and design; staring and other practices of looking; disability and performance art; media advocacy and activism.

Credits: 4

Examines the photographic medium from its earliest forms through the 1920s and 1930s. Topics include technical innovations, manipulations and interventions, function and reception, the relationship to the fine arts, and debates about photography’s claims of realism.

Credits: 4

Painting has long been accompanied by theories describing its abilities to attract, deceive, and even harm. This course looks at key theories and debates in the history of the medium (e.g., Rubenistes vs. Poussinistes, painting’s role among pluralistic practices) to better understand how both making and seeing a painting are colored by a history of ideas.

Credits: 4

Examining the intersections of visual culture, communications, and disability, this course reconsiders our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture; at the same time it also develops new understandings of disability and the technocultural environments in which it exists. Students explore critical accounts of disability, measuring them against theories of the visual, technology and communication.

Credits: 4

Despite a growing interest in the work of the Russian avant-garde, there is still relatively little known about the artists of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. This course addresses the broad scope and multidisciplinary practice of Russian modernism, from the shocking primitivism of The Rite of Spring to the cold pragmatism of constructivism.

Credits: 4

Design is both a noun and a verb. This course deals with the idea of design as a cultural phenomenon and a creative practice. Contemporary design and its making are situated within a broad methodological framework, drawing from existing and emerging theories in anthropology, art history, film studies, criticism, the history of technology, and architecture.

Credits: 4

A seminar that considers topics and theoretical models that inform students’ understanding of modern and contemporary art. Within this framework, critics, art historians, and artists are invited to give lectures and lead seminars on their particular research interests. Required for MA students.

Credits: 4

A directed investigation of a specific set of issues in contemporary art and culture. The focus, which changes from year to year, introduces students to critical and theoretical models central to contemporary cultural analysis. Invited artists, art historians, and critics participate through individual lectures, seminars, or directed collaborations with students. Required for MA students.

Credits: 4

Focuses on contemporary Latin American artists working in and out of Latin America: Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Adriana Varejao, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Garaicoa, Betsabeé Romero, Javier Tellez, Nadín Ospina, Tania Bruguera, and Nicolás de Jesus. Students analyze the way these artists address such questions as urban violence, social inequality, pollution, emigration, and national identity.

Credits: 4

Examines the history of design as it parallels the history of technology and industrialization. Covering a variety of design disciplines, including architecture and urban planning, graphic design, fashion, and industrial design, this course focuses less on aesthetics than on the cultural programs that have shaped buildings, objects, and communication systems for more than two centuries.

Credits: 4

A practical course in art criticism, which meets regularly in New York. Contemporary works of art form the basis for lectures, discussions, and written essays

Credits: 4

Examines how activists and artists have interrogated questions of “normalcy.” We will read deeply in the history of disability rights, as well as theories of personhood, identity, and representation. In so doing, we use ideas from philosophy, anthropology, feminist criticism, and literature to research and explore how art, media and performance studies present bodies deemed nonnormative.

Credits: 4

Examines a selection of poetry, short stories, novels, and films from different historical periods that foreground the visual arts through various means, including the character of the artist, the practices of art, the nature of creativity, and the critical reception of art.

Credits: 4

European art from the French Revolution to 1900, with movements in France, Germany, and England receiving particular attention. Major artists studied include David, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, Frederich, Constable, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Monet, and Gauguin.

Credits: 4

The history of performance art is the story of an obsession with changing the world. This course explores the work of artists, curators, and scholars—from 1950 to the present, in North America, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe—who have invested the form with their hopes, dreams, and fears of making art that is more real than everyday life.

Credits: 4

An examination of contemporary art outside of the traditional media of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Looking at painting-based performances of the 1950s, feminist body art, guerrilla television, and current political interventions based in digital media, students identify the strategies artists used to create new forms, and assess their success in modifying our understanding of the world.

Credits: 4

From photography’s 19th-century origins to contemporary practices, this survey course explores how and why photography became central to arguments about the modernity of African visual art. Moving from one regional focus to the next, students examine photography’s role in expeditionary and ethnographic projects, identity formation, political activism, spirituality, documenting the landscape, and representing the fantastical and the everyday.

Credits: 4

A variety of intersections between extreme mental conditions and the production of works of art during the modern period are investigated. Topics include connections between creativity and mental instability, artists with a history of mental disorder, and theories about stylistic or formal affinities between madness and art.

Credits: 4

This seminar focuses on uses of history—as both subject and method—in art around the turn of the 21st century. Within a globally comparative frame, students investigate contemporary theories and practices that take stock of the past in order to reimagine the future at a moment when the world seems simultaneously more connected and more fractured than ever before.

Credits: 4

An examination of critical and theoretical writing by artists about art. The course considers texts from various eras, but focuses primarily on 20th-century and contemporary material. Artists’ writings are analyzed in the context of art criticism as a whole, and students also have the opportunity try their hand at criticism.

Credits: 4

This seminar delves into the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of museum and exhibition practices in the U.S., from encyclopedic museums to storefront galleries. In addition to classroom discussion, students visit arts institutions in the area to consider collection and exhibition-related issues and to learn more about the operational function and structure of museums.

Credits: 4

African art and visual culture are considered in the context of African film. African youth, who make up most of the continent’s population, have had a marked effect on many sociopolitical phenomena. The films screened address African youth culture and such issues as the new independence (1960s), post-apartheid South Africa, youth rebels, religious fundamentalism, HIV, hip-hop and digital culture, and global emigration.

Credits: 4

A broad look at modern and contemporary Mexican art, using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Special emphasis is on the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and its aftermath throughout the 20th century. Students analyze links between the visual arts (including mural painting, prints, and photography) and the literature, the popular scene and the mainstream, the street art and the gallery art.

Credits: 4

Supervision of research and writing of the master’s thesis. ARH 5990 and 5991 must be taken in consecutive semesters.

Credits: 4

Supervision of research and writing of the master’s thesis. ARH 5990 and 5991 must be taken in consecutive semesters.

Credits: 4