Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Strategies of Being: African American Artists of the 20th Century Course Number: R1B Section 10 | CCN: 04879
Elaine Yau
This class explores the multiple ways in which American artists of African descent have resisted, revised, contended with, and re-imagined how race defines the limits and possibilities artistic production and interpretation. We will investigate how race — as an ideology...
Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art Course Number: HA 62 | CCN: 04892
Lisa Regan
The Italian Renaissance is often considered to be the beginning of modernity. This is because the Renaissance is the first coherent articulation of a number of ideas–from the role of the individual within society to the rise of capitalism– that...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: African Bodies in Film, Art, and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 9 | CCN: 04877
In this course, we will explore the politicization of the African body in a variety of visual media, including film, photography, sculpture, and fashion. We will begin by examining how visual representations of the African body have worked to “other&rdquo...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Spitting Image: the Avant-Gardes for/ Against the Image Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04874
Maia Beyler-Noily
This course will help students develop their analytic and writing skills through the discovery/discussion of a few key manifestations of the avant-garde within the visual arts (painting, photography, cinema and architecture) in France, from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. We...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Re:Imagin[in]g Photography Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04871
Laura Richard
This course will consider the rapidly changing role and implications of digitized images as medium and documentation–within the arts and as a social phenomenon. What does it mean to make and frame photographs in a world saturated with instantaneously dispersed...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Ambiguities Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 04868
Caty Telfair
The art world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was a tumult of controversy, debate, wild invention and stubborn reactionism that resulted in the radical transformation of centuries-long conventions of artistic...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The American Landscape in Painting and Practice Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04865
William Coleman
The art of landscape, including two-dimensional media, gardening, and contemporary earth art, has been particularly bound up with issues of national identity in the United States. For this reason, there has been a rich body of writing about the landscape...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: 15 Views of Manet’s Bar Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 04862
This course, a case study of sorts, is about a single painting, Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and the multiple, often contradictory ways in which art historians have sought to describe and interpret it. It is course...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Greek Athletics in Ancient Art Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 04859
Erin Babnik
This course is intended to allow students with an interest in art history to develop the basic writing, reading, research, and analysis skills that are necessary for formulating or engaging with substantive ideas about visual media. As a means to...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Camera and the City Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 04856
This course will examine the often complex, often contradictory ways photography was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to capture the development of the modern city. That is to say, the course will approach photography and modern...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Early Modern Dress and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 04853
Elizabeth McFadden
This introductory course is designed to sensitize students to discourses on dress and fashion in early modern Europe. First coined in England in 1529, the term “fashion,” as a modern concept, gained currency only in the mid-1670s during the reign...
Undergraduate Seminar: Global Surrealisms Course Number: 192M | CCN: 05345
Anneka Lenssen
This seminar explores surrealist ideas and practices and their legacy in the visual arts of the global twentieth century. We will take advantage of a recent proliferation of documentary studies of surrealism outside the West to consider a wide distribution...
Undergraduate Seminar: Reformation, Iconoclasm and the Origins of Northern Baroque Course Number: HA 192D | CCN: 05063
Koenraad Jonckheere
Although it was the era in which, for the very first time, writings on (religious) art were published in the Netherlands (both in Latin and the vernacular), the Iconoclastic era (1566-1585) has rarely drawn the attention of art historians. Yet...
Arts of Latin America Course Number: HA 88 | CCN: 04892
An introduction to the arts and visual culture of what is now Latin America from the earliest monumental art traditions of prehistory to the present. This course is not a comprehensive survey of all traditions and movements of art and...
Art & Science Course Number: HA C158/ History C188A | CCN: 04961
Massimo Mazzotti
In this course we explore the intersections of art and science in medieval, modern, and contemporary history. Our aim is twofold. First, to show the close interaction between these two fields, and of the way in which historically they have...
Undergraduate Seminar: Photography, Archaeology and Maya Ruins: the Frenchman Désiré Charnay in Mexico Course Number: HA 192L | CCN: 05300
Lisa Trever, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
This seminar will focus on the extraordinary photographs of Mexico by the French nineteenth-century photographer Désiré Charnay during his first voyage of 1857-1861. Already an experienced photographer (he took up the medium in 1853 in Paris), he photographed Maya ruins...
Undergraduate Seminar: Transatlantic Modernisms Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 05065
This seminar explores the art and material culture of the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Class sessions will be organized around case studies of diverse subjects in diverse media, including Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic Art...
Visual Cultures of South Asia Course Number: HA 30 | CCN: 04892
South Asia brings to mind conflicting images of the glamour of Bollywood and abject poverty. Yet, this vast geographic terrain has a long history of complex political cultures, multivalent religious ideals, and diverse creative expressions. Our engagement with the visual...
Southern Baroque Art Course Number: HA 170 | CCN: 04976
“Baroque” is an all-encompassing term that has been used to describe an amazing number of seventeenth-century artists and architects: Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Bernini, Poussin, and Velázquez to name a few. Rather than trying to convince you that they are in...
Theory of the Copy Course Number: HA 190T / Rhet 136 | CCN: 05033
Winnie Wong
The course surveys critical controversies surrounding fakes, forgeries, multiples, counterfeits, imitations, and appropriations from the Late Renaissance to the present day, in European, American, Australian and Chinese art. Each of the images and objects we will examine sparked extensive debate...
Undergraduate Seminar: Priest, Warrior, King: Images as Propaganda in the Ancient Near East Course Number: HA 192B | CCN: 05057
Sabrina Maras
This seminar will take an in-depth look at royal art as a tool for political propaganda and the indoctrination of cultural and religious beliefs in the world of the ancient Near East (c. 3000 BC- 320 BC). Emphasis will be...
Buddhist Icons in Japan Course Number: HA 134B | CCN: 04937
This course introduces the study of Buddhist icons in Japan within broader visual cultures in Asia. We will consider exemplary and unusual images of the Buddha and other deities; miraculous and secret icons; iconotexts and relics; and art historical praxis....
Prayers, Paradox, and Peasants: Art of the Northern Renaissance Course Number: HA 190E | CCN: 05024
In 1566, the great iconoclasm in the Netherlands signaled the revolt of a modern, middle-class, trade-based polity against its distant Catholic monarch, the King of Spain. In the previous 150 years, the Netherlands had undergone remarkably rapid social, religious, and...
Introduction to Greek, Roman, and Medieval Art Course Number: HA 10 | CCN: 04880
Andrew Stewart, Diliana Angelova
This introduction to the arts of ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Medieval Europe is designed for newcomers to the history of art and/or to the study of these cultures. The lectures will survey 2500 years of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and...
Art, Architecture, and Design in the United States (1782-present) Course Number: HA 185A | CCN: 05000
Looking at major developments in painting and architecture from Romanticism to Post-modernism (with some attention to sculpture, city planning, design, and photography), this course addresses art and its social context over the last two centuries in what is now the...
Histories of Performance Art Course Number: HA 190H | CCN: 05033
In 1971, UC Irvine graduate Chris Burden was shot in the arm with a gun in front of a small audience; this act has become a classic in the history of performance art. How might we understand this gesture of...
The Classical Painting Tradition in China Course Number: HA 131B | CCN: 04925
Ping Foong
Beginning with the post-Han period (after the third century) and ending with China’s final imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644-1912), this course will take a chronological and topical approach to the classical tradition of Chinese painting as it was expressed...
Special Seminar – “Money and Representation” Course Number: HA 298 | CCN: 05209
This seminar will begin on Wed 9/24 and end on Wed 10/22.
“Money,” T. J. Clark has written, “is the root form of representation in bourgeois society.” The proposition turns on the set of questions it raises, about markets and...
Regionalism, Nationalism, Globalism Course Number: HA 285 | CCN: 05159
This seminar will focus on critical models of place and its influence developed in the twentieth and twenty-first century – an era in which many have nostalgically lamented the demise of the local. Considering various ways we might productively position...
Formalism, Aestheticism, and Eroticism in Modern Art-Writing Course Number: HA 290.3 | CCN: 05168
This seminar investigates the relations between formalist procedures, aestheticist philosophies, and erotic investments in art-writing from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. How did major modern art-writers deal with the erotic and sexual content of artworks in the past...
Silent Archives Course Number: HA 290.2 | CCN: 05165
The 1980s arrival of an archive fever, le mal d’archive, saw the development of new methods of fieldwork and research in visual studies and art history. This, in turn, provoked a questioning of the conceit of the archive as a...
Teaching History of Art Pedagogy Course Number: HA 375 | CCN: 05249
Instructor approval required. This seminar satisfies a University-wide requirement that all first-time Graduate Student Instructors take a pedagogy course. It can be taken concurrently with a first teaching assignment or in the semester before beginning teaching. The class will encourage...
Graduate Proseminar Course Number: HA 200 | CCN: 05150
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the way in which art history developed from the late 19th through the late 20th century, and to allow them to frame art history’s current practices with that development in...
Feminist and Queer Theories in Art Course Number: HA 290.1 | CCN: 05162
This course proposes that recent art objects and artistic actions have helped catalyze and shape advanced feminist and queer thought, and asks how recent practices in the visual arts have been understood within theories about desire, activism, affect, loss, and...
Material Culture—The Interpretation of Objects Course Number: HA 203 | CCN: 05153
Margaretta Lovell, Patricia Berger
This seminar looks at both material culture theory and the practice of interpreting objects in the West and in Asia. It draws on the practices and questions of multiple disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, and art history. We will...
