Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Reading Meaning, Writing Meaning: Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 21888
Tuesday, Thursday: 8:00-9:30am
The Wikipedia tab of a Google search for the Arnolfini Portrait states that its central subject matter is “marriage,” but anyone who spends time viewing this enigmatic masterpiece–either digitally or surrounded by an excited crowd in London’s National Gallery–will surely...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Golden Age of Dead Media: Nostalgia in Modern Chinese Visual Culture Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 21889
Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am
Contemporary media culture has been described as “retromania,” “the aesthetics of obsolescence,” and “the golden age of dead media.” Our quotidian experiences with popular culture and new media, it seems, are haunted with memories of old, dead media. Contemporary China too is...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Indigenous and Colonial Mural Painting in Latin America Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 21916
Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm
Mural paintings represent the human impulse to visually register social, economic, political, and historical circumstances over the walls of different architectural structures, at various periods of time. Although mural paintings are omnipresent in the lives of people today, it is...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Work and the Idioms of Space, Movement, and Materials Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 21917
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
In this course, we will explore engagements with ‘work’ and ‘worksites’ through visual means and media. We will aim to navigate the stakes, ethics, and affects expressed in and through work as a mode of knowing, making, and performance. We...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Shadow Art History: Specters, Trauma, and Hauntings of the Unseen Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 21918
Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm
Art history, as an academic discipline, is founded on a belief in close looking. Indeed, there is much to be learned about history and about the world from carefully analyzing visual and material culture. But there is also much to...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art Under Pressure: American Art in Times of Upheaval Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 21919
Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30-5:00pm
How can art still be meaningful in times of crisis? This course will examine how art in the United States has responded to intense national conflicts and challenges. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Civil Rights Movement, we will look at...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art under Fascism: Italy, Germany, and Argentina, 1918-1955 Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 21920
Tuesday, Thursday: 5:00-6:30pm
This course aims to develop students’ critical thinking, looking, reading, and writing skills through close analysis of visual art and aesthetic theory, with a particular emphasis on twentieth-century art under fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Argentina. To better understand...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Esoterica Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24127
Monday, Wednesday: 8:00-9:30am
Esoteric art is obscure and intentionally so. Unintelligible to the uninitiated, esoterica is shaped by systems of thought and practice at odds with institutional or normative modes of vision, especially those commonly classified as scientific and modern. This class examines...
Survey of Western Art Course Number: HA 10 | CCN: 25646
Mon, Wed, Fri: 1:00-2:00pm
This course is an examination of ancient art from the Prehistoric to the Medieval Periods – within the western perspective It will introduce you to looking at and interpreting art in different ways, exploring the relationship of various visual art...
Art—Take, Break, and Fake It Course Number: HA 17 | CCN: 33197
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
Why do people steal art, destroy art, and fake art? These are not behaviors we usually associate with artistic creativity,beauty, and history. Is art theft, destruction, and forgery the “dark side” of Art as an embodiment of human cultural achievement?
Or...
Arts of China Course Number: HA 34 | CCN: 31557
Mon, Wed, Fri: 3:00-4:00pm
This course, for which no prior experience of Chinese art or history is required, will provide an overview of developments in the visual arts of China from the Neolithic period to the present. Special attention will be devoted to relating...
Theories and Methods Course Number: HA 100 | CCN: 24398
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
This course introduces the principal methods and theories of the professional discipline of art history from the later eighteenth century to the present. Although it emphasizes conceptual and practical tools that arguably are unique to art history (such as stylistic...
The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: 1000-330 BCE Course Number: HA C120B | CCN: 33366
Benjamin Porter
Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am
The royal art and architecture of later Mesopotamia will be explored in terms of the social, political, and cultural context of the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. The course provides an integrated picture of the arts of Mesopotamia...
AsiaAmerica: Asian American Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 132AC | CCN: 31556
Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30-5:00pm
This course focuses on modern and contemporary Asian American art and architecture from the mid-1800s to the present. It is not intended to be an encyclopedic survey of Asian American art. Rather, each class uses case studies—the work of a...
The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents Course Number: HA 185D | CCN: 31553
Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am
This course considers the linked arts of the United States, England, and France in the period between 1865 and 1918 looking at specific case study artists, structures, social movements, and literary works. We will focus on the arts and institutions...
Visual Activism Course Number: HA 190F.1 | CCN: 31552
Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm
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...
Art into Life: Modernism and Design Course Number: HA 190F.2 | CCN: 33739
Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30-5:00pm
How can art shape, inform, and transform everyday life? What is the artist’s role in forming (and reforming) the material conditions of living? Focusing on Europe in the first half of the twentieth century—but also looking beyond this chronological and...
Contemporary African Art in Transnational Perspective Course Number: HA 190T | CCN: 31551
Mon, Wed, Fri: 2:00-3:00pm
In 2018, British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor announced she was suing hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar, whose music video for “All the Stars” – one of the hit songs on the Black Panther soundtrack – appears to draw from Viktor’s Constellations...
Undergraduate Seminar: South Asia in/and Global Art History Course Number: HA 192A.1 | CCN: 19462
Monday: 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar will track the histories, methods, and debates that have animated the field of South Asian art and architecture. Our temporal spectrum will stretch from disputes over the origins of Buddhist art in the late 19th century to the...
Undergraduate Seminar: Image Theory in Premodern China Course Number: HA 192A.2 | CCN: 33763
Kwi Jeong Lee
Thursday: 2:00-5:00pm
What does “image” mean in Chinese intellectual traditions? How did proponents of different religious persuasions construe the relationship between images and their referents differently and how did such construal change over time? Why did the practice of fashioning images often...
Undergraduate Seminar: Etruscan Wall Painting: From Here to Eternity Course Number: HA 192B.2 | CCN: 31564
Wednesday: 9:00-12:00pm
For centuries artists, archaeologists, scholars, and poets have been captivated by the phenomenal images found on the painted walls of Etruscan tombs. These wall paintings offer an extraordinary look at the earliest examples of monumental painting in ancient Italy (a...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art and the Good Life Course Number: HA 192B.3 | CCN: 31565
Thursday: 9:00-12:00pm
Houses filled with images of gardens, marriage chests carved with frolicking Loves, marble statues of regular people with the flawless bodies of immortal gods, colorful tapestries with Dionysus’ band of drunken merrymakers, the watery abundance of the Nile: these are...
Undergraduate Seminar: Medieval/Modern, Giotto to Michelangelo & beyond Course Number: HA 192D | CCN: 31550
Friday: 2:00-5:00pm
This new seminar will engage with questions of modernity and modernities across time and space. Connecting our current location in California in 2020 to different phases of late medieval, early, mid-, and high Renaissance art history, patterns of artistic new...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art and Evolution Course Number: HA 192F.1 | CCN: 24849
Tuesday: 9:00-12:00pm
This course explores the profound effect of evolutionary theory on modern art in Europe and the United States. Artists explored new ideas about the struggle for existence, the relationship between humans and other animals, sexual selection, the purpose of beauty...
Undergraduate Seminar: Collage, Montage, Appropriation, Remix Course Number: HA 192F.2 | CCN: 31562
Wednesday: 2:00-5:00pm
What makes a work of art original? And why, over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, did artists increasingly turn to pre-existing objects to produce art? How can an earlier form be endowed with new meaning, and...
Undergraduate Seminar: COLOR! Course Number: HA 192F.3 | CCN: 31563
Tuesday: 9:00-12:00pm
How strange is our attempt to write about the visual, and color is perhaps the most challenging visual quality to describe, even to name. Art historians have devoted books upon books to perspective and to drawing, but color is too...
Undergraduate Seminar: African Power Course Number: HA 192M | CCN: 25799
Monday: 9:00-12:00pm
Following a troubled postcolonial era in which the figure of the grotesque, corrupt dictator came to represent African state power in the global imaginary, the 2018 blockbuster film Black Panther revived images of dignified and elegant African monarchs whose legitimate...
Graduate Proseminar Course Number: HA 200 | CCN: 21921
Thursday: 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar is intended to introduce graduate students to a range of critical perspectives, theoretical issues, and methodologies that constitute the practice of art history. The seminar is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the history of the...
Graduate Seminar: The Uncertainty Principle: Critical Writings on Chinese Art Course Number: HA 230 | CCN: 31560
Monday: 9:00-12:00pm
This seminar is designed as an introduction to the growing body of critical writings on Chinese art. Weekly themes will span from Bronze-age ritual implements to cinema. Subjects for each week, however, are chosen not merely on the basis of period and medium but...
Graduate Seminar: South Asia in/and Global Art History Course Number: HA 285 | CCN: 26502
Monday: 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar will track the histories, methods, and debates that have animated the field of South Asian art and architecture. Our temporal spectrum will stretch from disputes over the origins of Buddhist art in the late 19th century to the...
Graduate Seminar: Comparative Conceptualisms– LA/MENA [Latin America/Middle East/North Africa] Course Number: HA 290.1 | CCN: 31561
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anneka Lenssen
Tuesday: 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar explores how conceptual art—that is, art devoted primarily to generating and manipulating ideas rather than visual appearance—has been made and used by artists in Latin America, the Middle East, and other territories of non- and anti-First World engagement...
Graduate Seminar: Cal Conversations: Object Histories + Critical Concepts + Curatorial Practicum in Latin American Art / The Long Sixteenth-Century: Colonization and its Aftermath Course Number: HA 290.2 | CCN: 33041
Todd Olson, Ivonne del Valle
Tuesday: 2:00-5:00pm
Starting in the late fifteenth-century the world began to become “global.” This process had many implications in all areas, starting with the economy, religious beliefs and practices, daily life and cultural and artistic practices. Among these some would gradually disappear...
Seminar in History of Art Teaching Course Number: HA 375 | CCN: 21905
Thursday: 9:00-11:00am
This seminar satisfies a University-wide requirement that all first-time Graduate Student Instructors take a pedagogy course, and it qualifies for the GSI Teaching and Resource Center’s Certificate of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. It can be taken concurrently with...
