Courses

Spring 2014

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Public Sculpture and Memorial Culture Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04865

Keerthi Potluri

This course interrogates the relationship between art and memory. How does art inspire, sustain, and foreclose memory, and in what ways does the impulse to remember influence the creation of art? In particular, what do minimalist and postmodern...

[Show more]

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...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: A Small World After All: World’s Fairs, Theme Parks, and the Politics of Display Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 04853

Livi Yoshioka-Maxwell

Reading and composition courses serve as introductions to textual analysis and as guides to the composition of well-argued essays. This will be accomplished by class discussion, by breaking down essay-writing into manageable components, and by extensive rewriting. With these practical...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Surreal Bodies Course Number: R1B Section 9 | CCN: 05288

Bonnie Ruberg

In this class, we’ll look at representations of the body, both visual and textual, from the heyday of the Western surrealist movement. In doing so, we’ll explore how the body came to function as a site for both enacting and...

[Show more]

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...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Paris, Capital of the 19th Century Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 04856

What is a Metropolis? Or rather, what is meant by Metropolis? In 1973, Massimo Cacciari offered the following response: “the Metropolis,” he says, “is the general form assumed by the process of the rationalization of social relations.” ...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: A Home for the Eye/I: Reading Images/Writing visually Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 04868

Simona Schneider

“One must confront vague ideas with clear images”—Jean-Luc Godard (Il faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires) This course sensitizes students to various analytical approaches to 20th century painting, photography and the moving image. Our main strategy will be...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Homemaking Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04873

Katie Kadue

What do we mean when we say a place “feels like home”? What kinds of stories do we tell ourselves to feel at home, and what kinds of images and objects can turn a sterile room into a domestic heaven?...

[Show more]

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Looking at Chinese Art from the South: Art of Canton Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04871

William Ma

This introductory course is designed to teach students how to think, read, and write critically about Chinese art by focusing on visual materials (paintings, export art, ceramics, crafts, architectures, archaeological materials, video installations, etc.) produced in or around the region...

[Show more]

Freshman Seminar: Translating Pictures: Early Modern Cultural Exchange Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 04894

Todd Olson

The seminar will meet on the following dates:  1/23, 1/30, 2/6, 2/20, 2/27, 3/6 and 4/3/14. More information about Freshman Seminars can be found here: http://fss.berkeley.edu/ Pictures are often taken to be a universal language available to diverse linguistic communities. We assume...

[Show more]

Art and Archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age Course Number: HA 190B | CCN: 05011

Kim Shelton

Room share: Classics 172 This course is an introductory overview of the ancient civilizations of the Bronze Age (3000-1100 BCE) Aegean: Crete, the Cyclades, Mainland Greece, and Western Anatolia. It is intended to expose you to the sites, monuments, art, and...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Art in Public Course Number: HA 192G | CCN: 05069

Lauren Kroiz

This seminar explores art’s public presence in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Class sessions will consider works ranging from monumental sculptures and murals to performances and ephemeral expression, focusing on how various audiences have...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Visual Culture and British India Course Number: HA 192F.2 | CCN: 05066

This seminar engages with recent groundbreaking scholarship in the field of art and the British Empire, focusing on visual material relating to British India in the nineteenth century. We will consider a range of media, including prints, photographs, sculpture, painting...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar (Modern/Contemporary): Art as Appropriation Course Number: HA 192F.1 | CCN: 05063

Jessica Maxwell

In an effort to articulate his own procedure for creative quotation, artist Glenn Ligon once recited Jasper Johns’ famous sketchbook note: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” These influential instructions begin to describe the...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar in the Digital Humanities: Sound & Vision in the Built Environment Course Number: HA 192DH | CCN: 05059

This course will consider how human beings engineer perceptual experiences. We will explore the relationship between architecture, acoustics, and illumination in a series of case studies. We will pay close attention to the pictures situated in these environments. Do they...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) and the Global Hispanic World Course Number: HA 192D.1 | CCN: 05057

Todd Olson

The Spanish born artist, who was active in Rome and Naples during the first half of the seventeenth-century, has left a series of works that are remarkable for their repetitiveness. Thumbnail photos of his oil paintings in catalogue raisonées betray...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Identity and Politics in Contemporary Art of East Asia Course Number: HA 192A | CCN: 05048

Orna Tsultem

As the title indicates, the course will have two main foci of discussion: the construction of identity and politics broadly defined during the 20th and 21st centuries. Here we will consider arts within political regimes; politics of display, and politics...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Commemorating Augustus Course Number: HA 192B | CCN: 05051

The year 2014 marks the 2000 anniversary of the death of the first emperor of Rome, Augustus. Even before his death, Augustus was the subject of a great number of commemorative monuments and memorials in a variety of genres...

[Show more]

Muslim Spain Course Number: HA 190C | CCN: 05012

Heba Mostafa

Room share: NES 190D From its earliest beginnings as an Umayyad province and up until the 15th century, al-Andalus acted as a lynch pin within the Mediterranean world. Connecting the Islamic empire in the East and forging links of trade and...

[Show more]

Undergraduate Seminar: Homoeroticism and the Fine Arts Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 05068

Whitney Davis

The course introduces aspects of queer visual culture in the Euro-American tradition, with emphasis on the period from the Enlightenment (late eighteenth century) to the present day.  An introductory unit presents the “classical basis” of modern representations of male and...

[Show more]

Latin American Art Before Columbus (approx. 2500 BCE-1500 CE) Course Number: HA 188A | CCN: 05000

Lisa Trever

The Western Hemisphere was a setting for outstanding accomplishments in the visual arts for millennia before the arrival of Europeans in the “New World.” This course presents the indigenous artistic traditions of what is now Latin America, from the earliest...

[Show more]

Race and Representation in Twentieth-Century American Culture Course Number: HA 187AC | CCN: 05036

Lauren Kroiz

This course will fulfill an American Cultures requirement. This class focuses on theories and visualizations of race in the United States during the twentieth century. Class sessions will be organized around chronological case studies of diverse subjects made in varied media...

[Show more]

Art, Architecture, and Design in the U.S. Course Number: HA 185A | CCN: 04988

Kevin Muller

This lecture course examines art, architecture, and design from the time of the American Revolution up through the present. We will define American art as inclusive of canonical paintings, sculpture, and architecture, but also of lesser-known – though no less...

[Show more]

Age of Rubens Course Number: HA 173 | CCN: 04955

Elizabeth Honig

Peter Paul Rubens’s contemporaries considered him to be one of the most extraordinary men of his time. Although largely known today as a great painter, Rubens was also a major politician and diplomat, co-architect of important European peace treaties. Moreover...

[Show more]

The Spectacle of Modernity: Art and Technologies in Late 19th-Century France Course Number: HA 180C | CCN: 04967

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

What form can be given to modernity? What were the national, colonial, class and gender politics of modern self-fashioning in late 19th-century French art? On what basis should we evaluate avant-garde practice? This class will focus on the period from...

[Show more]

Pre-modern Visual Culture Course Number: HA 156B | CCN: 04943

The Gothic cathedral, that most characteristic of medieval creations, has been variously portrayed as a symbol of the Heavenly Jerusalem, a theater for the arts, the supreme example of structural engineering, the reflection of Scholastic ideals, a showcase for “scientific&rdquo...

[Show more]

Buddhist Temple Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 134A | CCN: 04919

Gregory Levine

This course introduces the art and architecture of Buddhist temples/convents in Japan. Whether as a monastic center, private devotional chapel, or popular urban nexus, the temple/convent has comprised a key religious environment in Japan and has had an enduring impact...

[Show more]

Renaissance Italy and the Mediterranean World Course Number: HA 62 | CCN: 04907

This course will examine the impact of the Mediterranean sea on the visual culture of Renaissance Italy. Throughout the course we will examine how water unites and divides. How did trade develop, and what was traded? How did Italian artists...

[Show more]

Arts of China Course Number: HA 34 | CCN: 04895

Patricia Berger

An introduction to the arts of China, designed for newcomers to the history of art and/or to the study of Chinese culture. Lectures will survey six millennia of Chinese art thematically and chronologically, including the burial arts of the Neolithic...

[Show more]

Introduction to Western Art Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 04874

Todd Olson

This course is an introduction to visual art in Europe and North America since the 14th century. “Covering” European art and its global legacy over the centuries would result in superficial attention to an overwhelming number of images without regard...

[Show more]

Stronach Travel Seminar: Greek and Roman Art in the Bay of Naples Course Number: HA 291 | CCN: 05147

Christopher Hallett, Andrew Stewart

* Also listed as Classics 270/AHMA 210 * From earliest times the Bay of Naples was home to a series of important Greek settlements —Cumae, Parthenope, Neapolis; and in the late Republic this part of Italy came to enjoy a fabulous...

[Show more]

Graduate Seminar: Image, Object, and Being in Latin America (600-1650 CE) Course Number: HA 290 | CCN: 05144

Lisa Trever

In this seminar we will study indigenous concepts of image, object, and being—and related problems in visual representation, ontology, materiality, embodiment, and agency—as they impact the writing of Pre-Columbian and early colonial Latin American art history. Sources include Quechua, Nahua...

[Show more]

Graduate Seminar: Theories of Mimesis Course Number: HA 263 | CCN: 05143

Mimesis, Greek for "imitation" has become a key term in recent debates in a number of disciplines. However, what is at its core is often astonishingly undefined, open and ambivalent. Important theories of Mimesis have been articulated in the...

[Show more]

Graduate Seminar: Making Art Modern in Japan Course Number: HA 234 | CCN: 05138

Gregory Levine

A strong current of books and essays in recent years has brought into fuller view modern formations of art institutions, policies, histories, and aesthetics in Japan in relationship to global flows/conflicts. The time is ripe for reading into this literature...

[Show more]

Scroll to Top