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...
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: 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...
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...
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...
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.” ...
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...
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?...
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...
Freshman Seminar: Translating Pictures: Early Modern Cultural Exchange Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 04894
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...
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art in Public Course Number: HA 192G | CCN: 05069
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...
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...
Undergraduate Seminar (Modern/Contemporary): Art as Appropriation Course Number: HA 192F.1 | CCN: 05063
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...
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) and the Global Hispanic World Course Number: HA 192D.1 | CCN: 05057
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...
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...
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...
Muslim Spain Course Number: HA 190C | CCN: 05012
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Homoeroticism and the Fine Arts Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 05068
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...
Latin American Art Before Columbus (approx. 2500 BCE-1500 CE) Course Number: HA 188A | CCN: 05000
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...
Race and Representation in Twentieth-Century American Culture Course Number: HA 187AC | CCN: 05036
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...
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...
Age of Rubens Course Number: HA 173 | CCN: 04955
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...
The Spectacle of Modernity: Art and Technologies in Late 19th-Century France Course Number: HA 180C | CCN: 04967
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...
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...
Buddhist Temple Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 134A | CCN: 04919
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...
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...
Arts of China Course Number: HA 34 | CCN: 04895
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...
Introduction to Western Art Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 04874
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...
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...
Graduate Seminar: Image, Object, and Being in Latin America (600-1650 CE) Course Number: HA 290 | CCN: 05144
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...
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...
Graduate Seminar: Making Art Modern in Japan Course Number: HA 234 | CCN: 05138
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...