Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Aesthetic Language of Renaissance Art Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24874
Matt Culler
Tuesday | Thursday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
Where do the words we use to talk about art come from? Many of our modern aesthetic ideas and sensibilities find their birthing ground in the language utilized to write and talk about art during the Renaissance or the Early...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Dot and the Line in East Asia Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 24873
Jon Soriano
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
Throughout centuries of dynastic change in East Asia, mastery over ink and brush could reliably be used to advance one’s position in society. Specific ethical, educational, and aesthetic attainments could be read through an individual’s abilities in calligraphy and...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Visions of Empire, Voices of Resistance: Rome and Iberia Through Image, Text and Myth Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 24872
Keith Budner
Tuesday | Thursday: 9:30 - 11:00am
The relationship between art and power is no secret. Go to any museum and you’re likely to see a host of artworks that depict a political leader – a king, a prince, an emperor, a president. But if...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Downcast Eyes: Episodes from a History of Iconoclasm Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 24870
Kathryn Crim
Monday | Wednesday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
And discontent is in my downcast eye
Alexander Craig, 1606
By his pale and downcast look, and disfigured face
François Fénélon, 1699
“Downcast” describes both the ruined, overthrown, or demolished artifact as well as the downward-moving gaze. Tracing an arc from depositions...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Hyenas, Donkeys, and Dirty Diesels: Figures of Social Death in Children’s Animation, Folktales, and World Art Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 24869
Ivy Mills
Monday | Wednesday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
When artists working on the animated Disney film The Lion King came to study the spotted hyenas in UC Berkeley’s research colony, scientists begged them to break with a transnational, millennia-long tradition that depicted hyenas as the most anti-social, anti-human...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Portraiture, 18th century to the present Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 24868
Caty Telfair
Monday | Wednesday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
“There is no more fascinating surface on earth than that of the human face.” – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The portrait is one of the most common forms of depiction in Western art history. From era to era, its basic formats have...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Portraiture, 18th century to the present Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 24867
Caty Telfair
Monday | Wednesday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
“There is no more fascinating surface on earth than that of the human face.” – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The portrait is one of the most common forms of depiction in Western art history. From era to era, its basic formats have...
Undergraduate Seminar: Beyond El Dorado: Materials, Values, and Aesthetics in Pre-Columbian Art History Course Number: HA 192L | CCN: 39363
Tuesday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
Legends of indigenous American gold seduced European voyagers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spanish conquistadors and others including Sir Walter Raleigh were taken in by tales of cities of gold and other stories, for example of a king called...
Undergraduate Seminar: Handicraft and Contemporary Art Course Number: HA 192H.2 | CCN: 39362
Thursday | 1:00 - 4:00pm
This undergraduate seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory. In a time when much art is outsourced — or fabricated by large stables of assistants– what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally...
Undergraduate Seminar: Middle East Conceptualisms Course Number: HA 192H.1 | CCN: 39361
Wednesday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
This seminar explores art histories of conceptual art——that is, art shifting the locus of consideration from the object to the idea——via the Middle East and the perceptual and material absences that arise from its experience(s) of occupation, war, and the...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art and the Modern Interior Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 39360
Tuesday | 1:00 - 4:00pm
The domestic interior was central to the development of modern western art. It was a favorite subject for painters, a space of artistic display for new middle-class patrons, and often the site of artistic creation. This course explores the theme...
Undergraduate Seminar: Vermeer: Looking, Speaking, Listening, Touching Course Number: HA 192E | CCN: 32242
Friday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
Johannes Vermeer was working near the end of the Dutch “Golden Age.” His art is not innovative, but retrospective. It looks back over a tradition of picture-making, taking visual and epistemological concerns established by others and pushing them toward conclusions....
Undergraduate Seminar: Saying “No” to Imperialism, Visualizing Freedom Course Number: HA 192A | CCN: 32241
Monday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
This seminar investigates the role art played, and continues to play, in anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. It also examines how such struggles, in turn, shape artistic languages and forms.
In the 19th century, anti-colonial movements were underway across South and Southeast...
VR and its Prehistories: The Art and Science of Transplanar Images Course Number: HA 190T | CCN: 39358
Justin Underhill
Monday | Wednesday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
This course will investigate 3d images from their development as a popular photographic medium in the nineteenth century to their current digital reemegence. We will closely study the optics that structure transplanar images and learn how to make or own....
African Aesthetics Course Number: HA 190M | CCN: 39357
Ivy Mills
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 1:00 - 2:00pm
How should we approach the grotesque, the exaggerated, the imperfect, the improvisational, the unfinished, and the obscured in African art? Should we read “ugliness” as a sign of the “bad” – either as an intentional signaling of moral deviance, or...
Breaking Boundaries: The Persian in Greek and Roman art (500 BC to AD 600) Course Number: HA 190B | CCN: 41108
Tuesday | Thursday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
This lecture will look at art breaking boundaries. At its core is the surprisingly ample and conspicuous presence of the Persian in Greek and Roman art. We will discuss the visual evidence from cultures linked to the Mediterranean and beyond...
American Architecture: Domestic Forms Course Number: HA 185B | CCN: 39356
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
Taking as a point of departure specific exemplary houses, both vernacular and high-style architectural forms are studied from the perspectives of the history of style, of technology, sustainability, and of social use. We look at space (interior space, the relationship...
Southern Baroque Art Course Number: HA 170 | CCN: 39172
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 10:00 - 11:00am
“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...
Late Antique Art from the Catacombs to the Dome of the Rock Course Number: HA 151 | CCN: 39171
Tuesday | Thursday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
This class examines three centuries (4th to 7th) of profound artistic, religious, historical and cultural transformations that ushered the Mediterranean World into the Middle Ages. It will help you understand how in the dialectic between the classical tradition and Christianity...
Classical Greek Art Course Number: HA 141B | CCN: 41206
Tuesday | Thursday: 9:30 - 11:00am
This course surveys Greek sculpture, painting, and architecture from the Persian invasions to the death of Alexander the Great: often called the Greek Golden Age. In addition to close study of the major works (Olympia, the Riace bronzes, the Parthenon...
Asia America: Asian American Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 132 | CCN: 42131
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 2:00 - 3:00pm
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 will focus on a case study—the...
Classical Painting Tradition in China Course Number: HA 131B | CCN: 39168
Tuesday | Thursday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
Beginning with the post-Han period (after the 3rd 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...
Theories & Methods for a Global History of Art Course Number: HA 101 | CCN: 39167
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 3:00 - 4:00pm
Simply put, art history is a history of image worlds, objects, and material practices. Could art history, then, help us better understand the haptic and visual potential of activist laser projections onto urban surfaces, the deification of the natural environment...
Approaches to the Origins of Art Course Number: HA 14 | CCN: 39166
Tuesday | Thursday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
This course explores current interdisciplinary ideas on seven topics often understood to relate to the perennial question of the "origins of art": what is art and what is it for? when and how did art "begin"? "traditional" art in contemporary...
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 24875
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
This course is an introduction to visual art in Europe and the USA since the 14th century with the main emphasis on painting and sculpture. Rather than attempting to offer a sweeping synthetic narrative of the development of art during...
Graduate Seminar: Why does Greek and Roman art and architecture matter? Course Number: HA 290.3 | CCN: 41130
Wednesday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
Our graduate seminar will be an experimental workshop. To get to know each other we will present our recent work (research, article, etc.) in a short question-and-problem-driven paper. This will provide the basis to discuss which questions and topics in...
Graduate Seminar: Beyond El Dorado: Materials, Values, and Aesthetics in Pre-Columbian Art History Course Number: HA 290.2 | CCN: 41050
Tuesday | 9:00 - 12:00pm
Legends of indigenous American gold seduced European voyagers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spanish conquistadors and others including Sir Walter Raleigh were taken in by tales of cities of gold and other stories, for example of a king called...
Graduate Seminar: Evolutionary Aesthetics and the History of Art Course Number: HA 290.1 | CCN: 24897
Wednesday | 2:00 - 5:00pm
A recent resurgence of interest in evolutionary-development aesthetics (in such disciplines as cognitive anthropology, philosophy of art, and prehistoric archaeology) has reopened many questions about the “origins” of art and aesthetic consciousness, about prehistoric art, and about the role of...
Graduate Seminar: Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art Course Number: HA 236 | CCN: 39365
Thursday | 2:00 - 5:00pm
Nuclear disasters. Acid rain. The mass extinction of animal and plant species. The devastating environmental crisis that the planet faces today has fundamentally transformed the way we perceive human interaction with the natural environment. New forms of thinking such as...
Mellon Graduate Seminar: Material Culture: The Interpretation of Objects Course Number: HA 203 | CCN: 39364
Monday | 2:00 - 5:00pm
This seminar looks at both material culture theory and the many ways scholars understand, ‘read,’ and interpret objects. It draws on the practices and questions of multiple disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, and art history. It considers painting, architecture...
