Molly Fierer-Donaldson
Monday, Wednesday: 8:00-9:30am
This course will focus on how the Precolumbian people of Mesoamerica, especially the Maya and Nahua (Aztec), conceptualized, enacted, and visually represented their ideas of death and the afterlife. We will explore these societies’ responses to death — and their visions...
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Caty Telfair
Monday, Wednesday: 9:30-11:00am
Modern culture is bristling with monsters: vampires, werewolves, sphinxes and Frankensteins
galore have taken over our big and small screens, haunt our bookshelves, and stalk the halls of our museums and galleries. Even as a literal belief in monsters and the...
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Eva Allan
Monday, Wednesday: 11:00-12:30pm
Increasingly over the past 20 years, medical schools have started to partner with local museums in order to integrate art observation courses into their curricula. The visual tools of art history—observation and questioning; careful, critical looking; and noticing details in relation to the whole—have been shown to...
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Jon Soriano
Monday, Wednesday: 12:30-2:00pm
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 how contemporary scholars...
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Jez Flores
Monday, Wednesday: 2:00-3:30pm
This course examines art at the center of public controversy in the United States since the 1970s. We will be exploring art in a range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, prints, and video. The content of this course is...
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William Stafford
Monday, Wednesday: 3:30-5:00pm
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...
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Megan Alvarado Saggese
Monday, Wednesday: 5:00-6:30pm
This course aims to develop students’ critical thinking, looking, reading, writing, and research skills through close analysis of visual art, with a particular emphasis on twentieth-century kinetic art. Using Frank Popper’s Origins and Development of Kinetic Art to guide the course, we will reflect on how a concern with motion in earlier art movements...
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Patricia Yu
Tuesday, Thursday: 8:00-9:00am
This is the second course in the Reading and Composition series. We will focus on how to read critically, compose arguments, conduct research, and write a 10-12 page research paper using visual evidence and citing appropriate sources. In addition to reading texts...
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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Tuesday, 1:00-3:00pm
Class will meet on Tuesdays from January 21 to March 3, 2020.
This seminar will introduce students to the complexity of photography as a medium and its history. We will read some of the classic texts on photography from the 19th...
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Lauren Kroiz, Leigh Raiford
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:00-2:00pm
This course introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is conceived each year around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus...
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Ivy Mills
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
Primitive. Tribal. Traditional. Authentic. These are the lenses that have fixed African visual cultures in relation to the dominant aesthetic traditions of the West. These classifications are based on “an Africa of the mind”—an Africa imagined as untainted, unchanging, and...
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Gregory Levine
Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am
Are we approaching the “end of the world” and the extinction of our species, indeed most species in the web of life? What can—and should—we do about it?
How might we bring together the study of art/architecture, ecology, and history in...
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Lisa Pieraccini
Mon, Wed, Fri: 1:00-2:00pm
Projection consists of presenting an image on a surface (such as a movie screen). It can also refer to distancing (we are not the Romans) or relating to or identifying with (we are the Romans) or sometimes a blend of...
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Jun Hu
Mon, Wed, Fri: 3:00-4:00pm
Why did a ruler of a small state take a lavish set of bronze bells instead of weapons with him to the netherworld in a time of war? Why, over a millennium, did artists continue to excavate and furnish grottoes...
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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm
What form can be given to modernity? What were politics of modern self-fashioning and visual culture in Paris, the city Walter Benjamin famously called “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”? This class will focus on the period from the 1860s...
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Aglaya Glebova
Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm
In this course, we will look at the major developments, movements, and paradigms of European modernism from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II. Topics covered include abstraction, the avant-garde’s use of mass media (from...
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Anneka Lenssen
Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30pm-5:00pm
This lecture course explores the transnational history of artistic efforts at radical representation and reconstruction following the Second World War, a period of sweeping independence and liberation movements in formerly colonized territories as well as new definitions of human rights....
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Theory of the Copy
Course Number: HA 190T/Rhetoric 136 | CCN: 32760
Winnie Wong
Mon, Wed, Fri: 9:00-10:00am
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...
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Jun Hu
Mon. 9:00-12:00pm
This seminar offers a set of introductions to basic aspects and elements of built environments in China. It is not a chronological survey. Each of the thematic sections incorporates a variety of perspectives, theoretical and technical, aesthetic and historical. Our...
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Margaretta Lovell
Friday, 9:00-12:00pm
This seminar will look at specific case studies of the production and use of architecture, paintings, and needlework within specific communities in what is now the United States. We will look, for instance, at Shaker watercolors and design; Puritan painting...
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Christopher Hallett
Monday, 2:00-5:00pm
Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome, inaugurated an enormous building program during his long reign that completely transformed the empire’s capital city. In this seminar we will consider some of the most famous of his constructions—his Mausoleum (the tumulus...
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Lisa Pieraccini
Monday, 9:00-12:00pm
At the turn of the 20th century Phoebe A. Hearst set out to bring Etruscan antiquities to UC Berkeley for the educational benefit of students, faculty, and the public at large. Several thousand artifacts from Tuscany (from funerary and religious...
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Tuesday, 9:00-12:00pm
This undergraduate seminar explores the art of the Victorian period (1837–1901) with a focus on orientalisms. We will look at diverse case studies in a range of media including Pre-Raphaelite paintings by William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward...
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Anneka Lenssen
Thursday, 9:00-12:00pm
This seminar takes the city of Cairo, the massive Egyptian capital of some 20 million residents, as a locus for exploring a range of critical artistic practices from the 1970s until the present day, and how these visual experiments shaped...
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Ivy Mills
Wednesday, 9:00-12:00pm
In this undergraduate seminar, we will explore horizontal affinities and antipathies in the Global South by tracking flows of visual culture between Africa and India. We will also experiment with a comparative approach that tests analytics developed to understand contemporary...
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Whitney Davis
Tuesday, 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar explores how different philosophical frameworks enable (or in some cases disable) certain kinds of art historical inquiries. We might look at various kinds of philosophical systems which have been taken up by art historians or have obvious relevance...
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Henrike C. Lange
Thursday, 2:00-5:00pm
“Psychologies of Art: Medieval & Early Modern Europe” maps psychological, emotive, and pathological patterns in art, in the history of art, and in art theory from the late Middle Ages to the present day. In this new version of the...
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Diliana Angelova
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm
Purposeful image-destruction, or iconoclasm, has occurred many times in the history of art. This undergraduate seminar examines the causes and the theorization of such iconoclasms through a number of case studies, starting with Mesopotamian assault and abduction of statues, and...
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