Courses

Spring 2022

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Writing on East and Southeast Asian Ceramics Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 24537

Susan Eberhard

Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am

Ceramics are tools for use, surfaces for ornament, feats of technology, and carriers of meaning across cultural and geographic borders. Ceramics produced in east and southeast Asia are considered among the world’s first global commodities. They are also fascinating works...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art and Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggles Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 24538

Amy O'Hearn

Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm

Rosa Parks’ mug shot, sit-ins at a Woolworth’s counter in North Carolina, and the March on Washington.  These are some of the images that are commonly associated with the quintessential African American freedom struggle in the United States.  But why...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Contemporary Art and US Imperialism Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 24539

E. C. Feiss

Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm

This course explores how to look at, write, and think about art after 1945 in relation to the U.S. imperial project. In the wake of the Second World War, the United States vied for dominance on the world stage, expanding...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Missing Heads, Mermaids, and Masquerades: Visual Culture in Urban Nigeria Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 24540

Ivy Mills

Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm

When the new public sculpture honoring legendary musician and activist Fela Kuti was unveiled in Lagos, some were dismayed by the artist’s choices.  Abolore Sobayo fashioned the figure in a pose reminiscent of iconic photographs of Fela on stage. In...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Colonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures: South Asia in the Museum Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 24541

Shivani Sud

Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30-5:00pm

This course will trace the histories of displaying and interpreting the art of South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as explore new possibilities for curating South Asian art in the future. In addition to studying...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art Practices in the Early Modern Iberian World Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 24542

Verónica Muñoz-Nájar

Tuesday, Thursday: 5:00-6:30pm

This course introduces undergraduate students to diverse artistic forms and practices created between the 15th and the 18th centuries in the Iberian world, a formation that, thanks to the expansionist projects of Portugal and Spain, came to include parts of...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Woven Worlds: Understanding Textiles Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 27781

Kristine Barrett

Monday, Wednesday: 5:00-6:30pm

This course explores the visual, technological, and cultural significance of textiles.  We will approach cloth and its production as an expressive encoding technology and synesthesiac medium that combines visual and tactile sensibilities with a range of entangled meanings, histories, narratives...

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Indigenous Arts in the Americas: Old and New Media Course Number: HUM 10 Compass Course | CCN: 28552

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Natalia Brizuela, Beth Piatote

Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:00pm

THIS CLASS investigates recent Indigenous creative practices—including poetry, film, dance, photography, and textiles—from across the Americas to think about how these forms of making and expression are not discrete but rather intimately woven together. Looking at work from North and...

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Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA C11 | CCN: 28855

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am

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...

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Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 30938

Ivy Mills

Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am

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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Art and Ecology Course Number: HA C106 | CCN: 33310

Sugata Ray, Sharad Chari, Asma Kazmi

Friday, 2:00-5:00pm

Taught by faculty from the Departments of Art Practice, Geography, and History of Art, this Big Ideas course is a space where we collectively study, think, and make art about the cataclysmic ecological crises that threaten our planet today. Examining...

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Projecting Ancient Rome Course Number: HA 108 | CCN: 30940

Lisa Pieraccini

Mon, Wed, Fri: 12:00-1:00pm

Projection depends on two fundamental aspects: distancing (we are not the Romans) or relating to or identifying with (we are the Romans) or sometimes a blend of both (might we be the Romans?) (Joshel, Malamud, Wyke 2001). Ancient Rome, with...

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AsiaAmerica: Asian American Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 132AC | CCN: 30941

Atreyee Gupta

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...

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The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents Course Number: HA 185D | CCN: 30942

Margaretta Lovell

Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am

This course considers the arts of the United States, England, and France in the period between 1865 and 1920, looking at specific case study works by painters, sculptors, architects, designers, photographers, literary works, and social movements. We will focus on...

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Decolonizing Ancient Mediterranean Art Course Number: HA 190B | CCN: 29788

Lisa Pieraccini

Mon, Wed, Fri: 3:00-4:00pm

This class examines new and innovative ways of “seeing”, discussing, analyzing and critically thinking about ancient Mediterranean material culture. There is a real urgency and agency in stripping away old models for understanding the past – this class embarks on...

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Warburg’s Archives in Berkeley: New Perspectives on Renaissance and Baroque Art Course Number: HA 190D | CCN: 30945

Henrike C. Lange

Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm

This new series of lectures highlights Renaissance / early modern and Baroque paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and architecture through the lens of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In continuation of the Warburg Lab at the Bancroft and Berkeley Art Museum (Fall...

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Soviet Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 190F | CCN: 30966

Aglaya Glebova

Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm

What does revolutionary art look like? What is the role of the artist in building a new society? This course explores a wide variety of artistic forms and experiments undertaken over the history of the Soviet Union, including those of...

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Contemporary Xicanx Art Production Course Number: HA 190H | CCN: 30943

Jesus Barraza

Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm

This course will focus on a decolonial reading of Contemporary Xicanx Art history, looking back at the past six decades of artistic production and its’ precolonial influences. We will concentrate on the study of the art of the Chicano/a Movements...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Theorizing the Global Early Modern, South Asia 1500–1850 Course Number: HA 192A.2 | CCN: 32612

Sugata Ray

Monday, 2:00-5:00pm

The recent past has seen a renewed scholarly focus on the mobility and global circulation of people, objects, and ideas across the early modern world. Historians have now come to understand the early modern as fundamentally transcultural, a form of...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Roman Mummy Portraits Course Number: HA 192B | CCN: 30974

Christopher Hallett

Monday, 9:00-12:00pm

The Roman province of Egypt has bequeathed us a large number of vivid portrait faces painted in the encaustic technique (brightly colored wax—the oil painting of the ancient world). These paintings were placed over the actual faces of the mummified...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Undergraduate Seminar: Contemporary Bay Area Arts and Artists Course Number: HA 192CU.2 | CCN: 32510

Jon Winet

Thursday, 2:00-5:00pm

The Bay Area is home to diverse and vibrant contemporary art scenes, fueled by thousands of creative artists working in a wide range of media – and with an impressive array of interests. The course is an active exploration of this multifaceted topic.  In-class...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Feminist and Queer Theories in Art Course Number: HA 192T.1/290.2 | CCN: 19179

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm

What happens when we understand art as an active producer of theory, rather than as an object to which theory might be “applied?” This seminar proposes that recent art has catalyzed and shaped advanced feminist and queer thought, and asks...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Ancient Sculpture/Modern Sculpture Course Number: HA 192T.2 | CCN: 32416

Whitney Davis

Wednesday, 9:00-12:00pm

The seminar will look at the uptake of various indigenous,’tribal’, ‘archaic’, and ancient sculptural traditions (e.g., Olmec, Mayan, Aztec, Igbo, Yoruba, Egyptian, Assyrian, Cycladic, Pacific NW Coast) by modern European, American, and Asian sculptors deeply invested in revising Western neo-classicisms...

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Capstone Experience – Guided Research & Exhibition Project Course Number: HA 193 | CCN: 32677

Jun Hu

Tuesday, 2:00-5:00pm

Announcing another new pilot program, Histart 193: Capstone Experience is a four-unit course designed for majors and minors interested in pursuing original research and collaborative work based on archives, artifacts, and structures scattered across the Berkeley campus. To give students...

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Graduate Seminar: Sensations: Cultural Histories of the Senses in the Ancient Mediterranean World Course Number: HA 290.1/ MELC 223/ HIST 280U | CCN: 19462

Diliana Angelova, Benjamin Porter

Thursday, 9:00-12:00pm

This graduate seminar draws on the recent analytical turn toward the senses to investigate the different ways in which Ancient Mediterranean societies experienced their material worlds. It examines senses-centered scholarship that engages visual, textual, and archaeological records, ranging from the...

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Graduate/UG Seminar: Feminist and Queer Theories in Art  Course Number: HA 290.2/192T.1 | CCN: 32377

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm

What happens when we understand art as an active producer of theory, rather than as an object to which theory might be “applied?” This seminar proposes that recent art has catalyzed and shaped advanced feminist and queer thought, and asks...

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Graduate Seminar: Art in Discourse Course Number: HA 290.3 | CCN: 32417

Whitney Davis

Monday, 9:00-12:00pm

The seminar will examine the recent upsurge of critical and theoretical interest in the histories and practices of ‘artwriting’–a form of elaborate rhetorical discourse about art that is placed between biographies of artists, connoisseurship, academic art history, art criticism, art...

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Graduate Seminar: Extinction and Visual Representation Course Number: HA 290.4 | CCN: 32543

Gregory Levine

Tuesday, 9:00-12:00pm

This exploratory graduate seminar asks: how does visual representation (allowing it generous flexibility) come to terms with extinction as process and end? Not just death, not just the “end of the world.” Extinction, full stop. Astrophysical-caused extinction (asteroids, the eventual...

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