Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art and Space: Tian’anmen Since 1911 Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04865
Yi Yi (Rosaline) Kyo
Since 1911, the area of Tian’anmen Gate and Square has gone through major spacial and architectural renovations. Along with these physical changes, the area has developed into a highly charged space for political theatre and protest. This class will consider artworks in...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Secret, Hidden, and Lost Objects in Buddhist Material Culture Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 21650
Mary Lewine
Monday | Wednesday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
In this course, we will explore themes of hiddenness, secrecy, and inaccessibility in the art and material culture of Buddhism in East Asia—and in writings about sacred objects, sites, and visual experience from within the tradition. We will read travelogues...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Missing Heads, Mermaids, and Masquerades: Visual Culture in Urban Nigeria Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 21651
Ivy Mills
Monday | Wednesday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
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....
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Truth, Text, and the Indexical Photograph Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 21652
Bessie Young
Monday | Wednesday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
What does it mean to say that we can “read” a photograph? Victor Burgin writes that "the intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse,’ but this...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Movement in Modernist Art: A Global Perspective Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 19914
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Medicine and the Art of Observation Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24507
Eva Allan
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
Increasingly over the past 20 years, medical schools have started 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...
Freshman Seminar: Feminism and Other Life Skills Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 32183
Friday | 1:00 - 2:00pm
What does it mean to be a feminist now? What is feminism’s lineage? What does feminism look like? How can feminism teach us now? This course is designed to give students an introduction to key texts in feminist theory with...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Weapons of Mass Seduction: Modern Chinese Encounters with Propaganda Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 22525
Julia Keblinska
Monday | Wednesday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
Propaganda is often dismissed as obvious and heavy-handed political messaging that suppresses individual expression and artistic creativity in the name of a violent regime. Today, it is hard to take Chairman Mao—whose rhetoric turned culture into a weapon—at his word...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Ambiguities Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 04868
Catherine Telfair
Much of the study of art history involves the identification and categorization of objects, and the resulting articulation of a stylistic and historical trajectory for the development of art. This endeavor, important as it is for our understanding of art...
Contemporary Art + Architecture from Asia, ca. 1945-present Course Number: HA 37 | CCN: 32149
Tuesday | Thursday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
This course will offer an overview of contemporary art and architecture from South, Southeast, and East Asia. Beginning around 1945 and paying special attention to new avant-garde and experimental practices, the lectures will trace the emergence of abstraction, hyperrealism, pop...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, and Politics Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24461
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...
Introduction to Modern Art Course Number: HA 80 | CCN: 32577
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 10:00 - 11:00am
This course introduces students to modern western art from the 1860s to the 1960s. It aims to demystify the “isms” of modern art—including Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Impressionism, Minimalism, Modernism, Post-Impressionism, Realism, and Surrealism—as well as labels such as Art...
Introduction to Western Art Course Number: HA 10 | CCN: 31030
Tuesday | Thursday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
This course is an examination of Western Art from the Prehistoric to the Medieval Periods. It will introduce you to looking at and interpreting art in different ways, exploring the relationship of various visual art forms and the cultural context...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Visions of Empire, Voices of Resistance: Rome and Iberia Through Image, Text and Myth Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 32744
Keith Budner
Tuesday | Thursday: 8:00 - 9:30am
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 art can...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Greek Athletics in Ancient Art Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04871
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: 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...
Freshman Seminar: Thinking about the strangeness of photography Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 32785
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...
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...
Beauty and Truth in Islamic Art Course Number: HA 21 | CCN: 31029
Tuesday | Thursday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
This course is an exercise in thinking about human perception and knowing in relation to the history of Islamic art and visual culture. It tracks the expression of theories of beauty and truth in great works of art and architecture...
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: The Art of Memory and Memorial Culture Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04874
Keerthi Potluri
This course interrogates the relationship between art and the archive of 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 sculpture...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Dot and the Line in East Asia Course Number: R1B Section 9 | CCN: 33356
Jon Soriano
Monday | Wednesday: 8:00 - 9:30am
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: 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...
Thinking Through Art and Design @Berkeley: Public Art and Belonging Course Number: L&S 25 | CCN: 20128
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...
Introduction to the Art and Architecture of South and Southeast Asia: Tantric Yogis, Dancing Ganeshas, Starving Buddhas Course Number: HA 30 | CCN: 31034
Tuesday | Thursday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
South and Southeast Asia brings to mind conflicting images of the glamour of Bollywood, abject poverty, the Vietnam War, tranquil beaches, yoga, and military dictatorships. How to reconcile such images with the region’s long history of complex political cultures, multivalent...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Tativille Course Number: R1B Section 9 | CCN: 04876
What is the Metropolis? Or rather, what is meant by Metropolis? In 1973, the Italian philosopher – and eventual mayor of Venice – Massimo Cacciari offered the following response: “the Metropolis,” he concluded, “is the general form assumed by the...
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 22526
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Folklore and Contemporary Art (Session A) Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 15299
Mon-Thurs: 2:00-4:00pm
This course explores the use of folk arts, folklore, and “the folkloresque” in contemporary art. We will begin by asking: What is folklore? Who are “the folk” (and who are not)? What kinds of socio-political structures and identities are articulated...
Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 30611
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Networks as Art, Networks as Art History Course Number: R1B Section 10 | CCN: 04857
This course will examine models of connectivity and interaction in relation to human cognition and cultural production. Critical readings will include Bateson, Luhmann, Manovich, Deleuze, Lima, Tufte and Bertin.
...
Beauty and Truth in Islamic Art Course Number: HA 21 | CCN: 31962
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 2:00 - 3:00pm
This course is an exercise in thinking about human perception and knowing in relation to the history of Islamic art and visual culture. It tracks the expression of theories of beauty and truth in great works of art and architecture...
Art, Ecology, and Asia: Ecohumanities and, or Against, the Climate Crisis Course Number: HA 38 | CCN: 32573
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...
Introduction to Modern Art: Making Art Modern in a Globalized World (Session A) Course Number: HA 80 | CCN: 15300
Mon-Thurs: 10:00-12:00pm
This course will offer a general overview of the history of modern art from the 1860s to the 1960s. In addition to introducing the “-isms” that are commonly associated with “Modern Art”— Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism…etc.—we will focus on the...
Art and Architecture in Japan Course Number: HA 35 | CCN: 04898
This course—and introductory survey—asks you to look precisely at art and architecture in or associated with Japan, doing so with a sort of “double-vision.” By this I mean the following: we can, and should, study a work’s visual-material and contextual...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Unsettling Nation: Image, Identity, and Art History in Mexico (Session D) Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 15301
Mon-Thurs: 10:00-12:00pm
This course explores how visual and material culture both reflect and construct Mexican identities over time by considering the role images play in the formation of a shared imagined community. By looking closely at select objects from the sixteenth century through the...
Crisis in the Making: Art and Ecology in Modern and Contemporary Asia (Session D) Course Number: HA 38 | CCN: 15566
Tues-Thurs; 2:00-4:30pm
This course is thematic introduction to the arts of modern and contemporary Asia as they relate to landscapes, local ecologies, environmental histories, migrations, and environmental disasters, among other topics related to the concept of “ecology.” Students will examine a broad...
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Humanists on the Move Course Number: HA 39G | CCN: 32392
Wednesday | 10:00 - 12:00pm
This class is about renaissance humanists and how we can use digital means, as well as traditional ones, to study them. Our particular focus is on the ways people were connected in the renaissance — as patrons, as readers, as...
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Shaking the Western Canon: Depictions of the Human Body and Disability Studies Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 14934
Alexandra Courtois de Vicose
Monday | Wednesday: 8:00 - 9:30am
Depictions of the human body have been central to western art history, a discipline largely concerned with corporeality and embodiment. Established art historical narratives trace how representations of the body have changed over time from European academies advocating the emulation...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Hauntings Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 14935
Caty Telfair
Monday | Wednesday: 9:30 - 11:00am
“There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence … Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”
Michel de Certeau
Ghosts, literal and metaphorical, are found in the blurry boundaries of understanding...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Hauntings Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 15053
Caty Telfair
Monday | Wednesday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
“There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence … Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”
Michel de Certeau
Ghosts, literal and metaphorical, are found in the blurry boundaries of understanding...
Introduction to the Italian Renaissance Course Number: HA 62 | CCN: 04909
Lisa Regan
The Italian Renaissance is often described as the beginning of modernity. This is because the Renaissance is the first coherent articulation of a number of ideas – from the role of the individual within society to the rise of capitalism...
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 4 | CCN: 15054
Ivy Mills
Monday | Wednesday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
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: Visual Culture, Authority, and Identity in Colonial Latin America Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 15055
Jessica Stair
Monday | Wednesday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
Indigenous cultures of Latin America endured profound and violent changes in the years immediately following Spanish invasion. Religious practices were suppressed, and those who engaged in such practices were persecuted. Socio-political systems were reconfigured, and sacred, historical, and ceremonial objects...
Introduction to Italian Renaissance Course Number: HA C62/ Italian C62 | CCN: 32308
Tuesday | Thursday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
This new version of Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Italian Renaissance survey presents moments from Italian art and literature from circa 1300 to circa 1600. Considering artworks and texts as mirrors and motors of cultural change, Italy will be shown in its unique...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Truth, Text, and the Indexical Photograph Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 15056
Bessie Young
Monday | Wednesday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
What does it mean to say that we can “read” a photograph? Victor Burgin writes that "the intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse,’ but this...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Aesthetic Language of Southern Renaissance Art Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 15057
Matthew Culler
Monday | Wednesday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
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: Reading the Crowd: 19th- century Texts and Images Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 22721
Margot Szarke
Tuesday | Thursday: 8:00 - 9:30am
This course provides an introduction to reading and interpreting works of art as well as literary texts that explore visual experience. Its primary goal is to help students develop analytical writing techniques and gain research skills so that they can...
Introduction to Greek and Roman Art and Architecture Course Number: HA 41 | CCN: 44336
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 2:00 - 3:00pm
This introduction to the arts of ancient Greece and Rome is designed for newcomers to the history of art and/or to the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The lectures survey 1500 years of Greek and Roman art and architecture both...
Asia Modern: Art + Architecture, 1800-present Course Number: HA 36 | CCN: 46143
Atreyee Gupta
Tuesday | Thursday: 9:30 - 11:00am
This course offers an introduction to the art and architecture of modern South, Southeast, and East Asia from 1800 to the present. Asia, of course, is as vast as it is diverse. Keeping this in mind, this course will not...
Introduction to Modern Art (Session D) Course Number: HA N80 | CCN: 15543
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday | 12:00 - 2:00PM
This course will offer a general overview of the history of twentieth-century art. We will begin with a brief look back into dominant trends of the nineteenth century and will conclude in the 1970s. Although many accounts of Modern Art...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Beyond the Page: Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Session D) Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 11765
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday | 2:00 - 4:00PM
In this course we are going to explore the world of comics and graphic novels from their origins in the 1930s to the present day. Comics and graphic novels will open us up to a series of broader questions of...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Camera in South Asia: From Colonial Photography to Bollywood (Session A) Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 11764
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday | 10:00 - 12:00PM
This course will investigate the diverse iterations of photography and cinema in South Asia, from the introduction of the camera in the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
We will begin with the early history of the camera in the colony. Remaining...
Freshman Seminar: Feminism and Other Life Skills Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 34046
Monday | 11:00 - 12:00pm
What does it mean to be a feminist now? What is feminism’s lineage? What does feminism look like? How can feminism teach us now? This course is designed to give students an introduction to key texts in feminist theory with...
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 8 | CCN: 15889
Ivy Mills
Tuesday | Thursday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
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 which depicted hyenas as the most anti-social, anti-human...
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 7 | CCN: 15888
Ivy Mills
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
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 which depicted hyenas as the most anti-social, anti-human...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Art of Capitalism Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 15887
Jason Rozumalski
Tuesday | Thursday: 9:30 - 11:00am
In this course, we will question the relationship between art and economics in Europe during the rise and establishment of capitalism. Why and how did monetization, commodification, and the ideal of profit influence aesthetics, artistic labor, pleasure, and consumption? Why...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Queering the City: Activist Art in the Late Twentieth Century Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 15886
Efstathios Gerostathopoulos
Tuesday | Thursday: 8:00 - 9:30am
In the 1980s and 90s, following wider changes in the art world and in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, queer artists took to the streets. Since then, many waves of queer art and activism have responded to local conditions and...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Myth and the Everyday in Antiquity and the Renaissance Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 15885
Jane Raisch
Monday | Wednesday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
The magic and fantasy of myth might seem to be a world away from the mundane and
routine details of everyday life. But in both works of art and literary texts, we often discover the two in surprising proximity: monstrous demi-gods...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art for the Masses: Propaganda Art in Twentieth Century China Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 15884
Rosaline Kyo
Monday | Wednesday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
Since the early twentieth century, artists have participated in political movements to disseminate particular messages to the masses in China. Whether through modern interpretations of traditional woodblock prints, or through photography and film, artists have played a pivotal role in...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Writing about Portraiture, 18th Century to the Present Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 15883
Caty Telfair
Monday | Wednesday: 9:30 - 11:00am
“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: Shaping Lovemaking: Depictions of Sex and Sexuality in the Greco-Roman World Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 15882
Norman Underwood
Monday | Wednesday: 8:00 - 9:30am
This course examines visual and literary representations of sex and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean. As the course will make clear, Greek and Roman society held considerably different attitudes about sex and sexual practices from our own—and from one another....
Visual Cultures of California, 1500-Present Course Number: HA 87AC | CCN: 33526
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 2:00 - 3:00pm
This class introduces the diverse visual cultures of the geographic area now known as California. The course will consider how space and race are culturally represented and reproduced over a broad span of time and across California’s shifting political designations...
Art and Architecture in Japan Course Number: HA 35 | CCN: 31991
Tuesday | Thursday: 8:00 - 9:30am
This introductory survey poses a challenge: to look and think critically about the art and architecture of Japan, ancient to contemporary. We will study a range of artistic/architectural categories and styles across a long historical span: objects and structures of...
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 15890
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...
Freshman Seminar: Sojourner Truth, Photography and the Fight Against Slavery Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 33936
Monday | 11:00 - 1:00pm
Taking advantage of the exhibition of the same name that I have curated at the Berkeley Art Museum, this seminar concentrates on the savvy use of photography by the illiterate runaway slave, abolitionist and feminist orator and activist Sojourner...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Zaha Hadid: Form, Function, Figures Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 33790
Eva Hagberg
Monday | Wednesday: 8:00 - 9:30am
When the Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid died in 2016 at the age of 65, publications from the New York Times to the Guardian to Architectural Record looked back on a career of fantastical paintings and world-shifting stadiums and, of...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Food Writing Art Historically Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 16323
Jon Soriano
Tuesday | Thursday: 5:00 - 6:30pm
Can food be art historical? Claims of food’s homeliness, perishability, and immediate use-value place food outside the traditional domain of art. However, specific forms of food are distinguishable according to their appearances in space and time. Some...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Becoming “Sensitive to That”: Photographic Practices of Receptivity Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 16322
Suzanne Li Puma
Tuesday | Thursday: 3:30 - 5:00pm
What forms of sensitization, "listening," or noticing are made possible through a photographic mode of engagement? This class will investigate how photographic images might participate in sensitizing the viewer to the world around her, or, conversely, in rendering her less...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: African Bodies in Film, Art, and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 16321
Ivy Mills
Tuesday | Thursday: 2:00 - 3:30pm
In this course, we will explore the politicization of the African body in a variety of visual media, including film, photography, sculpture, and fashion. We will begin by examining how visual representations of the African body have worked to “other&rdquo...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: African Bodies in Film, Art, and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 16320
Ivy Mills
Tuesday | Thursday: 12:30 - 2:00pm
In this course, we will explore the politicization of the African body in a variety of visual media, including film, photography, sculpture, and fashion. We will begin by examining how visual representations of the African body have worked to “other&rdquo...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Portraiture Before Photography in Western Europe Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 16319
Karine Douplitzky
Tuesday | Thursday: 11:00 - 12:30pm
For over five centuries, portraiture has been one of the most popular genres in Western art history. It is sufficient to mention Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile to convince us of the tremendous agency portraits exert upon generations of viewers. Although...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, and Politics Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 16043
Patricia Yu
Tuesday | Thursday: 9:30 - 11:00am
This is the second course in the Reading and Composition series. We will focus on how to read critically, identify arguments and approaches, and how to compose compelling arguments with appropriate sources. Our texts will be themed around the theories...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Early Modern Art Literature in Italy (1400-1600) Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 16042
Matthew Culler
Tuesday | Thursday: 8:00 - 9:30am
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 art literature and art of the Renaissance or the (sensibly named) Early Modern period...
Art of Latin America Course Number: HA 88 | CCN: 30650
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30 - 2:00PM
This class is an introduction to art, architecture, and visual culture made in Latin America, or made by Latin American and Latina/o artists living elsewhere. We will study selected artworks and artists from ancient, colonial, revolutionary and modern periods with...
Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art Course Number: HA 62 | CCN: 16395
Mon. | Wed. | Fri. | 3:00 - 4:00PM
This survey presents examples from Italian art and literature from circa 1300 to circa 1600 as mirrors and motors of cultural change. Italy will be shown in its unique position between the Northern countries and the Mediterranean, allowing for porous...
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Humanists on the Move Course Number: HA 39G | CCN: 31503
Wednesday | 10:00 - 12:00PM
This class is about renaissance humanists and how we can use digital means, as well as traditional ones, to study them. Our particular focus is on the ways people were connected in the renaissance — as patrons, as readers, as...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Early Modern Theories and Practices (Session D) Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 12604
In the early modern period, drawing assumed a new importance in its evaluation as a preparatory stage for more elaborate artworks and as a general practice of artists working within what would become all of Europe’s “fine arts”: architecture, sculpture...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: In and Out of Place: Representations of Race and Gender in Urban Modernity (Session A) Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 12602
One of the fundamental aspects of modernity is the persistent transformation of society and space – and that these changes are always experienced unevenly. Race and gender serve as particularly poignant markers of this unevenness. While cities are intrinsically sites...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Representing Urban Modernity Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04974
Sharone Tomer
One of the fundamental aspects of modernity is the persistent transformation of society and space – and that these changes are always experienced unevenly. Modernity’s history is of some people and spaces benefiting tremendously and others experiencing waves of marginalization and dislocations. This...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Viewing the Pain of Others Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04971
Vanessa Brutsche
This course will explore how images call upon us to engage with violence, with suffering bodies, or what Susan Sontag referred to as “the pain of others.” Examining visual media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and cinema, we...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art and Space: Tian’anmen Square Since 1949 Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 04968
Rosaline Kyo
Since 1949, the area of Tian’anmen Gate and Square has gone through major spatial and architectural renovations. Along with these physical changes, the area has developed into a highly charged space for political theatre and protest. This class will consider artworks in various...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Avant-Garde Art, 1850-1940 Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 04962
Caty Telfair
The art world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was a tumult of controversy, debate, wild invention and stubborn reactionism that resulted in the radical transformation of centuries-long conventions of artistic...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Reading the Crowd: Nineteenth Century Texts and Images Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04965
Margot Szarke
Baudelaire famously remarked that only gifted artists can efficiently mingle with the crowd [“Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude, jouir de la foule est un art…”]. Yet the inescapable, frenetic mob becomes a quintessential figure...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Seeing the World: The art and science of landscape in early modern Europe Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 04959
Jason Rozumalski
Are there boundaries between art and science? What is the difference between representation and abstraction? How does perception interact with reality? Can visualization be objective? In this course, we will address these questions (and others) by working to understand why and how people...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Avant-Garde Art, 1850-1940 Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 04956
Caty Telfair
The art world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was a tumult of controversy, debate, wild invention and stubborn reactionism that resulted in the radical transformation of centuries-long conventions of artistic...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Chinese Visual and Material Culture Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 04953
Patricia Yu
This course will examine changing conceptions of the body in Chinese visual and material culture. We will look at examples throughout China’s long history, from the First Emperor’s quest for immortality to contemporary artists’ use of their own bodies as a medium...
Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 04998
Ivy Mills
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...
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 04977
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: African Bodies in Film, Art, and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04965
Ivy Mills
In this course, we will explore the politicization of the African body in a variety of visual media, including film, photography, sculpture, and fashion. We will begin by examining how visual representations of the African body have worked to “other&rdquo...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: African Bodies in Film, Art, and Fashion Course Number: R1B Section 10 | CCN: 04980
Ivy Mills
In this course, we will explore the politicization of the African body in a variety of visual media, including film, photography, sculpture, and fashion. We will begin by examining how visual representations of the African body have worked to “other&rdquo...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Representing Urban Modernity Course Number: R1B Section 9 | CCN: 04977
Sharone Tomer
In this course we will study art and architecture as mediations on the struggles inherent in urban modernity. We will work from the premise that one of the fundamental aspects of modernity is persistent transformation of society and space –...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: From Los Caprichos to Charlie Hebdo: History, Memory, and Politics in Image-Text Forms Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04974
Aubrey Gabel
With the popularization of the graphic novel in the 21st century, readers and viewers have become more and more accustomed to seeing historical violence represented in pop culture forms, whether it be an animated film about the First Lebanese War or...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Writing on and Critiquing Fashion Today: Art History, Theory, and Practice Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04971
Elizabeth McFadden
This course introduces students to the varied discourses and theories on dress and fashion from the nineteenth-century to contemporary times (with a focus on European and North American cultures). Each week will take as its case study the oeuvre of...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Writing about Portraiture: 18th century to the present Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 04962
Caty Telfair
“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: Writing about Portraiture: 18th century to the present Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 04959
Caty Telfair
“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...
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