15 courses with the subject AHIS UN, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
AHIS UN2305RENAISSANCE IN IMPERIAL SPAIN3.00
The course will survey Renaissance art in Hapsburg Spain, considered in the wide geographical context of the extended and dispersed dominions of the different crowns of the Spanish monarchy, which connected the Iberian Peninsula with Italy, Flanders and the New World. It will concern visual art in its various media, mainly painting, sculpture and architecture, but also tapestries, prints, armor, goldsmithery and ephemeral decoration, among others. Works of the main artists of the period will be introduced and analyzed, giving attention to the historical and cultural context of their production and reception. The course will particularly focus on the movement of artists, works and models within the Spanish Hapsburg territories, in order to understand to what extent visual arts contributed to shaping the political identity of this culturally composite empire
The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses
How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions. We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement An introduction to the arts of China, from the Neolithic period to the present, stressing materials and processes of bronze casting, the development of representational art, principles of text illustration, calligraphy, landscape painting, imperial patronage, and the role of the visual arts in elite culture.
Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts
Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts
This course introduces twenty-seven significant monuments and objects comprising a selective overview of 4000 years of traditional Chinese culture. Through these twenty-seven objects, we will think about historical currents, consider materials (clay, stone, bronze, lacquer, paper, silk, ink, and wood), how things were made, how these objects were used among the living, and why some of them were buried with the dead. Because analogy and metaphor is fundamental to Chinese language, we will examine visual symbols, auspicious imagery and rhetoric of resistance that had their origins in literature. The goal of the course is to raise awareness of visual clues in Chinese art and to establish basic visual literacy. After successfully completing this course you will be better able to articulate a research question, read more critically, write a visual analysis, and impress friends and family as you name a painting used in restaurant décor
This seminar will focus on the invention of the public monument as a commemorative genre, and the related concepts of time, memory and history in the ancient Near East (west Asia), Egypt, and Greece. Public monuments will be studies in conjunction with ancient texts (in translation) as well as historical criticism, archaeological and art historical theories. The seminar considers ancient monuments in relation to, and in the context of, modern concepts of monuments, history and heritage and the debates surrounding them. The seminar also introduces these methodologies and debates to students
This course takes up a question posed by Terry Smith and applies it to Africa: "Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art?" It will investigate the impact of modernity, modernism, and increasing globalism on artistic practices with a special focus on three of the major centers for contemporary art in sub-Saharan Africa: Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria. Some of the topics covered will be: the emergence of new media (such as photography or cinema), the creation of "national" cultures, experiments in Pan-Africanism, diasporic consciousness, and the rise of curators as international culture-brokers. The course will examine the enthusiastic embrace by African artists of the biennial platform as a site for the production of contemporary art. What differential impact has French vs. British colonialism left on the arts? How are contemporary artists responding to calls for restitution on African cultural heritage?
It has long been recognized that Buddhism is a religion whose tenets are constantly being absorbed, reinterpreted, and disseminated through images. While artworks exist as compliments to doctrinal thought, they are also integral components to ritual and belief, and can even underpin and inspire new forms of religious thought. This course provides a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of Buddhist art in Japan. Each week, we will focus on one group of related images, studying and analyzing their basic design or composition and material. Then, we will think about their original use, how they served specific ritual functions, or how they promoted certain Buddhist teachings. Themes to be considered include the development of Japanese Buddhist art in relation to the broader East Asian context and to indigenous Japanese religions (Shinto), the role of art and architecture in promulgating larger belief systems, women as Buddhist practitioners and as commissioners of religious art projects, and the deification of historical figures. By the end of this course, students will acquire an understanding of the multiple ways people in the Japanese archipelago interpreted Buddhist art over time, and will learn to evaluate and analyze religious artworks within specific ideological frameworks.
AHIS UN3611Korean Art in the Age of Global Encounters4
This seminar explores the artistic developments in Korea with a focus on its encounter with the arts of China, Japan, and Europe from the fifteenth century to the present. Each class examines case studies the works of a particular artist—to examine the way in which Korean artists developed their distinctive style and established the aesthetic values in response to specific historical junctures. There will be two field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Perhaps no other single institution has played a more crucial role in the development and preservation of Japanese art and other forms of visual culture than the Buddhist temple, itself an entity that has undergone significant change, particularly in the modern period. This seminar will examine Buddhist temples in the city of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital from 794-1867 from their beginnings in the late eighth century into the early modern period. Although architecture and sculpture will be our primary areas of focus, the course will provide students with multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives on the diverse forms of institutional organization, architecture, art, and liturgy that comprise Buddhist houses of worship, with particular attention to their development in the city of Kyoto. We will take a site-specific approach, attending to the following general issues: the legacy of continental practices in such early monasteries as Hōryūji and Tōdaiji in Nara; adaptations to Japanese urban space and landscape at Tōji and Enryakuji; physical changes in temples with the introduction of new sects such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism; and the transformation of temples in the early modern period. A week-long visit to Kyoto during the first week of November (week of election-day holiday) will be the highlight of the course. In Kyoto we will visit temples and museums to see first-hand the monuments we have studied in the course. Students will compile presentations in advance to serve as the main guides for our visit. These presentations will form a basis for final papers, which will be presented in class during the last three weeks of the semester, and which will be due in written form at the last class of the semester
This seminar reconceptualizes traditional Chinese paintings (hua) through the perspectives of medium and format. The class sections are arranged in chronological order. We will investigate the distinct formats of portable paintings from the 2nd to 18th centuries (including funerary banners, handscrolls, hanging scrolls, albums, screens, and fans) and the representations of paintings of various formats in tombs and other architectural-pictorial contexts. We will probe into the new notions and thoughts presented by the new pictorial formats, and examine how they have been conventionalized and re-developed by later works. The goal is to foreground frame, scale, surface and ground, as carriers as well as boundaries, of image in the discussions of image, and to see painting as the happenings that were schematized and realized by these external, yet also intrinsic, agents. Students will have the chance to peruse the artworks in museum visits, and are expected to do presentations that address the selected pictures with format insights. Class discussions will be both theoretical and object-oriented, exploring the depths of visual analyses on a par with methodological reflection. Reading proficiency in Chinese is recommended, but not a prerequisite
This seminar introduces the murals and screen paintings of pre-modern China, both functioned as “painted walls.” Besides examining the visual attributes of these wall paintings, it attends to their special materiality and spatiality rooted in their media—the wall and the screen—to explore their original functions and interactions with the audience. Special attention will be given to the wall paintings’ themes, motifs, spatial representations, styles, scale, media, placement, contexts of display, and audience. Students will take turns leading seminar discussions to analyze the readings for each week. Every week students will read the assigned essays and write a one or two page, double-space reflection on the content and argument. You will post your reflection with questions on Canvas the night before the seminar
AHIS UN3791Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art4.00
The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, narrative sculpture, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar will examine a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and film Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics
