40 courses with the subject ARTH, 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.
ARTH 101Caves to Cathedrals: The Art of Europe and the Mediterranean to the1.00
13th Century Examines some of the best-preserved monuments from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the early and medieval Islamic world, and medieval Europe. Lectures, readings and discussions consider why, how and for whom these works were originally created, by examining ancient history, religion, politics, trade, and other social structures. Equal attention is given to recent historical factors that have shaped this "canon" of art history, including colonialism, nationalism, tourism, UNESCO, the art market, museums, and academia, as well as some of the "decolonizing" methodologies that have emerged to push back against those forces. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Analyzes the development of Buddhist visual cultures as the religion spread over numerous centuries, from South Asia (present-day India and Pakistan) to China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. Lectures and selected readings focus on key elements for understanding artistic and architectural production in the many cultures where Buddhism flourished, with a particular focus on the interplay between religious issues and other factors that resulted in specific changes. Students investigate transformations and continuities in the styles and subjects of Buddhist art forms, including how monuments mark or articulate sacred space as well as the myriad ways that images play a part in Buddhist beliefs and practice.
ARTH 105Introduction to Architecture in Cultural Context1.00
An introduction to the analysis of architecture and the understanding of it within its cultural frameworks. Students develop tools for the analysis of spaces and structures and become familiar with the vocabulary and the conceptual frameworks essential for understanding the built environment. Historical styles, significant individual structures or complexes, basic principles of urbanism, and the relationship between theory and practice are integrated through select case studies. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
A survey of art from the turn of the 19th century to the present. Students learn how to analyze the visual strategies of a variety of artworks, and to pose critical questions about their context, especially in relation to political changes, exhibition practices, and modes of circulation. Also an introduction to the discipline of art history, training students for more advanced art history courses by teaching basic vocabulary and techniques of close looking and analytical thinking about visual material. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Analyzes the development of Buddhist visual cultures as the religion spread over numerous centuries, from South Asia (present-day India and Pakistan) to China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. Students focus on understanding artistic and architectural production in the many cultures where Buddhism flourished, with a particular focus on the interplay between religious issues and other factors that resulted in specific changes. Students investigate transformations and continuities in the styles and subjects of Buddhist art forms, including how monuments mark or articulate sacred space as well as the myriad ways that images play a part in Buddhist beliefs and practice. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
An introduction to some of the central artists, themes, works, and debates that comprise the history and current state of global contemporary art (roughly 1950 to present), with a particular focus on the social movements and cultural politics that have informed major artistic developments and strategies of representation during these decades. Examines contemporary art's shifting relationship to sea changes in the world at large: the pressures and challenges, as well as the possibilities, that arise with globalization, decolonization, technological growth, social reforms, geopolitical conflicts, climate change, and the volatility of the art market.
Introduces students to some of the riches of Roman material culture, including painting, sculpture, architecture, coinage, and urbanism, from the 6th century B.C.E. to the 6th century C.E. Despite this broad time-frame, the aim is not exhaustive chronological coverage. Rather, the focus is on the social and political contexts that generated the production of particular artworks in the Roman world. Students explore the question of how these works' formal qualities met the needs of ancient patrons, and how they were reused or reinterpreted in subsequent generations. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
ARTH 208Marble, Gold, Silk, and Glass: Art of the Middle Ages1.00
A study of art, architecture, and material culture in Europe and the Mediterranean world, from the end of the Roman Empire (marble), to the rise of Christianity and the development of new visual vocabularies to convey its message of salvation (gold), to the emergence of rich, widely circulating and highly influential artistic practices in the Islamic world (silk), and finally to the emergence of pilgrimage routes and prosperous cathedral cities by the 13th century (glass). Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
ARTH 210Contemporary Art and Politics in the Middle East
Major developments in contemporary art movements of the Islamicate Middle East, from decolonization in the mid-twentieth century until the present are considered. Thematic areas include debates about cultural heritage, museum policies, and preservation, networks of digital exchange, censorship under authoritarian regimes, art as public diplomacy, and questions of representation amidst an environment of rising conservative Islamic activism. Students examine multi-media artistic production from Morocco to Afghanistan, chronologically contextualizing the politics of cultural production in the colonial period, during
ARTH 216Nature's Mirror: Renaissance Arts 1400-15501.00
Considers painting and sculpture of Europe ca. 1400–1550, examining major artists and regional practices within their social, political, and cultural settings. Themes include the development of linear perspective, the inheritance and interpretation of classical tradition, technologies of art, Renaissance "self-fashioning," and narrative strategy as approached through visual analysis, primary source readings, and recent critical literature. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Explores European architectural history and theory from c.1400-1800. Designed to give students with little or no exposure to architectural history and thinking, or to the period in question, an understanding of issues ranging from the most fundamental to the more advanced, across a number of contexts and case studies. Engages with architectural history as it relates to the body, place, and site; draws heavily on primary source texts as well as foundational and recent scholarship.
ARTH 226Nature's Order: Baroque Arts 1550-17501.00
European painting and sculpture ca. 1550-1750 in its cultural, political, and social settings. Themes include the impact of the Counter-Reformation on the visual arts; Caravaggio and international Caravaggism; "realism" and "verisimilitude"; the intersection of mysticism, spirituality, and art; art and science; art and optics; theatricality; art as propaganda; intersections between visual arts and architecture. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
ARTH 232Latin American Modern and Contemporary Art
Examines modern and contemporary art and visual culture in Latin America within the context of diasporic experience, transnational migration, Indigeneity, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism. Students consider a wide variety of media, including films, graphic arts, texts, and exhibitions with an eye toward the local and global events and sociopolitical structures that prompted their production--especially waves of colonial independence, Pan-Americanism, World War II, the cultural policies of the Cold War, and the rise of
From the early 19th to the turn of the 20th century, artists working in traditional media such as painting and sculpture as well as emerging technologies in photography and film, engaged subjects and themes of everyday life in an environment transformed by urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism. During this period, modern art developed some of its characteristic strategies: an emphasis on and critique of artistic originality, ambivalent relations with tradition, problematic ties with cultural and economic institutions, and a strained allegiance to radical politics. Students explore the art works, exhibitions, institutions, and discourses of 19th century art and politics with particular attention paid to the impacts of nationalism and globalization on the production, reception, and dissemination of art objects and the developments of global modernisms. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Offers a critical and historical examination of the artistic exchanges across the Atlantic — between North America, South America, Europe, and Africa — from 1880 to 1920. Students examine how modern art transformed in reaction and response to radical technological, social, and political change, addressing how industrialization, political and sexual revolution, rapid urban growth, and an expanding consumer culture defined a wide range of visual culture. Students examine painting, drawing, and sculpture alongside the newer media of photography, assemblage, film, and collage. Crosslisted: ALST 238 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Surveys international art movements of the late 20th century that broadly interrogate the definition of art, the status of the art object, and the role of the artist. Engages with critical theory that informs artistic practice (and vice versa) in the context of rapid and radical social change, emergences of new media, the breakdown of conventional artistic boundaries, impacts of decolonization and post-colonial thought, and the explosive growth of the art market and the global circulation of art. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation or Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Focuses on the artistic and political upheavals of the late 20th and 21st centuries, and the theories, philosophies, methods, and sensibilities that shaped the production of contemporary art and its written and critical histories in this dynamic period. Emphasis is placed on the social uses and contexts of art, rather than on its formal and aesthetic properties. Along with studying specific artists, movements, and art practices, students discuss the increased importance of curators, exhibitions, and the biennial system, as central to the circulation and production of contemporary art. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation or Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Begins with South Asia's most ancient civilization (ca. 2500 BCE) and then tracks the classic forms of Buddhist stupas, rock-cut cave temples, early mosques, and the increasingly grand stone temples dedicated to the worship of Hindu gods. Elegant figures, carved in an aesthetic language that persists in Indian dance, guide visitors through these monuments, teaching them about the nature of the divine. Special attention is devoted to analyzing elements that lend South Asian art its distinctive character. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
As South Asian temple complexes expand, they become entire cities and they share the form of kings' palatial fort-complexes. Expanding outward in concentric rings from their sacred, private cores, these temples and palaces, as well as garden-tombs and houses of government for the British Raj, create visions of divine transcendence on earth, transformative spaces where every visitor has a chance to engage with the ultimate order of creation. Students also explore the paintings made for the people who inhabited these palaces, with special attention to delicate Mughal portraits, impassioned love lyrics favored by Rajput princes, and spaces magically transformed by the presence of the sacred--Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim. Special attention is devoted to analyzing elements that lend South Asian art its distinctive character. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
ARTH 246From Emperors to Anime: Pictorial Practices in China and Japan1.00
This is a class about what objects can teach people, and specifically about many kinds of pictures - from temple murals to anime film - in the culturally diverse regions that are now called China and Japan. These sophisticated pictorial forms ask their viewers to employ forms of visual literacy that are in some cases quite different from the ways of seeing the European pictures require. Students are taught to do visual analysis, to see carefully and analyze what they see. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Recommended: Previous coursework in art history or Asian studies is helpful
ARTH 255Museum Exhibitions: Design, Rhetoric, and Interpretation1.00
Takes advantage of special learning opportunities that arise in conjunction with temporary museum exhibitions and/or permanent installations. Normally focuses on at least two related exhibitions that are currently on view either on Colgate's campus or at nearby institutions. Students meet with curators to learn about the exhibit and the decision-making process behind it. Students examine how museums use wall text, labels, juxtapositions, frames, cases, lighting, architecture, and, above all, their choices of what to include and exclude, to craft particular narratives and encourage particular interpretations of objects and historical phenomena. May also include a hands-on practicum as well, giving students the opportunity to curate and install a real exhibition of their own design. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Museums have meant many things to different people over the centuries. The mandate to display and preserve objects of historical interest is a relatively recent meaning. But museums have always had agendas, implicit judgements about the structure of history and the value of culture. Museums came to serve new and quite specific purposes during the 18-19th centuries as European presence expanded around the globe as colonialism and imperialism. Students explore the thinking driving the collecting processes that fed these museums and the display strategies that animated them, both in Europe and in the spaces Europeans colonized. India serves as the main case study, with comparison cases drawn from Africa and North America. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Studies the destruction, appropriation, reconstruction, and restitution of European art and architectural heritage. Temporal focus on the fifteenth to twentieth centuries with special attention given to the Nazi and Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland during WWII with respect to the fate of cultural heritage. Considers local and international conflict and post-conflict responses.
Teaches critical approaches to the study of museums as cultural, political, and didactic institutions. Integrates history, theory, and practice to give students an overview of how the museum as a phenomenon came to be, how exhibitions are made, what stories they tell, and the ways in which these stories are experienced by diverse audiences. Students gain insight into the professional practices of museums, as well as their identities as cultural institutions and public resources that also operate according to the priorities of particular communities, municipalities and private patrons. Engages with aspects of art collection,
The American Campus, a distinctive planning and architectural tradition, is the topic considered, with a special emphasis on the Colgate campus. Students undertake an in depth research project investigating how an aspect that has been influential in their educational experience has evolved over Colgate's two century history. Work within the University Archives is central to the research project. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Focuses on the emergence of a self-consciously modern architecture in European and the United States at the turn of the 20th Century, follows its maturation in the interwar period, and explores its international proliferation following World War II. Students become familiar with many key buildings and architects as well as the theory associated with them. All students execute three projects during the course of the semester in which they study and emulate the design strategies of select major modern architects. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Recommended: necessary Experience of ARTS/ARC 105 is valuable but not necessary Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Through a close analysis of cultural production and ideological statements, students examine the relationship between the politics of fascism and its visual practices, analyzing the role of art in the formation of the regimes' self-identity and in the formation of the fascist subjects. Students consider the related but diverse manifestations of fascist culture in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy in order to compare and contrast the heterogeneous modes of fascist visual culture in the interwar period. As well as examine responses to fascism in countries such as Great Britain, the United States, and Mexico, in order to understand the ways in which liberal regimes reacted to the visual propaganda of totalitarianism. Materials include painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, graphic design, film, and forms of public spectacle and pageantry. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
ARTH 309Scandals, Controversies and Debates in the Art World
Students research, read, think, discuss and write critically about recent moments (mostly in the last ten years) when art's complicated relationship to money, private property, expertise, race, identity, memory, and colonialism erupted into public consciousness. A second objective is to guide students through the process
The republic of Venice offers a special opportunity to study the interaction of the various fine arts that flowered simultaneously at the peak of one of Europe's greatest cultural centers. Students examine artistic achievements of the Renaissance and early Baroque ages (ca. 1400-1700), chiefly in architecture and music. Students make frequent excursions to exemplary churches and palazzi, may attend local concerts, and learn to sing some Italian Renaissance music. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
ARTH 344Hindu Temples: Architecture and Sculpture, Architecture as Sculpture1.00
From rock-cut halls carved into cliffs to elaborately ornamented constructions with multiple interior spaces, the buildings that have housed worship of the Goddess Shiva, Vishnu, and other deities of the Hindu pantheon honor the ideals of the divine palace and of the silent caves embedded in a mountain. Students explore what characteristics the wide range of Hindu temples share, how they vary from one region to another, and how they changed from the 3rd century BCE to 12th century CE. What do they share with structures for Buddhist, Jaina, and Muslim worship? How did ritual shape buildings and sculpture, and can we reconstruct ritual from material remains? Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Explores the history of group exhibitions of modern art and related debates on the nature of display. Using visual, historical, and theoretical materials to study select case studies from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, students focus on how the history of art display impacts our understanding of modernism today, studying installations of art as creations that manifest ideologies and aesthetics. An important aspect of the course is thinking about how photography — the primary medium through which we can now know how past exhibitions looked like — operates as a medium of visual representation as well as a force of cultural innovation by circulating modern art. In addition to the study of the history of exhibitions, students also investigate the changing role of the art critic and the curator. Students study exhibitions on campus, applying to contemporary shows the critical skills learned by studying art displays from the past. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Examines the "long" or the "global" 1960s and the ways in which many of its notable artists and thinkers made work that engaged with the plasticity and expansiveness of boundaries, both physical and immaterial, during a politically charged, transnationally interconnected moment in which many seemingly fixed and supposedly natural boundaries were tested and compromised. Engages with a range of artistic, political, and cultural boundary-formations and their breeches, drawing out connections between representation, interpretation, visibility, space, and power in select global case studies of 1960s art. Introduces new and emerging methodologies in the field, and engages with the challenges and the possibilities of writing art history from beyond installed categories of knowledge. Also gives students a methodological context for historicizing the discipline itself, which came of age in the 1960s in the academy and still largely understands fields of artistic production as territorially bound to nation-states and ethnic regionalisms. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
An umbrella course designed to utilize the expertise of the Art History staff and to explore specialized themes as they relate to the art of diverse cultures and geographical areas during the centuries before 1300 CE. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
An umbrella course designed to utilize the expertise of the Art History staff and to explore specialized themes as they relate to the art of diverse cultures and geographical areas at any time between 1300 and 1800 CE. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
An umbrella course designed to utilize the expertise of the Art History staff and to explore specialized themes as they relate to the art of diverse cultures and geographical areas during the centuries since 1800 CE. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
The student works closely with a faculty member to develop and complete a substantive independent research paper. Majors with an art history emphasis are required to take and complete ARTH 475 in the fall of their senior year. When Offered: Fall semester only
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
