112 courses with the subject ARH, 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.
The art and architecture of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe, presented in terms of their visual and cultural significance.
A survey of the history of Western art, including the works of Masaccio, Van Eyck, Donatello, Bosch, Michelangelo, and Leonardo; followed by the rise of national styles in the 17th and 18th centuries in France and England. Nineteenth-century neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, and postimpressionism, as well as modernism and developments in 20th-century art, are also covered. The discussion is required. COREQ: ARH1021
A discussion of the history of Western art, including the works of Masaccio, Van Eyck, Donatello, Bosch, Michelangelo, and Leonardo; followed by the rise of national styles in the 17th and 18th centuries in France and England. Nineteenth-century neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, and postimpressionism, as well as modernism and developments in 20th-century art, are also covered. COREQ: ARH1020
The work of Courbet, Manet, and the circle of the Impressionists sets the stage for the revolutionary modern movements of the 20th century (e.g., Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism). The course concludes with those artists who came to prominence in America at the time of World War II.
Introduces the diversity of practices that have dominated the history of art from 1945 to the present. Movements include: Abstract Expressionism, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop, minimalism, conceptual art, performance, Land Art, postmodernism, institutional critique, social practice, and “post”-internet art. This course uses the European and North American canon as a point of departure, emphasizing the global character of contemporary art practice.
Introduces the diversity of practices that have dominated the history of art since World War II. Movements include: Abstract Expressionism, postwar European painting, happenings, Fluxus, Pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, performance art, and postmodernism. While European and North American art are emphasized, Asian and Latin American art are also addressed, particularly in the context of increasing globalization. COREQ: ARH2060
Explores museums in their social role as conveners of art, objects, and material culture in communal spaces intended for contemplation but imbued with political concerns. Through the focus on specific sites and via a range of media (objects, exhibitions, literature, film, television), students discuss issues of value, ownership, conservation, rationales of display, repatriation, and the very idea of the “museum.”
Explores a range of topics, including the history of art museums, current theories and methodologies of display, and museum administration. In addition to class discussion, students meet with museum personnel from the Neuberger Museum of Art to learn the basics of museum operations, including curatorial work, exhibition design, registration, education and public programming, marketing, public relations, and finance.
Introduces historical and contemporary practice of curation, conservation, and collecting in Western museums through case studies. Themes covered include classifications of “art/artifact,” cultural patrimony, and the civic roles of museums. Site visits enable students to experience galleries, meet with curators and other staff members. Assessment is predicated equally on course participation, three shorter analytical writing assignments and a final project.
An examination of painting, sculpture, and architecture during the European Middle Ages, from the end of the Roman Empire through the Gothic era (c. 300-1400). French and Italian art are emphasized, but works from every part of Christian Europe, from England and Spain to the Byzantine Empire, are included.
An examination of painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in Italy from the late 13th century to the late 15th century, including Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca, and Botticelli.
An examination of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Italy during the 16th century. The course begins with an in-depth study of the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, Giorgione, and Titian, and then traces the evolution of the anticlassical style known as mannerism.
Developments in Greek sculpture, vase painting, and architecture are traced from the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces (c. 1200 BCE) to the rise of the Roman Empire (1st and 2nd centuries BCE). Topics include the impact of Near Eastern civilizations on early Greek culture, the “classical” style’s florescence in 5th-century Athens, and the creation of the Hellenistic world by Alexander the Great.
This course introduces students to ancient Roman art and architecture from the period ca. 750 BCE to 350 CE. Topics include the influence of Greek and Etruscan art and architecture on the Romans, the use of art and architecture to define “Rome,” the Augustan revolution, private art and architecture, and the art and architecture of the Roman provinces.
Explores a variety of Afro-Atlantic art forms from 1324, when the historian al-Umari recorded the MalianEmperor’s attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to 1791, when Toussaint Louverture led an insurrection,founding the first multi-racial republic of Haïti. Iconography, style, and materials are considered, along withreligion and gender. Students will engage with both primary sources and recent scholarly analyses.
Examines a variety of African art forms ranging from imperial to nomadic cultures from the prehistoric period to the 17th century. Iconography, style, and materials will be considered, alongside how and why both Black and non-Black artists, critics, and historians have mobilized the ancient and early modern periods of African history.
An introduction to women artists from the Renaissance era through the Enlightenment, including Anguissola, Gentileschi, Vigée-Lebrun, and Kauffmann. Topics include access to professions, constructions of sexuality and gender, and attitudes toward the body in representation.
Explores the history of twentieth-century architecture through the modern city, tracing the rise and occasional decline of the metropolis internationally. Students analyze how architects and urban planners proposed new visions of urban life and devised solutions for urgent social and political problems related to urbanization (e.g. public space, housing, gentrification, globalization).
Explore the history of colors within global art history in a global context. Factors like the availability and cost of pigments, trade routes, religious and political meanings will be considered, along with the impact of industrial color production, globalization, marketing and digital technology on our understanding of colors.
Explores a variety of Afro-Atlantic art forms from 1801, the founding the first multi-racial republic of Haïti to the present. Iconography, style, and materials are considered, along with issues of colonialism, religion, and gender. Students engage with both primary sources and recent scholarly analyses, as well as the collections at the Neuberger Museum of Art.
How and why do certain artworks become embroiled in major public debates, political scandals, and legal disputes? Beginning with the 1863 Salon des Refusés and continuing to the present day through an itinerary that travels the globe, students will examine the role of controversy in defining art, society, and how we imagine the relationship between the two.
The paintings of Michelangelo Mersisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) had a revolutionary impact on the art world of his era, and the fascination with his extraordinary re-evaluation of pictorial effects continues to this day. This course examines Caravaggio’s art and career and considers responses to his work by other artists, including film directors, up to the present.
Examines the relationship between the traditional crafts and the upheavals of modernity. Beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century and continuing to the present day, students explore how craft is framed as protest against industrialization, as utopian model of labor and exchange, and as aesthetic transformation.
Examine the display of objects in principle and in practice from the early modern through the modern era. Focus on the way meanings were created through acts of presentation across a range of sites, including scientific collections, cabinets of wonders, salons, stores, shop windows and museums.
This course focuses on American traditions of art, looking at racial construction, class hierarchies, gender and representation, patronage and politics, as well as the impact of new technologies. Together we ask how did colonialism, notions of frontier, forced enslavement, ideas about domesticity, and other historical phenomena shape American conceptions of art and artists to 1914?
A study of African American painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, drawings, photography, film, and vernacular and popular art. The course begins with the Afro-Atlantic era and covers images made by Southern artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as artists associated with the “New Negro” movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and postmodernism.
Examines the photographic medium from its earliest forms through the 1920s and 1930s. Topics include technical innovations, manipulations and interventions, function and reception, the relationship to the fine arts, and debates about photography’s claims of realism.
A study of the German painter, printmaker, and draftsman Albrecht Dürer. The artist’s interests in science, politics, religious conflicts, sexuality, and the non-Western world are emphasized. PREREQ: ARH1000-2994 Or ARH3000-3994 Or ARH4000-4994 Or HIS1000-2994 Or HIS3000-3994 Or HIS4000-4994
Examines the history of painting and sculpture in Northern Europe from the 14th century to c. 1570. Flemish, Dutch, French, German, and Czech works are considered, with emphasis on such artists as the Limbourg Brothers, Van Eyck, Bosch, Dürer, and Bruegel.
Examining the intersections of visual culture, communications, and disability, this course reconsiders our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture; at the same time it also develops new understandings of disability and the technocultural environments in which it exists. Students explore critical accounts of disability, measuring them against theories of the visual, technology and communication. PREREQ: ARH1010 Or ARH1020 Or COM1500
Investigates the themes, diverse genres, and major figures in 17th-century Dutch painting. Current problems of interpretation are examined, including the idea that there may have been a specifically northern form of visual thinking.
Despite a growing interest in the work of the Russian avant-garde, there is still relatively little known about the artists of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. This course addresses the broad scope and multidisciplinary practice of Russian modernism, from the shocking primitivism of The Rite of Spring to the cold pragmatism of constructivism.
An examination of the visual arts in Venice and its hinterland from the early Middle Ages to the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797. In addition to in-depth treatment of such artists as Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, and Tiepolo, the social context of the arts and the unique urban development of Venice are studied in detail.
A study of the representation of Asians, Africans, and Americans (and their native lands) in European and American art from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. Some consideration is also given to the impact of non-Western arts on the European tradition.
Design is both a noun and a verb. This course deals with the idea of design as a cultural phenomenon and a creative practice. Contemporary design and its making are situated within a broad methodological framework, drawing from existing and emerging theories in anthropology, art history, film studies, criticism, the history of technology, and architecture.
Focuses on contemporary Latin American artists working in and out of Latin America: Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Adriana Varejao, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Garaicoa, Betsabeé Romero, Javier Tellez, Nadín Ospina, Tania Bruguera, and Nicolás de Jesus. Students analyze the way these artists address such questions as urban violence, social inequality, pollution, emigration, and national identity.
Examines the history of design as it parallels the history of technology and industrialization. Covering a variety of design disciplines, including architecture and urban planning, graphic design, fashion, and industrial design, this course focuses less on aesthetics than on the cultural programs that have shaped buildings, objects, and communication systems for more than two centuries.
The simultaneous development of various painters associated with Impressionism (e.g., Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Cassatt) is presented. This radical new art movement is traced from the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 to the last exhibition of 1886 and the appearance of the post-Impressionists. Students explore the shared relationships of the Impressionist artists.
European art from the French Revolution to 1900, with movements in France, Germany, and England receiving particular attention. Major artists studied include David, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, Frederich, Constable, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Monet, and Gauguin. PREREQ: ARH1000-1994 Or ARH2000-2994 Or ARH3000-3994 Or ARH4000-4994
The history of performance art is the story of an obsession with changing the world. This course explores the work of artists, curators, and scholars-from 1950 to the present, in North America, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe-who have invested the form with their hopes, dreams, and fears of making art that is more real than everyday life.
A variety of intersections between extreme mental conditions and the production of works of art during the modern period are investigated. Topics include connections between creativity and mental instability, artists with a history of mental disorder, and theories about stylistic or formal affinities between madness and art.
Focuses on the work of French artists from the early modern era to the French Revolution, with special attention to the Gallic obsession with realism, alongside the more abstract aspects of representation.
An examination of critical and theoretical writing by artists about art. The course considers texts from various eras, but focuses primarily on 20th-century and contemporary material. Artists’ writings are analyzed in the context of art criticism as a whole, and students also have the opportunity try their hand at criticism.
A survey of Modern and Contemporary Indian art since 1850, examining the rich and complex art practices which have emerged from pre-independent India to date. Focus on the works of the most significant Indian artists; concepts of tradition/modern, nationalism/internationalism and globalization; and on socio-political practices that are reflected in artworks and practices that make Indian art truly distinct
Provides art history majors with an opportunity to examine the nature of the discipline by analyzing and comparing the writings of several art historians. The seminar concentrates on the work of a single artist in light of various art historical approaches. This writing-intensive course requires a variety of short essays and concludes with a research paper and class presentation. Limited to art history majors.
Since the 1800s, the avant-gardes have tried to resist the delimited role of fine art in Western culture. In this course, students examine the strategies that avant-garde artists have used to reconnect their art practice with the more contentious areas of social and political life.
Participants in this seminar propose, research, plan, and coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming to be undertaken the following semester (as part of the course, Exhibition II). These exhibitions will take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations. PREREQ: ARH4035 Or ARH4037
Participants in this seminar coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming based on the plans and preparations of the previous semester (conducted as part of the course, Exhibition I). These exhibitions take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations. PREREQ: ARH4025
In this seminar, students and the instructor co-curate an exhibition for the Neuberger Museum of Art. The class works on all aspects of the exhibition with the instructor and museum staff. Students learn about the various functions of departments, including curatorial, education, exhibition design, development, and public relations, putting exhibition theory into practice. Exhibition topics vary.
An investigation of the historical development and function of museums. Students examine the growth of collections and exhibitions, along with the various roles that museums have played in relation to art history and society around the world. Central to this course and its final project is the question: “What should a museum be in the 21st century?” PREREQ: ARH2140 Or ARH4030 Or ARH4715
A rigorous examination of the historical, theoretical, and concrete concerns of curatorial practice. Course-work culminates in a complete exhibition proposal. PREREQ: ARH2050 Or ARH2060
Train students in the myriad forms of writing required for a curatorial career through sustained focus on an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art and additional exhibitions at metropolitan area museums. Students produce several forms of written materials, including research precis, funding proposals, and wall labels, as well as consult with curators on and off campus. (57 words)
A practical course in art criticism, which meets regularly in New York. Contemporary works of art form the basis for lectures, discussions, and written essays.
Examines how activists and artists have interrogated questions of “normalcy.” We will read deeply in the history of disability rights, as well as theories of personhood, identity, and representation. In so doing, we use ideas from philosophy, anthropology, feminist criticism, and literature to research and explore how art, media and performance studies present bodies deemed nonnormative.
Cinema and Television Studies (School of Film and Media Studies):
This seminar focuses on uses of history-as both subject and method-in art around the turn of the 21st century. Within a globally comparative frame, students investigate contemporary theories and practices that take stock of the past in order to reimagine the future at a moment when the world seems simultaneously more connected and more fractured than ever before.
French Language and Culture
The visual record of the production and consumption of food and drink are examined in this seminar. Topics include food in the still life, the representation of gluttony, and the prominent position of sacred feasts and food miracles in religious art. The primary focus is on Western art, but examples from other traditions are considered. PREREQ: ARH1000-1994 Or ARH2000-2994 Or ARH3000-3994 Or ARH4000-4994
Since the 1800s, the avant-gardes have tried to resist the delimited role of fine art in Western culture. In this course, students examine the strategies that avant-garde artists have used to reconnect their art practice with the more contentious areas of social and political life.
Participants in this seminar propose, research, plan, and coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming to be undertaken the following semester (as part of the course, Exhibition II). These exhibitions will take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations. PREREQ: ARH5035 Or ARH5037
Participants in this seminar coordinate an exhibition series and related public programming based on the plans and preparations of the previous semester (conducted as part of the course, Exhibition I). These exhibitions take place in the Neuberger Museum, other sites around campus, or in a combination of Museum-based and other locations. PREREQ: ARH5025
An investigation of the historical development and function of museums. Students examine the growth of collections and exhibitions, along with the various roles that museums have played in relation to art history and society around the world. Central to this course and its final project is the question: “What should a museum be in the 21st century?”
A rigorous examination of the historical, theoretical, and concrete concerns of curatorial practice. Course-work culminates in a complete exhibition proposal.
Explores the history of twentieth-century architecture through the modern city, tracing the rise and occasional decline of the metropolis internationally. Students analyze how architects and urban planners proposed new visions of urban life and devised solutions for urgent social and political problems related to urbanization (e.g. public space, housing, gentrification, globalization).
Explore the history of colors within global art history in a global context. Factors like the availability and cost of pigments, trade routes, religious and political meanings will be considered, along with the impact of industrial color production, globalization, marketing and digital technology on our understanding of colors.
Train students in the myriad forms of writing required for a curatorial career through sustained focus on an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art and additional exhibitions at metropolitan area museums. Students produce several forms of written materials, including research precis, funding proposals, and wall labels, as well as consult with curators on and off campus. (57 words)
Explores a variety of Afro-Atlantic art forms from 1801, the founding the first multi-racial republic of Haïti to the present. Iconography, style, and materials are considered, along with issues of colonialism, religion, and gender. Students engage with both primary sources and recent scholarly analyses, as well as the collections at the Neuberger Museum of Art.
The major theoretical orientations and methodologies associated with art historical study are discussed and critiqued. Methods reviewed range from connoisseurship to the iconographical and social-historical. Theories surveyed include formalist, Marxist, literary, feminist, psychoanalytic, and new-historicist concerns that dominated 20th-century interpretative practice. Required for MA students.
How and why do certain artworks become embroiled in major public debates, political scandals, and legal disputes? Beginning with the 1863 Salon des Refusés and continuing to the present day through an itinerary that travels the globe, students will examine the role of controversy in defining art, society, and how we imagine the relationship between the two.
Examines the relationship between the traditional crafts and the upheavals of modernity. Beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century and continuing to the present day, students explore how craft is framed as protest against industrialization, as utopian model of labor and exchange, and as aesthetic transformation.
Examine the display of objects in principle and in practice from the early modern through the modern era. Focus on the way meanings were created through acts of presentation across a range of sites, including scientific collections, cabinets of wonders, salons, stores, shop windows and museums.
This course focuses on American traditions of art, looking at racial construction, class hierarchies, gender and representation, patronage and politics, as well as the impact of new technologies. Together we ask how did colonialism, notions of frontier, forced enslavement, ideas about domesticity, and other historical phenomena shape American conceptions of art and artists to 1914?
A study of African American painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, drawings, photography, film, and vernacular and popular art. The course begins with the Afro-Atlantic era and covers images made by Southern artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as artists associated with the “New Negro” movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and postmodernism.
Examines the photographic medium from its earliest forms through the 1920s and 1930s. Topics include technical innovations, manipulations and interventions, function and reception, the relationship to the fine arts, and debates about photography’s claims of realism.
Examining the intersections of visual culture, communications, and disability, this course reconsiders our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture; at the same time it also develops new understandings of disability and the technocultural environments in which it exists. Students explore critical accounts of disability, measuring them against theories of the visual, technology and communication.
Despite a growing interest in the work of the Russian avant-garde, there is still relatively little known about the artists of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. This course addresses the broad scope and multidisciplinary practice of Russian modernism, from the shocking primitivism of The Rite of Spring to the cold pragmatism of constructivism.
Design is both a noun and a verb. This course deals with the idea of design as a cultural phenomenon and a creative practice. Contemporary design and its making are situated within a broad methodological framework, drawing from existing and emerging theories in anthropology, art history, film studies, criticism, the history of technology, and architecture.
A seminar that considers topics and theoretical models that inform students’ understanding of modern and contemporary art. Within this framework, critics, art historians, and artists are invited to give lectures and lead seminars on their particular research interests. Required for MA students.
A directed investigation of a specific set of issues in contemporary art and culture. The focus, which changes from year to year, introduces students to critical and theoretical models central to contemporary cultural analysis. Invited artists, art historians, and critics participate through individual lectures, seminars, or directed collaborations with students. Required for MA students.
Focuses on contemporary Latin American artists working in and out of Latin America: Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Gomez Peña, Adriana Varejao, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Garaicoa, Betsabeé Romero, Javier Tellez, Nadín Ospina, Tania Bruguera, and Nicolás de Jesus. Students analyze the way these artists address such questions as urban violence, social inequality, pollution, emigration, and national identity.
Examines the history of design as it parallels the history of technology and industrialization. Covering a variety of design disciplines, including architecture and urban planning, graphic design, fashion, and industrial design, this course focuses less on aesthetics than on the cultural programs that have shaped buildings, objects, and communication systems for more than two centuries.
A practical course in art criticism, which meets regularly in New York. Contemporary works of art form the basis for lectures, discussions, and written essays
Examines how activists and artists have interrogated questions of “normalcy.” We will read deeply in the history of disability rights, as well as theories of personhood, identity, and representation. In so doing, we use ideas from philosophy, anthropology, feminist criticism, and literature to research and explore how art, media and performance studies present bodies deemed nonnormative.
European art from the French Revolution to 1900, with movements in France, Germany, and England receiving particular attention. Major artists studied include David, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, Frederich, Constable, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Daumier, Manet, Degas, Monet, and Gauguin.
The history of performance art is the story of an obsession with changing the world. This course explores the work of artists, curators, and scholars-from 1950 to the present, in North America, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe-who have invested the form with their hopes, dreams, and fears of making art that is more real than everyday life.
A variety of intersections between extreme mental conditions and the production of works of art during the modern period are investigated. Topics include connections between creativity and mental instability, artists with a history of mental disorder, and theories about stylistic or formal affinities between madness and art.
This seminar focuses on uses of history-as both subject and method-in art around the turn of the 21st century. Within a globally comparative frame, students investigate contemporary theories and practices that take stock of the past in order to reimagine the future at a moment when the world seems simultaneously more connected and more fractured than ever before.
An examination of critical and theoretical writing by artists about art. The course considers texts from various eras, but focuses primarily on 20th-century and contemporary material. Artists’ writings are analyzed in the context of art criticism as a whole, and students also have the opportunity try their hand at criticism.
Supervision of research and writing of the master’s thesis. ARH 5990 and 5991 must be taken in consecutive semesters.
Supervision of research and writing of the master’s thesis. ARH 5990 and 5991 must be taken in consecutive semesters.
Source: SUNY at Purchase College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
