The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art · Courses
HTA
11 courses with the subject HTA, 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.
HTA 101Modern to Contemporary: An Introduction to Art History3
This two-semester art history core course, developed as part of the Foundation year for students in the School of Art but open to all students, is organized around a set of themes running through the history of modernity from the 18th century to the present. Within specific themes, significant works, figures and movements in art/ design will be presented chronologically. Students will be able to identify and critically evaluate significant works, figures and movements in art/design in the modern period; be able to describe the main social and political contexts for the changes in art/design over the last two hundred years; and engage, in writing and class discussion, with theoretical perspectives on art/design production. The course will involve museum visits. Grading will be based on class participation, papers, and exams. 241
As a part of the ongoing discourse on the tripartite interrelation among art, religion and modernity, this class investigates “Buddhist art,” the visual culture of one the world religions, rooted in the premodern societies of India, Central, South East and East Asia and Tibet, from which its distinctive material forms, visual principles and ritual practices developed. More recently, the presence of Asian Buddhist material/ visual cultures has asserted itself anew through transnational exchanges and confrontations, particularly between Asia and the modern and contemporary West. This course attempts to historicize this phenomenon by taking a macro approach to Buddhist art (without sacrificing specifics related to individual cases) by investigating two possible constituents of modern/contemporary Buddhist art: its core historical principles carried over from its origins, which have been considered “timeless,” and its uniquely “timely” complication of or deviation from its original systems. We will spend half of the course studying some original principles of historical Buddhist art in areas such as visuality, representation, copy, agency, function and performativity, while quickly tracing the geo-historical spread of the religion throughout Asia over a period of more than 2,400 years. In this section, we will visit 245
Asian Americans come from vastly diverse paths of migration, socioeconomic conditions, political histories, and cultural backgrounds. Accordingly, the term “Asian American art” remains contested and open-ended. In this course, we will examine how artistic productions by Asian Americans during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have articulated varying ideas of identity, race, politics, community, and art, while continuing to question whether “Asian American art” can mean something more than art produced by bodies racialized as Asian. We will consider how various sociopolitical and discursive forces have historically shaped (and continue to shape) Asian Americans as a race, and carefully attend to the complexity of Asian American experiences and responses that have informed their artmaking. Beyond the focus on art and artists, we will also discuss how curating Asian American art has helped mold and animate the field. The course will address themes such as: Chinatown and the invention of place, immigration, citizenship, and identity, in/visibility and transparency/opacity, tradition and (self-)orientalism, art and activism from Gidra, Godzilla to Stop AAPI Hate, interraciality and globality, and theories of “yellow women” and “racist love” among others.
HTA 278Modernism in Latin America: Abstraction in Mexico City
This course traces the development of modern art in Mexico City during the first half of the twentieth century, addressing art produced by both Mexican and foreign artists. Existing literature places an emphasis on muralism and, with it, figuration. Demonstrating that abstraction and alternative modes of visual expression thrived in Mexico City during these decades foregrounds the individual and group endeavors that challenged artistic convention. In this process, we will reassess the expectations of orthodox abstraction, identifying how Mexico City-based artists productively translated and displaced these tenets. Throughout the course, we will deconstruct 246
While the study of Baroque art has traditionally been Eurocentric, scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of studying the movement within a global context. This course provides an introduction to Baroque art and architecture from ca. 1600 to 1750 in both Europe and across the world; emphasizing the movement of ideas, images, arts and goods, it underscores the international, dynamic, and hybrid nature of the movement. Starting with an introduction to the key artists, imagery and styles in Europe, the course explores the diffusion and development of the Baroque in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. This course also examines the political, social, and economic ramifications of this exchange and how these Early Modern networks of trade formed the foundation of our current global economy. Featuring a wide range of media— including painting, architecture, print, sculpture, textile, and decorative arts—this course will highlight the diverse nature of the global Baroque, while focusing on the contributions of native artists and the incorporation of local cultures into regional Baroque styles. 247
This course will examine the life and work of Louise Bourgeois. From the 1930s through 2010, Bourgeois moved between abstraction and figuration across the mediums of painting, drawing, prints, and most prominently, sculpture. Iconic today, the artist was overlooked for most of her career when she worked prodigiously alongside canonical male artists of late modernism to explore themes of identity, trauma, gender, and motherhood. In this class, we will develop skills of visual analysis, attending closely to the artist’s form and iconography (famously, the spider and the cell) as well as her process and materials (including bronze, marble, latex, plaster, fabric, and clothing). We will build a historical and methodological toolkit to engage critically with different aspects of her oeuvre, probing the uses of autobiography and psychoanalysis; the architecture of memory; and the poetics of inside and outside. Finally, we will pose the question of legacy and look at the ways her work has been metabolized in contemporary art by artists like Robert Gober and Kiki Smith or Tracey Emin, Leiko Ikemura, Sarah Lucas, Senga Nengudi, and Rachel Whiteread.
Performativity is the capacity of speech, utterance, gesture, and language to impact or create the world. In this course, students will explore the relevance of speech acts to social norms and identity, as well as creative forms of self- and collective fashioning and redress. This course moves from debates around the performative—the study of words which do things—to accounts of gender, race, and sexuality which emphasize their constructedness and thus, their alterability. This course also prioritizes performance art as one among many answers to the problem of embodiment and experiment. Together, we will explore key texts and performances within the field of performance studies to address the generative exchange between art and critical theory. Key words or sites include the relationship of speech to deed; discourse to materiality; inscription to violence; and embodiment to history. Students will have the possibility of exploring their own performance practice in a final project.
This course analyzes Digital Art History with origins in multiple art fields such as Conceptual art and Fluxus, as well as the fields of cybernetics, computation, and engineering. From conceptual art to artificial intelligence, the course surveys numerous aspects of Digital Art such as innovation in technology throughout the 1950s-present and artists’ responses and negotiations to these new technologies. Many exhibitions throughout the 1960s-today reflect this ongoing conversation between art and technology. We will look at not just the theoretical and historical texts, but also a survey of artworks, artists, and exhibitions to better understand how both inform each other. Some fields include net.art, surveillance, bioart, video games, and tactical media. Topics will include feminism, race, and sexuality and we will keep in mind also the male and Western-focused digital art history but also how recent artists challenge these histories. The course asks the following questions: Who gets to participate in these technological innovations? How does technology spark innovation and progress? How is technology fraught with bias that can lead to the oppression of some individuals over others? What is the future of digital technologies and art? 248
The course focuses on the cultural and political geography of artistic production from the mid-20th century to the present. We will engage with artworks, exhibitions, and publications as vehicles of cultural dialogue and tools of political propaganda and cultural imperialism. By studying the geopolitical trajectories of artistic practices and institutional networks, we will ask questions about why and how images and objects travel, and ponder the exchange of art and ideas in the field of global art and culture.
Through class meetings and museum visits we will investigate the idea of the museum, its history, cultural significance, meaning and societal influence. In particular, we will consider how the museum experience affects the attitudes and assumptions of museum visitors. We will explore the intellectual under-pinnings of the modern museum since the Enlightenment, with special attention to issues of nationalism and eurocentrism; the complexities of museum sponsorship (public, private, and corporate), and how they shape cultural presentation; and the emergence, since the 1960s, of community-oriented museums alongside the growing importance in society of multi-culturalism and ethnic identity. We will also consider standard art-historical issues of style and society as they relate to the various artworks we see. 249
The recent “decolonial” and “global” turn in museums and curatorial practice often ignores the fact that art history provides the disciplinary foundation for the museum as a colonial institution. What would it mean to curate against Euro-American narratives of art history? How do you curate artists and exhibition histories that aren’t found in institutional archives? How does curatorial practice offer alternate art historical evidence? This course thinks through such questions by engaging with theories and activist practices of decolonization, postcolonial theory, Black studies and Asian studies to move towards other epistemologies and methods of curatorial practice. It will foreground minoritized artists and transnational exhibition histories across Western Europe and North America, and the global South, while considering alternate epistemologies, aesthetics and collections beyond the hold of both art history and the museum. We will study texts, artists, artifacts, art objects, embodied practices, museum collections, exhibition histories, and modes of display and their relationship to questions of history, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, stewardship and the life of objects. 250
