Courses
Find current and past semester's courses below. Courses can also be found via CUNY's Dynamic Course Schedule.
Current Courses
PhD Program in Art History - Fall 2023 Course Schedule
ART 70000 Methods Professor Wen-shing Chou, Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person
ART 81000 I WANT THAT: material opulence, courtly discernment, and acquisition in early modern India (Mellon Seminar) Professor Molly Aitken, Thursday, 2-4 pm, 3 credits, no auditors
The class is about the creation of desire through extraordinary feats of making. It is is a hands-on class, with in-class sessions alternating with museum trips. We meet with curators, conservators and, if possible, artists to look at the mediums and techniques of early modern India’s luxury court arts: pigments, paper, gems and precious stone inlay, enamel, silk, perfume, and more. It is a study in imperial and regional regimes of pleasure that gave rise to and sustained rarefied court luxuries sought after and imitated around the world. We consider connoisseurship as a condition of character and quality as a signifier of empire. Pleasure is united with yearning, nostalgia, loss, and destruction. The poetics of things are kept in view--how, for instance, techniques and materials evoked places near and far and the metaphors and comportments that luxury arts inspired.
ART 82000 Art and Power in the Age of Alexander Professor Rachel Kousser, Monday, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors with permission
This course examines Hellenistic material culture within a global perspective, focusing on issues of art and power. Alexander the Great and his successors brought under Macedonian rule an area stretching from Sicily in the west to Egypt, Persia, and Afghanistan. In doing so, they created immense, wealthy, and diverse empires radically different from what had come before. Yet scholars of the Hellenistic era have often limited their purview primarily to developments in Greece and Turkey. This course will consider both familiar monuments such as the Great Altar of Pergamon and more recently excavated works from Central Asia, Egypt, the Middle East and Macedonia that have revolutionized our ideas of Hellenistic art. In addition, we will make extensive use of the Metropolitan Museum’s holdings, integrating those of the Greco-Roman galleries with the Near Eastern, Egyptian, and South Asian collections. Topics to be addressed include Alexander the Great and his reception in later eras; cultural heritage in wartime during the Hellenistic era; royal sponsorship of ephemeral artworks (e.g., processions, banquets, weddings, and funerals); Hellenistic queens and their representation; and the prehistory of the Silk Road.
ART 84000 Between the Seas: Northeast Africa in Byzantium and early Islam Professor Jennifer Ball, Monday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors with permission
Northeast Africa between the Red and Mediterranean Seas, from the horn of Africa to the Strait of Gibraltar, was a trading hub linking sub-Saharan Africa with Europe and Central and South Asia, making it among the wealthiest parts of the Roman, then Byzantine, and then early Islamic Empires. Due to the founding of the Christian monastic movement in the region, it also wielded great monastic and episcopal authority. It was an intellectual center in patristic thought, drawing the attention of emperors, pilgrims, and theologians. The region's visual arts, luxury textiles, metals, jewelry, panel paintings and illuminated manuscripts, and monumental works of architecture, mosaics, and frescoes are well-known to scholars but rarely looked at as examples of African Art made by African peoples. Coinciding with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (curated by Dr. Andrea Achi) that seeks to shift perceptions on the identities of the peoples in Northeast Africa, this seminar will be held directly in the exhibitions for some classes after it opens mid-fall. Trade, religion, and urbanity will undergird the works we study; we will also focus on the region's historiography, entwined with a colonialist mindset, which has extracted Egypt from Africa, recasting it as implicitly European in its links to the Roman or Byzantine Empires. We also interrogate more recent scholarly approaches of “Mediterraneanism” or “Globalism” which elide Northeast Africa with Eurasia.
ART 86020 Dada Season Professor Romy Golan, Wednesday, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, in person, auditors with permission
Dada was the first avant-garde that refused to be an -ism. It aimed to be a meta avantgarde that critiqued the concept of avant-garde from within. Affixing its four-letter word to all things--propagandada, dadaphone, dadacino, dadaco, dadamax, fatagaga, dadaglobe—it spread as a viral antidote to the traumas of World War I and the Spanish flu. As such, Dada was the first international avant-garde using new media to broadcast from Zurich to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, New York and, on occasion, Moscow. This seminar will consider dada’s manifestoes as an artform, dada’s defiance of painting, dada fairs, dada soirees, dada montages, dada readymades, dada pastiches, dada films and dada’s many temporalities: presentism, simultaneity, ballistics, delay, melancholia, and utopianism. Artists and poets include Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Sophie TauberArp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg and Alexandr Rodchkenko.
ART 873000 NUEVA YORK (Mellon Seminar) Professor Anna Indych-López, Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person
This site-based class approaches New York as a Latinx and Latin American city. Much of our work and discussion will take place out in the field, exploring Latinx and Spanish-speaking diasporic visual cultures, sites, and geographies of NYC, although there will be some classroom meetings. We will examine a broad range of material, from prints and murals to film and cuisine. Site visits include Pepe Coronado’s East Harlem Print Workshop, the Nuyorican Poets Café, casitas, Taller Boricua, East Harlem murals, Mano a Mano’s Día de los Muertos Festival, and studio visits with artists. (Some events might take place outside of the regularly scheduled class time.) For research projects, students are encouraged to take advantage of and familiarize themselves with CUNY’s many archival resources, including Centro (Center for Puerto Rican Studies @ Hunter), the Dominican Studies Institute @ CCNY, and the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute @ Lehman. The course will encourage non-traditional, creative, and interdisciplinary research projects. "Nueva York" will center issues of visual spatial politics and activism in our global city and is based on collaborative research that is part of a Mellon Crossing Latinidades working group in which GC faculty, alums, current students, and others seek to “situate the networks of Latinx art.” Questions we will ask include: How can studies of space, (non)-sites, migrations, and belonging demonstrate that placehood, solidarities, and identities within U.S. landscapes shape and depend on one another? How do objects and their articulation in different places, institutions, and socio-political processes help us model new forms of inquiry that decolonize art historical and humanities scholarship?
ART 899000 Dissertation Workshop Professor Cynthia Hahn, Thursday, 11:45-1:45pm, Level 3 only by permission
Past Courses
ART 83000 Shaping the Body with Adornment and Addition –Medieval and Premodern
Professor Cynthia Hahn, Tuesday, 11:45-1:145 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission
This seminar will investigate the importance of bodily modification and enhancement, especially through the things people chose to wear on their persons. That is, not textiles, but things that are mostly metal and that represent significant investment of thought, devotion, or value to acquire or create-- jewelry, belts, purses, swords, armor, reliquaries, books, even watches or astrolabes. What was the required ensemble for a knight? For a lady? For a scholar? What was someone buried with? or what did they pass on to their heirs? Heinrich Suso (b. 1295) gouged an emblem into the skin over his heart, which, once scarified, ‘beat’ with the pulsing of his blood, but most people were satisfied with a centrally-placed brooch that was part amulet, part devotional mechanism, part a means to close a cloak. In writing a general history for Reaktion press on the subject, my exploration has ranged widely and the course will follow the format of that book—beginning in Merovingian archaeology and ending in the splendor and excess of Tudor court portraits. Readings will range from Georg Simmel, and Alfred Gell, about bodily aura and ‘expansion’, to selections from Pliny and more recent sources that reveal material meanings and value and also chart their wide geographical origins (as well as early colonizing efforts to ensure supply). Students will assess archaeological material, sumptuary laws, inventories and wills, as well as artist’s records. Jewelry will be considered by type and by effect. One chain to pull will be that of the charge leveled at women as representing the very personification of vanity; a closer examination will reveal that men are the driving force behind the multiplication of items of adornment. Another theme will be that of the consideration of the political use of personal branding through devices and badges; yet another will be the use of magic and amulets. Visits to collections will be important to the class and to the choice of topics. Students who are not medievalists are encouraged to enroll as there will be no supposition of previous knowledge.
This course fulfills a Medieval requirement.
ART 84000 Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the Middle East
Professor Nebahat Avcioglu, Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person
The Middle East is one of the most significant regions that shaped modern architecture. Today it plays a prominent role in setting collective discussions about the future of architectural practice, around decolonialization, multiple modernisms and globalization in general. This course focuses on the 20th and 21st century building activities of the region where major European and American trained architects were and are still deeply involved in its rapid transformation. The specific vision of national independence developed by Middle Eastern architects with their emphasis on the vernacular, local forms and regional identities led to a critical appraisal of ‘universal’ modernism. Focusing on specific case studies from a number of countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and the Gulf kingdoms (Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc.), the course will examine the practices of modern and contemporary architecture as a response to the increasing social demands, political uprisings and democratic transformations as well as the economics of oil and religious movements. We will closely analyze floor plans, design principles and urban schemes to understand how local identities are gradually supplanted or not by a regional identity through the discursive and political management of universalizing tropes such as ‘modernization’, ‘globalization’ and ‘neo-modernism’. And what feedback-effects, categories or scales such as the ‘local, ‘regional’ and ‘universal’ may have on the practices of Middle Eastern architecture still grappling with the idea of modernity.
This course fulfills an Islamic requirement OR a Modern requirement. This course fulfills an architecture requirement for a major/minor.
ART 86020 Turning Points in Russian/Soviet Art, 1910-1953
Professor Romy Golan, Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission
From the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 to the death of Stalin this seminar will look at Suprematism, Constructivism, Productivism, Socialist Realism along with the theoretical debates that surrounded them: Faktura vs tektonika, the end of painting, agitprop photomontage vs factography, the socialist object, gender equality in the avant-garde, pedagogy in the laboratory schools of Vkutemas, the exhibition as medium, the Comintern’s aesthetics of anti-racism, Socialist Realism as an international style.
We will pay attention to the reception of Soviet art in the West: the visits to the USSR by fellow-travelers and others in the 1920s and 30s, the embrace of socialist realism in France and Italy vs. the focus on abstraction in the U.S. in the 1950s, the fascination with all things Soviet in Studio International, Macula, and October in the 60s and 70s, the historicizing approach of the 1980s, the reactions to the events of 1989, the rekindling of a revolutionary zeal by a younger generation of scholars in the 2000s; the role of groundbreaking exhibitions such as Paris-Moscou, the centennial exhibitions commemorating the Russian revolution, and most recently Cold Revolution at the Zacheta in Warsaw.
Primary sources will include: K. Malevich, El Lissitksy, B. Arvatov, V. Stepanova, V. Tatlin, A. Rodchenko, Nikolai Tarabukin, G. Klutsis, S. Tret’Iakov, N. Gabo, A. Gan, V. Schlovsky; A. Lunacharsky; S. Eisenstein, A. Deineka, A. Zhdanov; A. Barr, Le Corbusier, C. Perriand, and G. Lukacs
-Secondary readings: C. Gray, J. Bowlt, S. Bann, A. Michelson, Y-A. Bois, B. Buchloh, T.J. Clark, B. Groys, C. Lodder; S. Buck-Mors, M. Gough, C. Kaier, J.L. Cohen, D. Fore, Jérôme Bazin, A. Badiou.
Office Hours: Wednesdays after class or by appointment, Email: rgolan@gc.cuny.edu
This course fulfills a Modern requirement.
ART 86040 Alvin Ailey and Beyond
Professor Claire Bishop, Thursday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission; Cross-listed with THEA 82000
The class will be (mostly) held at the Whitney Museum.
This Mellon Seminar, led by Claire Bishop and Adrienne Edwards (Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum), will focus on the life and work of African-American choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–1989), who will be the topic of a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2024. Themes might include: Ailey’s hybridization of concert dance, theater, and social dance (Horton, Dunham, Halprin, Fosse); modes of creation and distribution (Hollywood and Broadway); the imaginary of the American South and Caribbean; queer aesthetics; and how to make an exhibition constellating the life and creativity of a choreographer. This will be an opportunity to workshop ideas and new research—not just into his career, but also its legacy in the work of contemporary performers and choreographers.
This course fulfills a contemporary requirement.
ART 80010 Tools for De-modernizing
Professor Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Monday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, Hybrid
This seminar will focus on transformative institutional changes in contemporary arts institutions. The aim will be to develop a ‘toolkit’ that can help leverage policy and special initiatives at institutions to be more inclusive for their personnel, participants, and pubic. Specifically, enrolled students of this seminar will help shape a training program for leaders in the arts, who are part of an international network of arts institutions committed to this shared aim. The seminar is meant to reconsider the inherent biases of the now globalized “white-cube” spaces predominant in contemporary art institutions, as much as it is to focus on initiatives at the intersection of art and education made for experiencing culture at present. Useful terminologies, literature, and case studies will be jointly compiled and discussed in this seminar. The seminar’s name makes reference to the essay Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, as well as Tools for Collective Learning, a forthcoming publication about the renaming of an arts institution to remove its associations with a Dutch colonizer. This seminar is facilitated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, the director Kunstinstituut Melly, formerly known as Witte de With, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
This course will meet IN PERSON on the following dates:
TUESDAY February 21 (classes follow a Monday schedule), 11:45-1:45
Thursday, February 23, 9:30-11:30
Monday, March 20, 11:45-1:45
Thursday, March 23, 9:30-11:30
Monday, April 17, 11:45-1:45
Thursday, April 20, 9:30-11:30
May 17-23 two in-person meetings TBD
There will be some additional zoom meetings
ART 89000 Selected Topics in the History of Photography: Violence and Repair
Professor Siona Wilson, Monday, 9:30-11:30 am, 3 credits, in person
How have individuals and communities developed ways of using photography to repair histories of violence? The history of photography has a close affiliation with the history of state violence, from the metaphor of the photographer shooting a picture to the institutional practice (dating back to the 1860s) of the official military photographer. Social documentary takes the “slow violence” of poverty as its main subject and colonial history has set the camera to work as a surveilling technology. Yet, alongside this history of photography and violence is a parallel history that foregrounds practices of repair. This seminar will engage with selected examples from the Nineteenth Century to the present with a comparable geographic breadth, including (but not limited to) the abolition movement in the US, war imaging, representing disability (the cruel gaze), holocaust photography, and anticolonial struggles. We will also consider ways in which photographers and writers have developed strategies for repairing forms of violence that are not easily visualized, that elude the camera’s direct address. In our readings we will supplement art historical approaches with scholarship in gender studies, anthropology, media studies, and political science as well as practices by artists working with archival images.
This course fulfills a modern requirement and can be used for a photography major/minor.
ART 89902 Pedagogy
Professor Jennifer Ball, Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person
This required course is a practicum for teaching undergraduate art history and will focus on courses in one’s field as well as the survey course. In addition, we will read pedagogical theory and discuss how to teach a field built on colonial practices in a country founded on settler colonialism to a global student population.
ART 89900 Dissertation Workshop
Professor Anna Indych-López, Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 pm, online
Level 3 only by permission
Cross-listed courses
GEMS/MALS 82100: Topics in Material History
Early Modern Objects and Material Culture Methods
Prof. Amanda Wunder, Tuesdays, 2-4 pm, 3 credits, room TBD, in person
Cross-listed with ART 85000 Seminar: Selected Topics in European Art and Architecture, 1300-1750
This class will explore methods for working with surviving early modern objects as historical sources. Students from all disciplines with an interest in the early modern period are welcome. We will examine a variety of objects, which will include textiles, illuminated manuscripts (and their bindings), prints, polychrome sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and other functional and decorative objects. Students will work directly with surviving objects as much as possible. Most class meetings will take place off-campus at museums, libraries, and private art galleries around Manhattan. The class will focus on objects made in and for the Iberian world; students are welcome to develop projects based on objects from other cultures. Readings will include key texts in material culture theory and methods as well as case-studies and other models of scholarly writings that use objects as evidence. One highlight of the semester will be a class meeting with a curator of the exhibit “Juan de Pareja: An Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This course fills the Early Modern requirement.
THEATRE 81600: Screendance: Movement and Media
Prof. Ed Miller, Mondays, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm, 3 credits, room TBA, in person
Theatre is sponsoring the course. Cross-listed with ART 89600 Seminar: Selected Topics in Film Studies
Both dance and film focus upon articulated and expressive bodies in movement, yet a film is a recording, assembled from a selection of images, effects, and sound files whereas dance is perceived as “live” and often described as ephemeral. What becomes possible when these two ontologically differing expressive modes intertwine? Many scholars in the last 20 years have argued that a new mediated form is created in this encounter, called screendance. This course is an introduction to screendance studies; it draws upon film and performance theory and does not require students to have a background in dance.
We begin by reframing key collaborations between filmmakers and choreographers, beginning with Louis Lumière and Loie Fuller in Danse Serpentine (1896). We also look at Maya Deren’s collaboration with Talley Beatty in A Study of Choreography for Camera (1945) as well as Lucinda Childs’s work with Sol LeWitt in Dance (1979), Trisha Brown’s work with Babette Mangolte in Water Motor (1978), and Merce Cunningham’s work with Charles Atlas in Exchange (1973, 2013). Through reading key texts on cinema and movement (Gilles Deleuze; Jordan Schonig) as well as texts specifically on film and dance by Noël Carrol, Douglas Rosenberg, Thomas DeFrantz, Harmony Bench, Erin Brannigan, as well as essays from The International Journal of Screendance, we determine how race, gender, and physique informed how tap dance was filmed in Hollywood musicals, how Balanchine’s non-narrative ballets were transformed by PBS’s Dance in America in the 1970s, and how Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater of gender and courtship was filmed by directors as different as Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman, and Pedro Almodóvar. In the final third of the semester, we look at the strategies deployed by Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and William Forsythe in the late 20th century to incorporate digital imaging into their choreography. We conclude the course by looking at the aesthetics of new dance forms spread via social media platforms and videotelephony during the Pandemic, especially through TikTok dance challenges, Instagram dance classes, and Zoom dance parties.
Students work on a portfolio that consists of a weekly response to the reading and the dance videos viewed in class. Weekly prompts are provided to enable students’ ability to write on dance and media critically and creatively and to identify a research area for students’ final projects. Although the focus of this course is primarily on American screendance, students are encouraged to research other traditions or occurrences for their final projects.
For students doing a Film certificate, this course will fulfill a requirement.
ART 70000 Methods of Art History (seminar)
Professor Claire Bishop
Thursday, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, in person, no auditors
This class will examine a range of methods to art historical research that have shaped the discipline, as well as methods of inquiry currently changing the trajectory of today’s art history. A portion of the syllabus is structured around a selection of weekly readings that illustrate the different ways scholars approach the same keyword or concept, work of art, institution, or archive of materials. It will ask students to contemplate the efficacy and the larger stakes and implications that inform each study. Topics explored will include navigating absences in the archive, debates in the field across chronologically broad areas of study, citational practices, decolonizing art history, the limits and possibilities of autoethnography, and a selection of transgender and nonbinary methods featured in Art Journal’s Winter 2021 issue. Class time will also be dedicated to discussing the methodological approaches modeled by the Fall 2022 Rewald Seminar invited speakers. Such a critical and reflective look at research will inform each student’s intellectual development as they continue to articulate their relationship to the discipline of art history and the kinds of scholarship to which they hope to contribute, upend, or address anew.
ART 76020 Art in Europe 1848-1900: from Realism to the end of Impressionism (lecture)
Professor Romy Golan
Thursday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, accepts auditors with permission
The art of the second half of the 19th Century has been given myriad different narratives. In this course we will focus on these: Social realisms and the representation of labor and boredom; the intersectionality of class, race, and gender politics in Manet’s Olympia; the difficulty of capturing pleinairisme in writing; the reimagining of genre painting; the anarchism of Pointillism and Divisionism; the novelistic lives of Van Gogh and Gauguin; Cézanne and phenomenology; ornament as protagonist; Art Nouveau/Jugendstil and colonial violence; the museum as Gesamtkunstwerk; the global on display at the world fairs; the afterlife of the 19th Century in Empathy Theory and Monet’s Nymphéas installation in the Orangerie.
Readings will include, among primary sources: Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Felix Fénéon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Rancière, Alois Riegl, and Aby Warburg.
There will be two take-home exams.
ART 81000 Unseen and Unspoken: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Alterity in Mughal India (seminar)
Professor Molly Aitken
Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person, no auditors.
The visual arts in South Asia make wondrous play of seeing and blindness and of the iconic and aniconic. Image ontologies turn on the illusory, on veiling, and on insight as what lies beyond sight. Images in South Asia were seen to be efficacious with thrilling powers, able to harness the unseen to change matter and confound intellects. The act of seeing was transformative. While early modern South Asia did not imagine a human unconscious, its visual arts hint in their inconsistencies and refusals at chaotic passions, violence and horror. Scholarship on South Asia’s arts has tended to focus on the connoisseurship of surfaces and on iconographies that submit to translation into word with reasonable certainty. This is a class about the hermeneutics of what eludes the naked eye and troubles capture in language. The topic is Mughal South Asia—then called Hindustan, literally the “land of Hindus”—and the focus is themes of gender, sexuality, class and cultural difference. We will think about how images signaled the unseen and at how the dynamics of making, gifting, looting, copying and innovating yielded tensions that the poets did not acknowledge in their panegyric. Our scholarly frame is an historiography of colonial silencing. What did the British Raj and a Euro-centric world view in the humanities render unspeakable and how do we access the life that animated Mughal image-worlds without risking hermeneutic excess? Or, worse, without burying Mughal South Asia’s image-worlds under our own preoccupations?
ART 83000 Jerusalem: Monuments and Memory from Constantine the Great to Suleiman the Magnificent (seminar) cross-listed with MSCP 80500
Professor Warren Woodfin
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, in person, accepts auditors with permission
Placed by many medieval maps at the center of the word, Jerusalem is a city triply sacred: to Jews as the capital of the kingdom of Judah and the location of the Temple until its destruction in 70 CE; to Christians as the city in which Jesus instituted the Eucharist, suffered, and was buried; and to Muslims as the site of the “farthest place of prayer,” al masjid al aqsa, visited by Mohammed on his night journey. Throughout the holy city and its environs, sites were marked with monuments to their spiritual significance that were in turn remodeled and re-interpreted over the centuries. The figural arts—painting, sculpture, textiles, metalwork, and the arts of the book—similarly played a role in configuring and reconfiguring this landscape of holiness. Jerusalem presents a remarkable series of case studies on the integration and diffusion of artistic and architectural models, the changing discourses around key monuments, the role of pilgrimage and relics, and interreligious competition through artistic patronage. Covering the period from the reign of Constantine (312–337) to the city’s conquest by the Ottomans (1516), the course will consider both the artistic production of Jerusalem itself and arts intended to reproduce the holiness of Jerusalem elsewhere.
ART 85010 A Feminist History of Italian Renaissance Art (seminar)
Professor Maria Loh
Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, no auditors
This seminar seeks to answer the intertwined questions: what a feminist history of Italian Renaissance art might look like and why such a history matters now more than ever before. Students will learn how to make sense of the ideological stratagems at play in a range of different types of images. Portraits of women with dyed blonde hair plucked back high on their foreheads. Mythological and folk tales in which women are brutalized by gods, princes, and sometimes other women. Formidable, towering iconic women who offer comfort to the afflicted and down-trodden. Wise, self-made women who curate their own public image. Prints of female reproductive organs turned inside out. What affective communities engaged with these images in the past and why should these images continue to matter to us today? The course will introduce the student to a set of key readings that have shaped the field of Renaissance art history. Students with no prior knowledge of pre-modern art are encouraged to participate. The primary learning outcome will be to learn how to read historiographically rather than just gleaning readings for content.
ART 87300 Remapping the Art of the Americas via Mobility
Professor Katherine Manthorne
Thursday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, online, accepts auditors with permission
Globalism has swallowed nationalism. The imperative to think globally that arose in the politico-economic realm has impacted every field in the humanities. This approach is shedding new light on the study of Art of the Americas, especially when we replace the nation state as the unit of study with mechanisms of mobility of people, goods, artwork and ideas. Building on recent scholarship, we explore a selection of the following topics: Atlantic Triangle Trade; Pacific coast routes; Port cities of New Orleans, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco; impact of the Panama Canal and Pan-American highway; Riverine arteries (Mississippi, Amazon); circulation of artworks, especially works on paper; Artists’ travels and relocations; Diasporas, immigration and nomads; Settling of frontiers and displacements of Native peoples; and Scientific, ethnographic and archaeological exploration. Students engage with weekly readings through discussions and create a personal project via several short, written papers.
ART 87400 Visual Geographies of Mexico City (seminar)
Professor Anna Indych-López
Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, hybrid, no auditors
This seminar explores the visual cultures and economies of Mexico City, one of the cultural capitals of Latin America, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Muralism to the street interventions of Los Grupos, and from Surrealist exiles to international artists who make the city their base today, CDMX has been the nexus for a wide array of artistic networks, approaches, and movements. The material, aesthetic, and social-cultural remains of the histories of colonization and slavery as well as the living presence of Indigenous communities, creoles (criollos), Afro-Mexicans, and mestizos (people of mixed descent) make Mexico City a unique, critical locus for such artistic imaginaries. In the twentieth century, the capital transformed from a modest and essentially agrarian locale, attracting (primarily Indigenous) workers from across the nation, into a contemporary megalopolis (the third largest city in the world). From paintings and photographs in the early and mid-century that directly figured the city’s marginalized, racialized bodies and colonias within broader efforts to define race and nation in Mexico, to contemporary spatial practices that are rooted in the formal logic of Mexico City’s margins, artists have drawn upon and enacted urban sites to reveal the city’s racial and social tensions and inequities. Covering a wide range of material, including performance, video, architecture, graphics, photography, public sculpture, murals, film, popular/mass art, and urbanism, this seminar asks how has this city inspired and impacted artistic practices? How are urbanism, the built environment, and the lived realities of the metropolitan area reflected in modern and contemporary artistic production? This discussion-based seminar encourages students to think through the open-ended potential of art to shape global cities and their futures and the role of the city in structuring distinct forms of being, knowing, and making. In the early weeks of the semester, students will present on and discuss readings. Students are encouraged, in consultation with the instructor, to take on interdisciplinary approaches to their research paper topics and to explore connections to other cities and cultural capitals, by framing their analyses in global and transregional contexts, with Mexico at their center. Papers engaging Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States are especially welcomed. Projects will be presented in class followed by group discussions.
ART 86020 Cubism and the Trompe L’oeil Tradition (Mellon seminar)
Professor Emily Braun
Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person (50% GC/50% Met), no auditors
This Mellon Seminar is organized in tandem with the exhibition, Cubism and the Trompe l Oeil Tradition, curated by Emily Braun and Elizabeth Cowling, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 17 – January 23, 2023. It offers a two-fold approach. First it will provide a case study for the complex methods and logistics of curating an international exhibition of historical artefacts (versus contemporary art), from initial research to installation: object selection, narrative coherence, loan negotiations, conservation, architectural and graphic design, and didactic materials. At the same time, the course will focus on the genre of still life (including trompe l’oeil) using the Met’s collection and with presentations from the Met’s curators. Readings and lectures will address still life as material culture, as a history of foodstuffs, commerce, colonialism, popular culture, and the readymade, and as a privileged vehicle of allegory and meta-representation. The relationship between still life and ekphrasis will be considered, as will still life and the photographic medium. Assignments will include an in-depth research paper, based on a work from the museum’s collection.
Art 79400 Aesthetics in Film
Professor Nicole Wallenbrock
Thursdays 4:15-6:15
Aesthetics of film is an essential course for graduate students of any field who wish to write with expertise about film and film matter. In this course students will learn the very specific vocabulary needed to communicate the way in which film generally, and a film specifically, functions—for this reason, Film Art by David Bordwell and Karen Thompson will be our primary text. We will screen films together that will serve as primary examples of one film element under discussion. Articles by film scholars and theorists in Dropbox will supplement our study, such as Robert Stam and Louise Spence, "Colonialism, racism and representation," and Linda Williams, “Mirrors without Memories.”
We will begin with a study of film narration (Carol Todd Haynes, 2016). We will next do a thorough study of how elements of film, such as lighting (Passing, Rebecca Hall, 2021) composition, camera movement (Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021), set design/location (Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1971), color, duration, editing, sound/music (Sorry to bother you, Boots Riley, 2019), and casting (Wanda, Barbara Loden, 1971) impact the narrative and alter our perception of characters and events. We will constantly question why (and when) a film is canonized and what might represent a disruption (for example the experimental shorts Meshes in the Afternoon Maya Deren, 1941 and Scorpio Rising Kenneth Anger, 1963). Class discussions may at times highlight depictions of race and gender, but also incorporate the effect streaming and small screens have on filmmaking styles and reception.
ART 89900 Dissertation Workshop (seminar)
Professor Jennifer Ball
Monday 6:30-8:30 or Friday, 2:00-4:00 pm, hybrid, level III only by permission
This is a zero-credit course for level III students working on their dissertations. The emphasis is on improving the flow of writing and argumentation: grammar and punctuation, but also sentence structure, dangling and misplaced modifiers, pronoun case, tenses, relative pronoun use, noun/verb agreement, passive/active voice, parallelism, and register.
The class is structured around a weekly topic of discussion (selected by participating students) and group crit of ten-page chapter excerpts submitted by two to three students. Ideally, each student will present and receive feedback on their work three times over the course of the semester. Students are expected to attend every seminar, not just to participate in those seminars where their work is being discussed.
ART 81000 Rethinking Ink Art in 19th and early 20th century China
Professor Chou Wen-shing
Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, hybrid (mostly in person), no auditors, permit and non-art history with permission
Course description coming soon
This course fulfills either a Modern Art requirement or an Asian Art requirement
ART 86020 Post-Museum (Mellon Seminar)
Professor Claire Bishop, and Director of the James Gallery Katherine Carl
Thursdays, 9:30-11:30 am, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission
Recent writing by Ariella Azoulay and Dan Hicks would have us believe that that the Western museum is so imbricated in imperial violence and financial capitalism that it is no longer compatible with the visions of freedom and imagination expressed by the works of art it collects. Rather than itemizing these problems afresh, Post-Museum seeks to imagine cultures of display after the Western museum. What alternative value systems might be institutionalized around the object? How might these reach new audiences and tell new histories? Combining real-world examples with speculative exercises in radical imagination, Post-Museum aims to bring together overlapping issues from archaeology, Indigenous/African heritage, and modern/contemporary art. The research undertaken during this course will result in programming for the James Gallery (exhibition or talks) and/or a publication outlining new cultures of display in the twenty-first century.
This course fulfills a Modern Art requirement
ART 86040 Attention/Internet: Spectatorship Today
Professor Claire Bishop
Thursdays, 2-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission, cross-listed with Theatre and English (12 students max.)
Online: clickbait, pop-ups, pageviews, likes, upvotes, web-blockers, filter bubbles, information overload. Offline: ADHD, mindfulness, distraction, willpower, being “woke.” All these terms indicate the centrality of attention to contemporary life, but the quality and quantity of our gaze has never been more sought after or contested. This interdisciplinary seminar seeks to identify changes in looking and reading that have arisen in tandem with digital technology and the Internet, and how these shifts impact upon the reception and consumption of contemporary art, performance and literature since the 1990s. A strong aspect of this course is methodological: attending to theories of looking and reading that pit depth (the traditional model of the humanities) against surface and speed (associated with online consumption). A range of texts from Art History, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, English, and Theatre will be juxtaposed with cultural objects selected by the participating students.
This course fulfills a Modern Art requirement
ART 77400: Topics in Modern Latin American Art and Architecture (lecture)
Photohistories of Latin America
Professor Katherine Manthorne
Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, online, auditors with permission
Embracing the multiple dimensions of photographic practice 1839 to the present from Mexico, the Caribbean and South America, this course combines illustrated lectures and critiques of readings supplemented by short student research papers, an image-based midterm examination and a take home essay final examination.
Organized loosely chronologically, we focus on critical themes in key nations at select moments. We analyze formal, technical and biographical considerations of the photographic documents and their makers against their socio-historic context. Emphasis is placed on Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Peru- nations that have generated strong photographic traditions and related literatures – complemented by material from other regions. Highlighting native-born photographers, we explore how Latin American photographers have drawn upon their rich history to reveal issues of identity, spirituality, and society.
This course fulfills a Modern Art requirement
ART 83000 Morgan Manuscripts (specific topic TBD)
Professor Cynthia Hahn and curator Joshua O’Driscoll
Monday, 2:00-4:00, 3 credits, hybrid (sometimes meeting at the Morgan), no auditors
Description: TBA
This course fulfills a Medieval Art Requirement
ART 76020 Materiality: The Social Lives of Objects of the Great War
Professor Karen Shelby
Thursday, 11:45-1:45 pm, in person, 3 credits, accepts auditors by permission
During the centenary, the contributions of twenty-first century scholars provide a new understanding of the role material culture played during and after the Great War. This course will examine the war through an interdisciplinary lens and a wide-variety of conflict-related objects. Three-dimensional narratives of the war, including battlefield landscapes, dioramas, panoramas, memorials, monuments, cemeteries, museums, and the 500-mile long Western Front itself, place the living into the imaginary realms of the dead. Art, in the form of painting, sculpture, prints, and photography also serve as socially constructed palimpsests for soldiers, those at the home front, and battlefield tourists. Some artists turned to figurative expression within a nationalist context, while others attempted to express the physical, psychological, and material devastation through less conventional methods. Amateur artists provided first-person narratives of their experiences on the front line in photographs, diary sketches, and trench art. The latter became a popular commercial product during and after the war, blurring the line between art and kitsch. Depictions of the landscape gained agency as a focal point for commemoration and social transformation. Museum exhibitions attempted to provide an embodied experience of the war’s myriad histories through art and artifact. In this course we will explore the “limits of representation” in the depiction of atrocity, art in museums as historical artifact, and representation of the war in contemporary practice. We will also address propaganda and reflections of wartime citizenship, nationalism, official and unofficial war art, the relationship between fine art, camouflage and other utilitarian art forms, and postcolonial assessment of war cemeteries.
This course fulfills a modern art requirement
ART 89902 Pedagogy for Art History
Professor Joshua Cohen
Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 0 credit, in person, no auditors
This zero-credit course will focus on the distinctive challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching at CUNY, one of the most diverse universities in the United States. The goal is to reimagine the traditional teaching of art history so that it more effectively serves the needs of our students and our society at large. Topics to be addressed include the demographics of CUNY, designing a syllabus, creating lesson plans, running discussion, formulating tests and paper assignments, and interacting with students, as well as observations and mentoring with faculty at the CUNY campuses and opportunities to practice teaching.
ART 70010 (lecture) Representing Race
Professor Judy Sund
Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, hybrid, auditors by permission
The course begins with a panhistoric survey of the way “black” people have been represented in the Western world, with emphasis on the ancient and Medieval origins of enduring tropes of blackness and consideration of the question whether “race” is a viable term in discussions of visual cultures that predate the invention of racial categories. This overview prefaces discussion of their re-presentations in modern art; of Black self-representation (including contemporary artists’ pushbacks against longstanding tropes); and of museological re-presentations in current exhibitions and installations. The class will include visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where curators will discuss the intents and strategies that shaped the Afrofuturist period room (‘Before We Could Fly”) and the Carpeaux exhibition (“Why Born a Slave!”).
This course fulfills an Early Modern requirement
ART 89900 Dissertation Workshop
Professor Michael Lobel
Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 pm, modality TBD, no auditors
Art History Level 3 students only with permission
ART 70000, 57050, Methods
Prof. Jennifer Ball, Tuesday, 2:00–4:00 pm; no auditors
This course takes a critical look at the field of art history with an investigation into its place in the colonial project, and art history’s relationship to the patriarchy, nationalism, white supremacy and other systems of power that are reflected in the collections – visual and scholarly – we study. Together we seek to decolonize our field by looking at both its origins and also through reading bodies of theoretical writing in and outside of art history which help us maintain a consistent crit- ical lens on our research methods. Critical race theory, LGBTQ studies, material and visual cul- ture studies methods, Colonialism and repatriation projects, among many other approaches will be examined. The methods of speakers who present in our PhD program’s Rewald Seminar se- ries will be discussed as part of our class and attendance is required at these lectures.
ART 76010, 54498, Architectural Modernity: A History
Prof. John Maciuika, Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 pm; accepts auditors
This course traces the shifting ideas, values, and assumptions underlying Western and non-West- ern architectural modernity from approximately 1850 – present.
ART 76020, 54502, Race, Discourse and the Visual Arts in the US, 1760–1940
Prof. Katherine Manthorne, Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm; auditors by permission
Beginning in Colonial America, debates about race helped shape the national art. Rather than providing a survey of African American or Native American art, this course examines case stud- ies that highlight changing attitudes about inclusion/exclusion in visual representation across media and geography. In discussion-based meetings we explore the social practice of art produc- tion to understand how visual culture participates in discourses about race. We interrogate indi- vidual works spanning a wide range of production -- oil paintings, public monuments, portrait photographs, political cartoons, domestic objects owned by slaves, and movies – against key is- sues such slavery, abolition, global economies, whiteness, and government policies such as Indi- an Removal and Jim Crow laws.
ART 80040, 54503, The Image in Circulation: Print Culture and the Modern Image, 19th & 20th Centuries
Prof. Michael Lobel, Wednesday, 9:30–11:30 am; no auditors
This course will focus on the material conditions of the so-called work of art in the age of me- chanical reproduction. We will consider specific channels through which images have circulated in modern culture and their impact on production, reception, and meaning. Attention will be paid to how groups often denied access to artistic institutions made use of lesser-valued visual forms, as evidenced for instance in the importance of illustrating to African-American artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other topics to be addressed may include wood engrav- ing, chromolithography, African-American printmakers and the WPA, and the silkscreen in the 1960s.
ART 85000, 56954, The Art of Dress in Early Modern EuropeProf. Amanda Wunder, Tuesday, 9:30–11:30 am; no auditors
This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the making and meaning of clothing in Western Eu- rope, primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a wide variety of sources and methods. We will be looking closely at the various crafts that went into making clothes (weaving, embroidery, tailoring, lace- and trim-making) and the relationship between clothing and the arts (painting, literature, and theater). To the degree that it is possible, we will work with original ob- jects in museum collections, including textile fragments and surviving garments, vestments and armor, printed works and painted portraits. Readings will include recent scholarship on global fashion and the relationship between fashion and nature in the early modern world.
ART 86020, 54508, Mellon Seminar: Surrealism Beyond Borders
Prof. Romy Golan, Wednesday, 2:00–4:00 pm; no auditors
This Mellon seminar takes its name from an exhibition this fall at the Met curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, which will then go to Tate London. Surrealism Beyond Borders and its multi-au- thored catalogue move beyond a Paris-centered narrative to look at Surrealism’s significance and impact around the world from the 1920s to the 1970s. Surrealism was the first avant-garde movement that tried to transform the world not from without but from within. It turned the exist- ing world against itself. Surrealism was not committed to any particular medium but rather used any means at its disposal. As such it caught on the imagination of artistic and political (revolu- tionary)—of myriad artists from Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Romania, Serbia, Syria and elsewhere where it was framed and reframed in local con- texts. In the process this unusually long-lived movement became, arguably, the first truly global avant-garde.
Focused as it was initially on Paris, Surrealism was nevertheless premised, from the start, on strategies of deterritorialization (André Breton’s dépaysement); the informe (in Georges Bataille’s arsenal); exhibitions as a form of “mimetic subversion” (a move that engages the ene- my on its own ground, but obliquely), etc. We will thus proceed to further decenter the decen- tered.
ART 86040, 54506, Topics in Contemporary Art: Performing Research
Prof. Claire Bishop, Thursdays, 9:30–12:30 pm, no auditors
This is an experimental, practice-based class for students who want to think about alternative and public-facing means of dissemination for their writing. The emphasis will be on New York City as a site, and classes will be held at a different outdoor location each week. Topics include lecture performances, audio-books, chapbooks, radio/podcasts, street vending, and delegated per- formance. It is open to students from all departments, but priority will be given to students from Art History and Theatre & Performance. The class meets on Thursday mornings from August to November, 9.30am–12.30pm. (NB there will be no classes after Thanksgiving because of the weather.)
ART 899000, 54510, Dissertation Workshop
Prof. Jennifer Ball, Wednesdays, 6:30–8:30 pm, online CUNY Level III students only by permission
*all classes will be meet online, until further notice*
ART 76020, Art in Europe 1848-1900: from Realism to Symbolism
GC: Thurs. 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Romy Golan
The art of the second half of the 19th century has been given myriad different narratives. In this survey we will focus on these: the representation of manual and machine labor; the difficulty of capturing the effect of pleinairism in writing; the intersectionality of class, race, and gender politics in Manet’s Olympia; the industrialization of time; the rethinking of genre painting; the anarchism of Pointillism and Divisionism; the novelistic lives of Van Gogh andGauguin; Art Nouveau/Jugendstil as an animation of the inorganic; the whiplash and racial violence; Monet, Cézanne and the end of Impressionism; Symbolism and psychologie nouvelle; the world on display at the world fairs; and, throughout, the question of the off-stage and the homology between politics and stagecraft.
There will be two take home exams: a mid-term and a final. I accept auditors
ART 83000, Charting New (and Old) Territory: Mapping in the Middle Ages
GC: Weds. 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Jennifer Ball
Maps were used by Medievals not only to document known places but also to lay claim to religious and cultural histories. As the over ten-foot Armenian map known as the Tabula Chorographic Armenica, which covers all known sites connected to Armenia and its diaspora, attests, maps document how groups identified themselves and others, more than they charted topographical features and borders. Maps could be aspirational, as Matthew Paris’ famous map of the Christian Holy Land, which he made without ever leaving his monastic cell in England. Medieval Christians drew their known world (mappa mundi) and included its unexplored edges, typically labeled with phrases like “Here be dragons,” which seems inaccurate and amusing to moderns. But the relationship between mapping and travel was complex, serving other uses, such as the reconstruction of memories or a virtual pilgrimage. While this seminar will primarily study maps of the Medieval Mediterranean, we will utilize cartographic theoretical approaches across periods looking at works by James Ackerman, Christian Jacob, and Matthew Edney among many others. Some time will be devoted to using mapping software and web tools for one’s own research.
ART 86030, Race, Space, and Modern Architecture
GC: Tues. 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Marta Gutman
This doctoral seminar considers the history of modern architecture in relationship to race, space, culture, and power.The seminar is organized around this important new book, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson. Race and Modern Architecture requires careful and critical reading, considering the periodization, the global reach, the focus on high-style architecture, designed by architects, and the connection (or not) to social theory and activism.
The seminar is taught synchronically, and students are expected to participate in and have their video cameras turned on during weekly Zoom seminars. The pedagogical model is based a group independent study project, one in which students contribute to the seminar, suggesting readings and topics for discussion each week. Students are also expected to contribute to the class blog each week, posting comments on readings before the seminar meets. A final paper/presentation is also expected.
One goal is for students to understand that there is a dynamic rather than a static relationship between a physical place, its social make-up, and race as an ideal or imagined condition. Expect to think about race, space, and modern architecture in relationship to inequality, ethnicity, segregation, racism, gender and sexuality, protest, civil rights, ghettos, ethnic enclaves, liberation movements, civil disobedience, and the design professions.
Another goal is for students to learn to analyze the components of a building and the drawings that are used to document and represent buildings. Each week, one component is offered for close study and assessment, for instance, the architectural plan, the façade, and so forth, along with a reading that interprets the representational ortectonic aspect in question.
Required text: Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited byIrene Cheng, Charles L Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
ART 86020, Mellon Seminar: Portraiture
GC: Thurs. 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Emily Braun
This Mellon seminar is conceived in tandem with two exhibitions opening at the Metropolitan Museum in Spring2021: The Medici: Portraits and Politics and Alice Neel: People Come First. It addresses the timely subjects of picturing individual and collective identity; the self and other as performed and depicted in the Western tradition; and how that tradition has been exploited over the last half century to represent the traditionally underrepresented. With focused topics and flashpoints (class, race, gender and sexuality), we will explore portraiture as genre across mediums and typologies (self-portraits, slave portraits, group portraits, kin and marriage portraits, “citizens andkings”) and as a methodology of the social sciences. Qualities of style, likeness, pose, costume, attributes, skin tone and the gaze will be used to analyze the purported intersubjective experience of portraiture. The course is organized as a colloquium, with guest lecturers, and entails weekly readings (Alois Riegl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kim Hall, Joseph Koerner, Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Richard Powell etc.) formalpresentations, and written assignments, and one longer research paper. Museum visits will be encouraged but optional while pandemic conditions prevail. Scanned readings will be provided.
One of the following two texts are suggested for purchase and for general background reading: Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Reaktion Books, 1991)
Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford, 1994)
ART 86040, Intervention
GC: Weds. 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Claire Bishop
This is a research-led seminar that attempts to elaborate a genre of working in public space for the broadest possible audience. While disruption and negation have been central to the avantgarde throughout the twentieth century, this class proposes a narrower definition of intervention that focuses on the public gesture, media circulation, and political timing. The center of gravity will be Latin American art since 1970, and the work of collectives, but there will be ample opportunity to develop the idea globally—e.g. to Europe, Russia, China, and recent protests in the US.Readings will expand beyond art history to include political philosophy, foreign policy, and liberation theology.
The goal is for each student to produce an original research paper.
Auditors with permission.
ART 88000, Modern Africa: Art and Decolonization
GC: Weds. 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Joshua Cohen
Designed broadly for students of postcolonialism and global modernisms, this seminar explores 20th-century African arts in relation to the highly varied contexts of colonialism, decolonization, the Cold War, and capitalist imperialism. Modern African expressive forms developed as early as the 1920s and ’30s in colonial schools and among scattered independent practitioners. Following World War II, a next generation of art critics and image-makers gained visibility under the predominating yet controversial influence of the Paris-based Negritude movement. By the 1960s and ’70s, modernism flourished in some parts of the continent with support from new national governments. Many states additionally sought to modernize indigenous traditions. And a growing chorus of skeptics began sounding alarms about authoritarianism, corruption, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modern art and visual culture will be examined in this course through a cross-genre and multi-media lens: one that registers how “high” and “popular” cultural elements have often merged or become blurred; and one that looks at drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, andfilm. Course readings privilege primary texts. We will additionally read scholarship in African art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, among other fields.
ART 89900, Dissertation Workshop
GC: Tues. 10:00-12 noon, 3 credits, Prof. Anna Indych-López Level III Students only with permission, no auditors.
ART 89902, Pedagogy Practicum for Art Historians
GC: Thurs. 11:45 am-1:45 pm, 0 credits, Prof. Rachel Kousser
Inspired by the anti-racism protests during the summer of 2020, this zero-credit course will focus on the distinctive challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching at CUNY, one of the most diverse universities in the United States.The goal is to re-imagine the traditional teaching of art history so that it more effectively serves the needs of our students and our society at large. Topics to be addressed include the demographics of CUNY, designing a syllabus, creating lesson plans, running discussion, formulating tests and paper assignments, and interacting with students; aswell as observations and mentoring at with faculty at the CUNY campuses and the opportunity to teach a sample class.
Auditors by permission only
