21 - 30 of 105 results for: ARTHIST

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be presented as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities involving multifaceted and often ambivalent, even contradictory responses to the changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass culture.

This course surveys the major movements, figures, and themes in American and European art during the Cold War, from the drop of the A-bomb in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It examines the formative relationship between art and politics in this explosive period. We will consider the changed role of the avant-garde after the catastrophes of World War II; the use and abuse of modern art as propaganda; spectacular postwar affluence and the rise of the culture industry; multimedia, intermedia, and the invention of new communications technologies; the burgeoning military-industrial complex and the Vietnam War; the revolutionary efforts of second-wave feminism, sexual liberation, and the counterculture; and the charged debates of the ¿culture wars¿ and the crisis of representation in the 1980s. What was art¿s social, cultural, and political function in the recent past¿and how is this role instructive in the present? Topics include Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Neo-Dada, Pop, Op, Fluxus, Happenings, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance, Institutional Critique, Process Art, Systems Art, Earth Art, Video Art, and theories of modernism and postmodernism. We will visit the Cantor Arts Center to view original works.

Examines the pivotal figures, movements, themes and practices of art in the United States and Europe, from the conclusion of World War 2 to the end of the 1960s. Emphasis is on the changed nature of the avant-garde after the catastrophic events of midcentury. Topics include: modern art, ideology and the Cold War; the rise of consumer society and the "Society of the Spectacle"; concepts of medium specificity; the impact of new media and technologies on postwar art making; the role of the artist as worker and activist. Movements include: Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Pop, minimalism, process, performance conceptual art. An introductory art history course is recommended.

This course investigates multiple histories of photography. It begins in early nineteenth-century Europe with the origins of the medium and ends in the United States on September 11, 2001, a day that demonstrated the limits of photographic seeing. Rather than stabilizing any single trajectory of technological iterations, the course is more interested in considering the ¿work¿ performed by photography. Through historical case studies, it considers how `to photograph¿ is to order and to construct the world; to incite action and to persuade; to describe and to document; to record and to censor; to wound; to heal.

This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.

This course considers the complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics covered will include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the twentieth century; the place of prints, photography, and the internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. We will discuss texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

(Same as ARTHIST 176) The impact of second wave feminism on art making and art historical practice in the 70s, and its reiteration and transformation in contemporary feminist work. Topics: sexism and art history, feminist studio programs in the 70s, essentialism and self-representation, themes of domesticity, the body in feminist art making, bad girls, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians from the art historical mainstream, notions of performativity.