11 - 20 of 29 results for: ARTHIST

This course, Writing the Visual: The Art of Art Writing, will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, which has been theorized as everything from an act of translation and interpretation to one of collaboration or competition. Oscar Wilde even suggested that, "criticism is itself an art." Students will study these varied approaches to art writing and put them into practice by responding to artworks seen in person around the Bay Area, with the goal of publishing a print journal of student writing at the end of the quarter. Through direct engagement with these writerly modes, students will also develop a personal stance on writing about art, championing one form of art writing in a scholarly essay.This year's topic: What is Contemporary Art? Focus on the production, criticism, and curating of contemporary art. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, and first-hand encounters with art objects and exhibitions, we will investigate current understandings of contemporary art. We will also consider the history of contemporary art by looking at how art of the past was understood in its own moment, when it was new and now.

Professional experience in a field related to the Visual Arts for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for galleries, museums, art centers, and art publications. Students arrange the internship, provide a confirmation letter from the hosting institution, and must receive consent from the faculty coordinator to enroll in units. To supplement the internship students maintain a journal. Evaluations from the student and the supervisor, together with the journal, are submitted at the end of the internship. Restricted to declared majors and minors. May be repeated for credit.

This seminar examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black, and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will explore a variety of writing such as news articles, manifestos, letters, protest signs, scholarly texts, and court proceedings. The course approaches censorship as an act to restrict freedom of expression and, however unwittingly, as a mode of provocation and publicity.

The Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) is known for his small drawings, intricate motifs, and fantastical themes. His drawn and painted marks are personal hieroglyphs defying easy description. Drawing and painting in an age of epochal transformations (world war, economic collapse, the rise of Fascism), he persisted in an art of the small. Aligned with childhood, mental illness, and marginality in general, Klee's work still raises questions about the importance of unimportant art?a kind that pursues the private valor of an enchanted obscurity. Drawing on brilliant recent scholarship about Klee by Annie Bourneuf, as well as critical readings on childhood and modernism, mental illness and modernism, and the high melancholy theory of Walter Benjamin (whose Theses on the Philosophy of History derives from Klee's Angelus Novus, which Benjamin owned), the seminar will explore the value of the small and obscure not only in Klee's art and times but in our own.

This seminar examines exhibitions of art made by Latinas/es/os/xs in the United States, including Chicanos, Nuyoricans, and other Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. While exploring exhibitions, students will consider curators' and artists' relationships to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Students will also study how practitioners have responded to and challenged discrimination, institutional exclusion, and national debates through their work. The course will include guest curator talks and will result in final projects that comprise either research papers that critically look at exhibitions or proposals for exhibitions of Latinx art.

This course examines the role of the senses in art and architecture to move beyond conceptions of art history that prioritize vision. While the experience of art is often framed in terms of seeing, the other senses were crucially involved in the creation of buildings and objects. Textiles and ceramic vessels invite touch, gardens involve the smell of flowers, sacred spaces were built to amplify the sound of prayers and chants. The focus will be on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, which forays into other regions. Readings will range from medieval poetry and multisensory art histories to contemporary discussions of the senses in design and anthropology.