111 - 120 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

Museums have a history. This course questions how museums have shaped and been shaped by society, from their origins in early modern cabinets of curiosity to their contemporary transformation into virtual galleries and online exhibitions. Incorporating visits to Stanford's diverse collections, this seminar considers the histories of museums as public institutions and explores key concepts guiding the acquisition and display of art.

Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photographs, and paintings by, among others, Lucille Clifton, Audrey Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Toi Derricotte, Gordon Parks, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Featuring intense discussion and emphasis on developing powers of black aliveness in one's own writing.

Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.

What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will guide our investigation of the manifold connections between words and images in this course on intermediality and the relations and interrelations between writing and art from classical antiquity to the present. Readings and discussions will include such topics as the life and afterlife in word and image of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and John Milton's "Paradise Lost;" the writings and creative production of poet-artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; innovations in and correspondences between literature and art in the modern period, from symbolism in the nineteenth century through the flourishing of European avant-garde movements in the twentieth century.

Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in the scholarship on race and ethnicity. This seminar will engage with the enduring legacies of connection between Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean forged through the colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture, as well as migration. Through the work of Lisa Lowe, Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, as well as a range of contemporary scholarship, we will parse the theoretical frameworks of intimacy, creolization, and Relation. The seminar also includes weekly screenings of films that draw our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of racial, ethnic, and caste affiliation, and invite us to relate large-scale continental intimacies with granular histories of cross-ethnic and inter-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on "the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity," referring to the asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity. Edouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, "each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other." This seminar attends to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic, romantic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies. Undergraduates who wish to enroll in the seminar are advised get in touch with the instructor.  

Fashion, art, and representation in Europe and the US between 1860 and today. Beginning with Baudelaire, Impressionism, the rise of the department store and the emergence of haute couture, culminating in the spectacular fashion exhibitions mounted at the Metropolitan and other major art museums in recent years. Students participate actively in class discussion and pursue related research projects.

This course focuses 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.

What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the first place? In this course, we will focus on a heterogeneous series of texts, artworks, and physical locations to discuss these questions. Potential topics include The Book of Exodus, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and of Elizabeth Bishop, the location of Harriet Tubman's childhood, the poetry and drawings of Else Lasker-Schüler, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the art of James Turrell, and the films of Luchino Visconti.

From murderous dolls to evil doppelgängers, humanoid doubles haunt the Western cultural imagination. Beginning with an in-depth look at the contested concept of the "uncanny", the seminar traces the history of anxiety about non-human humans in the West. An interdisciplinary inquiry, this course draws its sources from art, film, literature, psychology, and science.