171 - 180 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of cities, states, and rulers. Mary inherited and combined the functions of the ancient goddesses of war, victory, and maternity and offered an enduring Christian equivalent. This course explores images, relics, chants, and processions in the public and private expressions of the Marian cult.

This course explores the changing definition of the concept of an image in the medieval Mediterranean brought about by the rise of Islam as a new religion in the seventh century. By the eight century four political entities - the Umayyads, the Byzantines, the Carolingians, and the papacy - competed for power and influence, insisting that their legitimacy issued from their correct understanding of the manifestation of the divine. Their orthodoxy was tied to the acceptance or rejection of the material image in devotion. This course explores the many and varied definitions of what constitutes an image for the Byzantine East, the Latin West and Islam. We will engage with the phenomena of performative iconicity tied to the exhalation of breath in chant and the recitation of the Qur'an; the Eucharist as an image of God; and the concepts of the textual icons; figurative poems; and the magical power of script. The course will engage with the reading and analysis of primary sources and the close-looking of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts.

This course explores the phenomenon of iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of a vast and profound cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the period from the seventh to the ninth centuries. As the Arabs established the Umayyad caliphate in the seventh century, quickly conquering Holy Land, Egypt, and advancing all the way to Spain, they perpetrated an identity crisis in the region. By the seventh century three large political entities formed in the Mediterranean - the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines - each competed for legitimacy; all three emerged from the ashes of Late Antique culture, yet each tried to carve out an identity out of this common foundation. In this parting of the ways, the three cultures took among others the issue of what constituted an image and what role it played in devotion. Eikn, imago, ura became the basis on which to built differences and accuse the other political players of idolatry.

Looking at textiles in the archaeological and visual record, this course will consider their materiality, fabrication processes, and circulation as part of embedded value in the Andes over hundreds of years. Course content will cover how Indigenous textiles in the Andes have long engaged questions of identity, subjecthood, representation, status, and knowledge production, as well as potentially legal and territorial considerations. We will give a good amount of attention to the Inka empire, the autochthonous power that dominated the area just before European invasion and how textiles and fiber technology was part of a rhetoric of power for the Inka state. During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Inkas expanded along the western edge of South America, plotting their presence with administrative and production centers such as weaving workshops. Textiles were critical to how the Inkas visualized their power and reach, with very specialized, elite cloth serving as emblems of the state.

Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.

The devastation of 1945 marked not only the end of a war but the collapse of entire ways of seeing, thinking, and creating. From the ruins emerged a generation of artists, writers, and thinkers who wrestled with a world that had been fundamentally altered. How could one depict reality after the World Wars? How could painting move forward after the obliteration of tradition? What forms could literature take when language itself had been shaken? This course explores how photography, painting, and literature responded to the rupture of war and genocide, forging new artistic and intellectual languages in the face of crisis. We will study the stark, haunting images of postwar photography that capture both destruction and resilience; the radical experiments of painters who abandoned inherited forms to create new modes of expression; and the philosophical and literary works that questioned the very foundations of meaning, while also gesturing toward new beginnings. Through these encounters, we will consider how art and thought in the postwar era navigated between despair and renewal, bearing witness to catastrophe while insisting on the necessity of creation.

This seminar explores issues of race and racialization in California, from the time of statehood to the present. Students will read scholarship, analyze visual art, including photography, and examine archival resources. How was race created and used to understand others? How did it affect individuals and groups as well as policies, laws, and various practices? Furthermore, how do these (art) histories of race and racialization continue to affect us in the present-day?

This course examines global origin myths for architecture, for example cosmic symbolism (e.g. the Mandala/dome), and the magic of technologies (e.g. the "petrification" of the wooden hut in permanent architecture). Examples range from Ethiopian rockcut churches, to the Parthenon, to the Ise Grand Shrine, to Fire Temples, and Navajo lodges. The course concludes with the modern mythology of industrialisation and the mechanised building.

Beginning with the Renaissance, artists came to recognize that their very conduct - how they presented themselves - was as much a medium as the work they produced. This course traces this evolution through a lineage of figures, from early modern masters like Raphael and Artemisia Gentileschi to contemporary provocateurs such as Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing, culminating in the speculative biographical landscapes of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X. At its core, the course asks: Can true transformation be realized? How do artists navigate the limits of appearance, identity, and talent? And, through these acts of self-reinvention, can they propose an alternative way of living, one both conceivable and, perhaps, attainable?