81 - 90 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

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.

This seminar focuses on the key themes, histories, and methods of architectural theory -- a form of architectural practice that establishes the aims and philosophies of architecture.  Architectural theory is primarily written, but it also incorporates drawing, photography, film, and other media.  One of the distinctive features of modern and contemporary architecture is its pronounced use of theory to articulate its aims. One might argue that modern architecture is modern because of its incorporation of theory. This course focuses on those early-modern, modern, and late-modern writings that have been and remain entangled with contemporary architectural thought and design practice.  Rather than examine the development of modern architectural theory chronologically, it is explored architectural through thematic topics. These themes enable the student to understand how certain architectural theoretical concepts endure, are transformed, and can be furthered through his/her own explorations. CEE 32B is a crosslisting of ARTHIST 217B/417B.

This course takes clothing seriously. It examines fashion both as a concept and as a global industry that grew massively during the early modern period (15th-18th centuries), contributing to making the world what it is. Taught by an ex-Vogue journalist, this seminar explores how clothes communicate and subvert ideas of distinction while also examining why many people have overlooked this power over time. In particular, the course focuses on the understudied relationship between fashion, wars, and other geopolitical catastrophes since only disasters provide the necessary ground zero for narratives of change that are fundamental for fashion's constant regeneration.

Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical-Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.

Artworks from Benin City, which were looted by British troops from the Edo Kingdom in Nigeria in 1897, are at the center of a public debate about a violent colonial past and the (involuntary) complicity of museums in its aftermath. The return of the so-called "Benin bronzes" in 2023 has shaken the foundations of the "universal museum" model. Colonial narratives and the legitimacy of collections are being put to the test. How do museums in Germany position themselves in these debates and the political struggles that have evolved around it?

This course explores how new image technologies transformed culture and society in the 19th century, from the invention of lithography in the 1790s, to the development of photography in the 1830s, to the birth of cinema in the 1890s. We will consider how these and other new media and the makers who wielded them shaped art, politics, science, and entertainment in the period, with a focus on French and British contexts. The course will address themes of reproduction, originality, expression, documentation, realism, and seriality, among others, and will engage closely with the print and photography holdings of the Cantor Arts Center.

An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciousness.

African material culture played a pivotal role in numerous modern art movements between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. This course examines a range of 19th- and 20th-century engagements with canonical African art among modernists of diverse backgrounds. During and following periods of colonial rule, how did the presence of African art transform the expressive possibilities imagined in modern painting, sculpture, and other media while also serving to challenge notions of Western cultural supremacy and exclusivity? Formal and discursive engagements with African art may be critically investigated as forms of "primitivism," as scholars and curators have long argued. Yet these engagements also stand to be theorized as transatlantic phenomena that developed from the roaming imagination of cosmopolitanism, and that eventually accompanied various efforts to shape a postcolonial world order.

This seminar will explore the dynamic history of contemporary Chinese art exhibitions and curatorial culture from the 1980s to the present. Through case studies of pivotal exhibitions held in China and internationally, seminar participants will examine curatorial positions and strategies, associated writing modes and art historiography, and critical and public reception of contemporary Chinese art and artists during an era of experimentation and global emergence.