161 - 170 of 175 results for: ARTHIST

This seminar investigates the importance of rock crystal and its imitations as material, medium, and metaphor from antiquity until modernity. The objects examined include rings, reliquaries, lenses, and the Crystal Aesthetic in early twentieth-century architecture and even Superman's Fortress of Solitude. The texts range from Pliny to Arabic Poetry to Romance Literature to modern manifestos.

This seminar explores the sonic and visual aesthetics of punk rock since the 1970s. While studying music, videos, zines, and album covers, students will examine the convergence of art with politics among artists, such as Lydia Lunch, Vaginal Davis, and Shizu Saldamando, and bands, including Crass, the Plasmatics, and Los Illegals, as well as punk subgenres, like No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and Queercore. Likewise, students will consider how issues of identity, race, gender and sexuality informed artists and their work.

In this seminar, students will uncover the sociopolitical complexities of Minimalism, a movement and style of art defined by pared-down geometric forms that emerged in the 1950s and continues to be popular today. Through a critical engagement with Minimalism's art historical narrative and art world controversies, students will consider the influence of key historical events on artists and their work, such as the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, and AIDS Epidemic, as well as issues of race, gender, and sexuality. In the process, students will recover the contributions people of color, women, and queer artists have made to Minimal art.

This seminar will consider the role of mysticism in American art and culture. Long denigrated as irrational or escapist, mysticism in fact offers a site from which to investigate and challenge entrenched assumptions of linear time, historical positivism, hierarchies of taste, and rationality that remain the epistemic grounding of art history. Topics covered will include Transcendentalism¿s debt to Buddhism; the Aesthetic Movement; Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger, and occultism; Rastafarianism; Afrofuturism; psychedelia, drugs, and the counterculture, among many others. Readings will include work by Max Weber; Theodor Adorno; Sylvia Wynter; Toni Morrison; Marcel Mauss; and Ashon Crawley. Special attention will be paid to issues of race, ethnicity, and decolonizing methodologies.

This course introduces graduate students to a range of interpretive methods within art history and visual culture studies. In addition to scrutinizing multiple schools of thought and critical debates within the field, the seminar pays particular attention to the style and strategies of writing taken up by individual critics and scholars. How ¿ and to whom ¿ does the art historian¿s voice speak in different moments, visual contexts, and interpretive communities?