Courses

The history of art is different from other historical disciplines in that it is founded on direct visual confrontation with objects that are both concretely present and yet documents of the past. Department faculty emphasize analysis of images, objects, and built environments as the basis for critical thought and visual literacy. In addition to formal and iconographic analysis, faculty members use the work of other disciplines to understand visual images, such as social history, perceptual psychology, engineering, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and archaeology. Because of its concentration on visual experience, the art history major increases one’s ability to observe and to use those observations as analytical tools for understanding history and culture.

The studio division of the art major has been structured to foster the development of a critical understanding of making art to support creative interests, and to develop students’ perceptions and imaginations as they investigate a variety of visual media.

  • Advanced Art History students are welcome to take seminars at the graduate level (500+ level). Each year, the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor, a leader in his or her field, teaches two special seminars intended for undergraduate and graduate students to take together.

    ARTH 101 LEC Introduction to European Art Before 1700

    Last offered Fall 2022

    A team-taught introduction to the art and architecture of Europe from the ancient Mediterranean to Baroque Italy. This course celebrates the glory of works of art as physical objects, to be viewed and contemplated, to be sure, but also often to be worshiped, worn, touched (even licked), held, exhibited, bought and sold, passed through or around, and lived in. To help students begin to appreciate how these works of art might have been understood by those who originally made and used them, the course sets its objects of study within a number of revealing historical contexts, from the social and the political to the philosophical and the art historical. To give students time with original works of art, our discussion-centered conferences use the wealth of art resources in Williamstown: the Clark Art Institute, the buildings and sculpture of the Williams College Campus, and the Williams College Museum of Art. [ more ]

    ARTH 102 LEC Art and Architecture from the Age of Enlightenment to the Present

    Last offered Spring 2023

    A semester-long, team-taught introduction to European and American art & architecture from approximately 1600 to the present. Students will learn how to analyze art made for the widest variety of purposes, from inspiration and contemplation to commemoration and condemnation. We will look at some of this era's most deeply moving art, including works by Rembrandt and Maya Lin, Bernini and Frank Lloyd Wright, Van Gogh and Kehinde Wiley. To the extent that we are able, we will also spend time with original works and familiarize ourselves with the wealth of resources in Williamstown: the Williams College Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute, and the Chapin Rare Book Library. [ more ]

    ARTH 103(S) LEC Introduction to East Asian Art

    This course offers an introduction to the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, from the prehistoric era to the present day. Following a chronological order, the course surveys important artworks that represent major developments in medium, style, and subject matter in the three cultures, while paying attention to the movement of objects and art techniques across the region. Key themes of the course include bronzes, lacquerware, ceramics, tomb building, Buddhist reliquaries, ink painting, wood-block printmaking, and timber frame architecture. Students will learn about the development of art and artisanal practices in East Asia, while gaining a broader understanding of the continuity and discontinuity of the local artistic traditions in relation to the region's history, politics, religion, and culture. East Asia boasts a history of art that stretches five thousand years. In addition to gaining an overview of important artistic traditions in the region through the lectures, students will develop visual analysis skills and engage with critical methodologies in East Asian art through closelooking exercises and discussion-driven case studies during sections. The course pays special attention to how the constant cross-cultural exchanges between China, Japan, and Korea contributed to the development of art in unique ways across time. What is the shape of "East Asian art"? How does art help define East Asia culturally? And what does it tell us about East Asia's past, present, and future? Exploring these questions through art, students gain an objectbased understanding of the civilizations in East Asia. The curriculum also integrates objects from the Williams College Museum of Art. [ more ]

    ARTH 104 LEC Art, Space, and Visual Culture in Africa from Past to Present

    Last offered Fall 2019

    This course introduces students to the power and diversity of expressive forms that have characterized the arts, spaces, and visual cultures of Africa from prehistory to the present. In the context of this course, students will not only study a wide array of objects, images, and structures that have been produced within this vast geography, but will also consider how such forms have used materials, ideas, and aesthetics to function variously as tools of divine manifestation, political intervention, social commentary, and identity construction. [ more ]

    ARTH 105(S) LEC Arts of South Asia

    South Asia, which includes the modern-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, is often compared to the European continent. Regional societies in the Indian "subcontinent" are as distinct from each other as those of Italy, Germany and France. Similarly, they also differ in their language, dress, diet, rituals and politics. However, parallel to the wealth of diversity, South Asia also demonstrates a rich history of interconnectedness. This complex web of culture, language, religion and politics is best manifested in the arts of the region. How does visual culture reflect regional variations? How does a survey of artistic style and iconography help uncover networks of exchange across South Asia? What role did the arts play in the expression of religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Islam? With these questions in mind, this course is designed as a survey of the arts of South Asia starting with the height of the Indus Valley Civilization in 2600 BCE and ending in 1857 CE, a date that marks the cessation of independent rule in South Asia. Using the study of architecture, painting, sculpture and textiles, students will learn how to make stylistic and iconographic analyses, while also improving their art historical writing and analytic skills. [ more ]

    ARTH 106(F) CON An Invitation to World Architecture

    What is architecture? Built form? Object? Space? How do we think about architecture as we move around, within, and through it? What can architecture tell us not only about material, design, and engineering, but also about the individuals, groups, and communities who make it? These inquiries provide the starting points for thinking about what architecture means as concept, space, and practice, and how it affects the ways in which human beings experience the world. As the primary mode through which we organize our lived reality, architecture not only channels human behavior into specific repertoires of action and reaction but also symbolizes beliefs, value systems, and ideas about the self, gender, nation, race/ethnicity, community, life, death, and the transcendent. Such themes, thus, constitute the critical lenses that students will use over the course of the semester to unpack how structural form has and continues to define the human condition in the broadest sense. Drawing from a variety of texts and examples that emphasize the diversity and complexity of architectonic traditions around the world, this course will analyze how individuals have employed architectural strategies to solve the problems of living within diverse contexts and how such spaces not only provide meaning in everyday life but also actively and dynamically order the world as space, object, environment, text, process, and symbol. [ more ]

    ARTH 107(F) LEC Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous North America

    This course introduces students to the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native North America. It will consider the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures that emerged in the regions now referred to as Mesoamerica, the "United States," and "Canada." Cultures to be addressed include Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Mexica (Aztec), Chaco, Mississippian, Inuit, and Native Hawaiian, among others. Students will learn not only about these cultures but also the sources and methods by which present-day scholars have come to know of their complexity. Artforms to be addressed will include ceramics, murals, sculpture, inscriptions, feather work, shell work, sacred architecture, residential architecture, and urbanism. This is one half of a two-course sequence that also includes, "Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous South America and the Caribbean," (Spring 2024) and may be taken in any order or independently. [ more ]

    ARTH 108(S) LEC Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous South America and the Caribbean

    This course introduces students to the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native South America. It will consider the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures that emerged in the Andes, Amazonia, the Southern Cone, and the Caribbean. Cultures to be addressed include Chavín, Nazca, Moche, Tiwanaku, Inca, Casarabe, Tupi-Guarani, Cocle, Taíno, and Mapuche, among others. Students will learn not only about these cultures but also the sources and methods by which present-day scholars have come to know of their complexity. Artforms to be addressed will include ceramics, murals, sculpture, khipu, tocapu, feather work, shell work, sacred architecture, residential architecture, and settlement. This is one half of a two-course sequence that also includes, "Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous North America," and may be taken in any order or independently. [ more ]

    ARTH 202(S) SEM Introduction to Performance

    Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the importance of the body and embodied practices in culture and in everyday life. In this course, we will learn the fundamental terms and theories in the field, and engage seminal artworks in the genre of performance art. Together, we will study artistic genealogies, analyze specific contemporary artworks, and center performance as a mode of analysis to engage the themes of identity, embodiment, temporality, relationality, and systems of power. We will ask: What is performance? How is performance art distinct from other creative modes of expression? What are the social, cultural, and political implications of using the body as material? This course will explore performance in theory and in practice. Our readings will draw from feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies, and we will also stage performance experiments in class as an embodied investigation of the course theme. Class sessions will privilege group discussion building on student reading responses and presentations. [ more ]

    ARTH 204(F) SEM Historical Research in Dance and Performance Studies

    This course is an introduction to the analysis of historical and socio-political context of movement-based performances. While readings and viewings will focus on dance genres practiced at Williams and beyond, an important element of the course will be the practice of documenting, interpreting, and writing about performances. The course will enable students interested in dance, theater, and visual arts (including commercial arts) to hone their skills in the practice of analyzing still and moving images, while also offering students of history and art history the opportunity to develop competency in historical research. This is primarily a discussion-based seminar course. Learning objectives: to understand the social and political contexts for various artistic and performative genres; to develop the ability to document, analyze, and write about dance as a historical and cultural text; to explore interdisciplinary modes of engaging with movement-based performances. [ more ]

    ARTH 205 LEC Patrons, Rituals, and Living Images in Japanese Buddhism

    Last offered Fall 2021

    This course introduces students to Buddhist art and architecture in Japan from its introduction in the sixth century through the present. We focus on the ways different communities--the imperial court, immigrant artists, monks, women, and commoners--employed and venerated Buddhist images for political legitimacy, personal salvation, and worldly benefit. This course also examines how Japanese Buddhist imagery became aestheticized in the early twentieth century and appropriated later in modern and contemporary visual cultures. Some of the topics to be discussed include the reception of continental styles of Buddhist sculpture, the relationship between mandalas and rituals, the role of women in developing Buddhist embroideries, and the Western reappraisal of Zen arts. Students will develop familiarity with the concepts and ideas underlying the production of Buddhist images and will gain foundational skills in analyzing the visual, material, and iconographic qualities of Japanese Buddhist art. For the final project, students will design a digital exhibition focused around one of the topics of the course. [ more ]

    Taught by: Carolyn Wargula

    Catalog details

    ARTH 206 TUT What is Islamic Art?

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Through a deep engagement with primary sources--visual, performative and textual--this tutorial introduces students to global cultures that have participated in the production of Islamic art and culture through the centuries. Through a diverse set of readings, we will discuss how Islamic art is viewed today. How did, for instance, Colonialism and Orientalism from the 18th to the 20th centuries create an entrenched narrative for the study of the field, that continues to hold sway to this day? How have Muslim cultures defined their own artistic production? In particular, how can specific artworks, such as figural painting or palace architecture, be understood as "Islamic"? What are some key scholarly debates around the term "Islamic Art"? The tutorial is specifically designed keeping in mind the period of soul-searching the field is currently going through, even to the point of questioning the very term "Islamic art" and its epistemological parameters. By familiarizing students to an important discipline in art history, the aim of the tutorial is to provide alternate methodologies as well as epistemologies that run parallel to more mainstream or familiar avenues of study. [ more ]

    ARTH 207 TUT "Out of Africa": Cinematic Por(Be)trayals of a Continent

    Last offered Fall 2020

    This tutorial provides a focused study of the politics / poetics of visualization and identification associated with film and cinema about Africa from past to present. From colonial-era propaganda newsreels about Africa's 'fighting men' to contemporary white-savior narratives that exploit current socio-political ruptures on the continent for epic effect, films about Africa produced by a primarily Western cinematic regime have proven themselves to be highly effective apparatuses for framing "Africa" as a concept to be summoned time and time again to tell different stories for different audiences, and in doing so privilege particular viewpoints and imaginaries. This tutorial will provide a space for robust discussion and debate about the various representative tropes, conceptualizations, and visualizations that have been used to shape the contours of "Africa" as understood by a primarily Western audience from past to present, and how these same tropes in many ways have come to define the nature of the relationship between film / cinema and the continent over the history of their engagement. In doing so, it will also address how strategic displays and narratives deployed by cinematic productions often support specific power dynamics that locate an idea of "Africa" within paradigms of specific cultural and political understanding. In zeroing in on how such films promote targeted realities for people and places within the continent, this tutorial will address how "Africa" in Western film and cinematic traditions is positioned within a particular framework of understanding that is more often than not irrevocably tethered to a Western imaginary. [ more ]

    ARTH 208(F) LEC Chinese Painting

    This course surveys the Chinese painting tradition, from the second half of the first millennium BCE to the present. Following a dynastic timeline, the course covers important painting genres including funerary, religious, figures and portraiture, landscape, ink, bird-and-flower, and oil painting and considers them in relation to the shifting historical and cultural context of China. Key themes of the course include the relationship between the art of painting and religious beliefs, political ideology, self-expression, premodern painting theories and criticism, and encounters between the East and the West. As is the case with other cultures, the art of painting in China is shaped by both the painter and its time. In addition to an overview of the history of Chinese painting, students will develop skills in visually analyzing the style, the composition, and the brushstrokes of various painting genres, while gaining an understanding of how painting responded to different historical and cultural conditions in China. The course also pays special attention to primary sources on painting, through which students will learn to think about Chinese painting in its original artistic and intellectual context. [ more ]

    ARTH 209 LEC The Art and Archeology of Maya Civilization

    Last offered Spring 2023

    The ancient Maya civilization was one of the most sophisticated and complex cultures of prehispanic Central America. Its complex calendrics, astronomy, mathematics, art and hieroglyphic writing system are celebrated worldwide. The course will examine the trajectory and nature of ancient Maya civilization from the combined perspectives of archaeology and art history. The origins and evolution of the Maya states during the Preclassic period (1000 B.C.-A.D. 250) will be explored through the rich archaeological remains and Preclassic art styles. The Classic Maya civilization (A.D. 250-1000) will then be presented through a detailed survey of the archaeology, art and hieroglyphic texts of this period. Finally, the collapse of Classic Maya civilization and its transformation and endurance during the Postclassic period and under early Spanish rule (A.D. 1000-1600) will be critically evaluated through a review of the archaeological, iconographic, and ethnohistorical evidence. [ more ]

    ARTH 210(F) LEC Intro to Latin American and Latinx Art: Contradictions & Continuities, Postcolonial to the Present

    This course introduces students to the breadth and richness of the visual arts in Latin American and U.S. Latinx art. The course begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when artists and writers first began formulating the notion of an art "native" to Latin America, and continues through the ever-expanding cultural expressions developed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Through a contextual approach, we will pay particular attention to Latin American artists' shifting relationships to race, class, and gender issues, their affiliations with political and revolutionary ideals, and their critical stance vis-à-vis the European avant-gardes. Similarly, we will analyze the emergence and development of Latinx artistic practices in the postwar U.S., tracing these artists' own exploration of race, class, and gender dynamics. This class introduces Latin American and Latinx artistic practices and scholarship to enable students to develop a critical understanding of the historical specificity of diverse movements, their relation to canonical definitions of modern and contemporary art, and their relevance to issues of colonialism, nationalism, revolutionary politics, and globalization. We will consider a vast array of genres--from painting and sculpture to printmaking, photography, conceptual, installation, and performance art--and will draw from artist statements, manifestos, and secondary interpretive texts to consider both the impetus behind these dynamic artworks and their lasting legacies. [ more ]

    ARTH 211(S) LEC Art and Experience in Ancient Rome

    To see and be seen--it could be argued that this was the very definition of Roman culture. Much like today, spectacle and the dissemination of images lay at the heart of political and social life. The visual arts were crucial both to how the Romans rehearsed their identity and goals as a community, and to how individual Romans communicated their achievements and values. In this course, lectures on the art and architecture of ancient Rome (ca. 300 B.C.-A.D. 400) will provide the backdrop for an investigation into the role visual culture played in the lives of all Romans, including slaves and former slaves, women and children. Special topics will include the funeral and funerary portraiture; the military triumph and monuments of victory; the house as a site of memory; the use of images on coins; participation in religious celebrations; displays of war booty and prisoners of war; experience and audience at the racetrack and in the amphitheater; the spectacle of food and dining; and the Roman street as both contested space and a place for art. Readings will include a combination of primary and secondary sources. All readings are in translation. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

    Catalog details

    ARTH 212(F) TUT Distant Encounters: East Meets West in the Art of the European Middle Ages

    In this tutorial, students will investigate the rich artistic consequences -- in architecture, manuscript illumination, mosaic, sculpture, panel painting, fresco, metalwork, and other minor arts -- of European contact with the Eastern Mediterranean between approximately 300 and 1450 CE. From the beginnings of Christianity, pilgrims from Europe made the long journey to sacred sites in what they called the Holy Land (extending across parts of present-day Egypt, Israel, Syria, and Turkey), the place of Christ's life, death, and believed resurrection. Large numbers of pilgrims even made the long journey to the Holy Land, and especially to Jerusalem, to visit a range of sacred sites related to Christ and his saints. When these sites became less accessible with the spread of Islam in the seventh century -- and even before this time -- Europeans sought to recreate many of them at home. Later, from 1095 onward, Christian Europeans attempted to reclaim and hold the Holy Land from non-Christians by force, through an ill-fated series of five major and several lesser "crusades." Over the centuries, before, during, and after the Crusades, exposure to the peoples, ideas, and cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean also came through trade and through the travel and settlement of non-Europeans in Europe itself, particularly in Spain, Sicily, and Venice. Through all of these centuries, moreover, the Christian, Greek-speaking empire of Byzantium, focused on its great capital of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), interacted in myriad ways, both friendly and hostile, with the Latin-speaking polities of Western Europe, focused at least symbolically on their ancient capital of Rome. Together, by way of open discussion, we will explore artistic production within each of these different cross-cultural contexts of East-West encounter. In the process, we will reflect on how art could function as a conduit for the exchange of ideas in the Middle Ages, and how it could be used both to negotiate and to intensify cultural difference. [ more ]

    ARTH 213(S) LEC The Human Figure in the Ancient Mediterranean

    From the earliest representations in the third millennium BCE until the end of the Roman period in the fifth century CE the human body remained the foremost choice of subject for artists, patrons, critics, and the public in the ancient Mediterranean world. This course will consider cultural ideas about the body in antiquity, and trace their repercussions in the modern era. Over the course of the semester we will concentrate on 12 case studies, each representing a specific concept from an area of the Mediterranean. Topics include the "shining bodies" of bare-chested potentates in Egypt and the ancient Near East, statues that give the dead voice, the perfection and humanity of the bodies of the gods, ancient Greek science and the nude goddess, the pathos of Hellenistic athletes, and the interpretative challenge of the ambiguous and sensuous marble forms of the Barberini Faun or the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, both found in Roman contexts. We'll consider the cross-influences of ideas about gender, class, race and the body coded in public and private art. Reading material will include ancient literature in translation as well as contemporary critical essays. Evaluation will be based on participation in discussion and group presentations, short response paper, tests on images, and a final 8-page research paper. Engaged library research of original paper topics will be supported throughout the semester. [ more ]

    ARTH 216(S) LEC Modernism, Anti-modernism, and the Avant-garde, 1900-1950

    This course is designed to introduce students to the key artistic movements and aesthetic debates in the first half of the Twentieth Century in Europe, the U.S.S.R., Mexico, and the United States. We will trace the rise of Modernism and Anti-modernism and investigate the concept of the avant-garde. We will situate the crucial artistic movements of the period--from Fauvism to Futurism, Cubism to Constructivism, Social Realism to Surrealism, Art Deco to Dada, the Harlem Renaissance to the Bauhaus--within the social, political, economic and historical contexts in which they arose. Particular attention will be paid to how the work of women artists contributed to the aesthetic and philosophical motivations that shaped the avant-garde. [ more ]

    ARTH 218 TUT From the Battlefield to the Hermit's Cell: Art and Experience in Norman Europe

    Last offered Spring 2022

    This tutorial provides students with the chance to investigate in-depth three of the most astonishing works of art created during the entire Middle Ages: the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1077-1082), the Cappella Palatina (c.1130s-1166), and the Psalter of Christina of Markyate (1120s-1160s). Created within a hundred years of each other all within territories controlled by the Normans--a warrior dynasty that settled in northern France in the 10th century and then expanded north into England and south into Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries--each of these works is unprecedentedly ambitious in scale, dazzling in its material properties, and survives in its original wholeness, a rarity in the medieval world. Despite these similarities, however, each work is very different from the other two and so sheds light on very different aspects of Norman experience, across Europe. The Bayeux Tapestry, likely made by female embroiderers for a baronial hall, is a giant textile (over 70 meters long) that in gruesome and fascinating detail tells the story of the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. The Cappella Palatina in Palermo, in turn, commissioned by King Roger II, is a royal chapel covered in sumptuous mosaics that reveals through its decoration and ritual the dynamic interaction of Islamic, Byzantine, and Latin Christian traditions in the multicultural Norman kingdom of Sicily in the 12th century. And the Psalter of Christina of Markyate, a large prayerbook made for the use of a female recluse in southern England, contains 40 full-page paintings and 215 decorated initials, a vast and inventive program of imagery that through its creative profundity helped reshape private devotional art and culture for centuries to come. Through their variety, then, these three objects--an embroidery, a building, and a book--give students insight into the rich array of concerns and aspirations, from the political to the spiritual and from the public to the private, that gave substance and meaning to 11th- and 12th-century European life, for women as well as men. What is more, these three remarkable works of art have been the focus of much interesting scholarship in recent years, so an exploration of some of that literature provides a compelling introduction to the discipline of art history itself, past and present. [ more ]

    ARTH 220 LEC Sacred Spaces of Islam

    Last offered Fall 2017

    A clean place oriented towards Mecca is enough for daily prayer, but the communal practices of Islam are myriad and they often transpire in more formal architectural settings. These structures range from traditional columned halls of brick and timber to modernist ensembles of reinforced concrete and plate glass; monuments may be open to the elements, flat-roofed or domed; surfaces may be enhanced with carved marble, inlaid wood, glazed tile and other beautifying elements. [ more ]

    ARTH 221(S) LEC History of Photography

    This lecture course will examine the history of photography from its beginnings in the 1830s to the present, from the first grainy black and white images to the work of contemporary artists using cutting-edge photographic technologies. We will examine photographs used for documentary, scientific, and aesthetic purposes, and we will trace the medium's emergence and acceptance as a fine art. We will also explore photography's physical and conceptual characteristics as a medium, paying particular attention to its uniquely intimate and frequently contested relationship to "the real." By the end of the course, students will have a broad understanding of photography as a unique medium within the history of art and knowledge of the theoretical frameworks that developed alongside that history. [ more ]

    ARTH 222 SEM Photography in/of the Middle East

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Photography has been globally disseminated and locally inflected since its invention. In the Middle East, the powers and pleasures of the medium have been valued by colonial forces, indigenous populations, photojournalists and artists; the resulting images merit aesthetic and art historical appreciation even as they grant visual access to the social and political dynamics operative in diverse cultural contexts. We will explore photographic practices in various zones of the Middle East--e.g., the Holy Land, Turkey, Egypt and the Persian sphere--by attending to individual photographers and case studies. This tightly focused approach will support, in turn, a consideration of the agency and power of images more generally--what work do photographs do? Who resists and who benefits? The goal will be to appreciate diverse styles and perspectives that underlie renderings of the Middle East. [ more ]

    ARTH 223 SEM Comic Lives: Graphic Novels & Dangerous Histories of the African Diaspora

    Last offered Spring 2021

    This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as the late Congressman John Lewis' March and Ebony Flowers' Hot Comb, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will build comic creation and analysis skills through short exercises, eventually building up to the final project of a graphic short story that illustrates historical and/or autobiographical narratives. No art experience is required, only an openness to expanding one's visual awareness and composition skills. This course is often taught in collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art's Object Lab program, which allows the class to have its own space and art objects that are directly related to the course topic. This class may feature Object Lab participation, film screenings, and collaborations with guest speakers. [ more ]

    ARTH 225(F) LEC Art and Archaeology in Early China

    This course offers a survey of art and architecture in China from the beginning of civilization to the end of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). Students are introduced to important artworks in ceramics, bronze, lacquer, jade, and built spaces including royal palaces, mausoleums, and ritual monuments, while learning to think about them in their archaeological context. Special attention is paid to the relationship between artistic innovations and the rise of new materials and craft technologies, such as glass and fire gilding. [ more ]

    ARTH 228 TUT Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso

    Last offered Spring 2021

    This course will provide an introduction to three major Spanish painters--Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso--who lived and worked, respectively, in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Though these painters are world famous, they are rarely studied comparatively, and in the context of their Spanish artistic roots. The syllabus will cover the historical and social contexts in which they started working, and how they followed, and departed from, artistic conventions of the time. Through specific paintings, we will consider the historical evolution of the artists' relationship to their patrons and subjects, from the elite status of Velázquez within the royal court, to Goya's dramatic rise with the reigns of Charles III, and Charles IV, and his subsequent exile to France. Picasso was free of royal patronage and also lived in France, yet despite this freedom he remained deeply connected to the themes and concerns of his Spanish artistic predecessors. In addition to key paintings including Velázquez's "Las Meninas" and other royal portraits, Goya's "Maja Desnuda" and his series "The Disasters of War," Picasso's "Guernica," and his own 20th century reinterpretation of "Las Meninas," we will focus on the artists' shared subjects of portraits and war, and consider the following issues: How does the role of the Spanish artist change over the periods covered? How did the artist exercise his freedom whilst under the scrutiny of the court and the Catholic Church? How were these painters' lives and work shaped by key historical events such as the Inquisition, Napoleon's invasion of Spain, or the Spanish Civil War? How does the work of art evolve in its role from private royal commission to public display in museums open to all? We will read short literary pieces from each period, primary materials such as letters and other documents, and historical and critical works. All readings will be in English. Knowledge of Spanish is encouraged, but not required. [ more ]

    ARTH 229(F) TUT The Art of Natural History

    The scientific revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fundamentally changed the way the natural world was seen and celebrated, classified and organized, displayed and manipulated. New discoveries in the natural sciences and competing theories of evolution intertwined with shifting conceptions of natural history, of nature, and of humankind's proper place within it. This course will investigate the links between art and natural science. It will seek to understand the crucial role of the visual arts and visual culture in the study and staging of natural history from the eighteenth century to the present. We will pursue the questions that preoccupied the artists themselves. How should an artist react to new ecological insights? What is the proper artistic response to newly discovered flora and fauna? What is the role of aesthetics in the communication of knowledge? How are those aesthetics connected to ethics? How might a drawing of a plant convey information that is different from that of a photograph or a glass model of a plant? How might a theatrical diorama frame a scientific idea in a way that is different from a bronze statue? Students will seek to understand the myriad connections between seeing, depicting, and knowing, to question long-held assumptions about the division between "objective" science and "subjective" art, and to recognize that art has the ability not only to interpret, disseminate, and display scientific knowledge, but to create it as well. [ more ]

    ARTH 230 LEC From Alexander to Cleopatra: Remodeling the Mediterranean World

    Last offered Fall 2022

    The period between Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) and Cleopatra (30 B.C.), like our own, was characterized by internationalism, migration, wide-ranging cultural values and religious practices, and ethnically diverse urban populations. Large numbers of non-Greeks came under the control of newly established Hellenistic kingdoms, while in the west Rome's emergence as a superpower offered both new opportunity and danger. The Hellenistic world was a place of vibrant change in the spheres of art, architecture, urban planning, and public spectacle. In this course, we will consider the art and archaeology of this period in their political, social, and religious contexts, focusing on the visual language of power and royalty; developments in painting, sculpture, mosaics, and monumental architecture; interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks; and the impact of Greek culture in Rome. [ more ]

    ARTH 231 TUT Art, Life, and Death: Locating Women in Italian Renaissance Art

    Last offered Spring 2020

    Renaissance art is the stuff of blockbuster museum exhibitions, mass tourist pilgrimage, and record auction prices. From our modern vantage point, the cultural accomplishment of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy clearly has the ability to astound. Calling to mind the inimitable imagination of Botticelli, the scientific genius of Leonardo, or the superhuman creativity of Michelangelo brings into focus an inspiring narrative of individual accomplishment, innovation, and progress (ideals we easily understand and may well share). This is an important story we still tell of human achievement. This tutorial explores a critical question: where are the women in this narrative? Women were not typically artists, so how might we bring their roles, force, and power into focus? To do this, we will turn away from the grand historical narrative we so easily recognize and enter a more foreign world: a realm of everyday experience in which art-never created for its own sake-was powerful, and mattered to people. Art shaped realities and mediated the fundamental questions and of life and death, from power, sexuality, love, desire, and self-definition, to mortality and communion with divinity When we approach Renaissance art on its own terms, our picture expands to include women, their lives, and what they themselves wanted to see. In addition to secondary scholarship, we will pay close attention to primary sources (including images themselves), giving students ample change to forge original arguments: one of the central goals of the tutorial. [ more ]

    ARTH 232 LEC Renaissance Rome: Renovating the Eternal City

    Last offered Spring 2023

    George Eliot called Rome "the city of visible history," a place with the power to bring "the past of a whole hemisphere" right before our eyes. The magnetic visual power of Rome did not just occur naturally, however; it is a product of a bold urban project first envisioned by Renaissance popes and brought into being by the artists and architects they hired. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Rome was transformed from a shrinking and neglected medieval town into a thriving center of artistic energy and invention. Beginning with the papacy's return to the city in 1417, we will focus on the historical, ideological, and artistic forces behind this period of renovation and restoration that reshaped the urban and artistic fabric of the city. We will study the particularly Roman foundations for the period known as the High Renaissance, then, approaching art historical touchstones by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante as works grounded in a uniquely Roman sense of time and historical destiny. We will conclude with a selective look at Baroque works by Caravaggio, Bernini and Borromini, exploring their powerful innovations and effects as a continuation of the Renaissance renewal of the eternal city. [ more ]

    ARTH 233 SEM Italian Renaissance Art

    Last offered Spring 2021

    A survey of Italian art from Giotto to Michelangelo. This course will follow a chronological framework, giving students a grounding in the development of Italian art over the course of the 14th-16th centuries, but will also take a thematic approach that will allow us to delve into important art historical issues. Some, such as historical consciousness and the relationship to the past, or the reinvention of the idea of the artist and of art itself, will be important as we construct a critical understanding of the idea of "renaissance," or "rebirth," long central to the identity of the period. Others, such as gender, patronage, power, naturalism, and the materiality of objects, will bring us deep into the worlds in which these dazzling and still powerful works of art were originally created and experienced. [ more ]

    ARTH 234(S) LEC Arts of Tibet -- Sacred Abode of the Himalayas

    This course surveys the art and culture of Tibet from the time of the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh century to the modern period. Traditionally understood as the divine abode of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva who embodies the compassion of all buddha in Buddhist cosmology, Tibet was also fantasized as the immortal realm of "Shangri-la" by western interpreters. In this course, we will begin by examining the imagination and representation of Tibet and its culture in modern western discourses, and then shift the focus to the development of artistic forms of Tibet in the context of Tibet's history and religious movements, from ancient times to the present. [ more ]

    ARTH 235(S) STU Taswirkhana: Technique and Practice of Indian Drawing and Painting

    Small in scale but vast in its representation, the world of Indian painting is famous for its stylized naturalism and mastery of line. It is an artistic practice whose legacy stretches back to at least the first century CE. This studio course will introduce students to the technique and practice of traditional Indian drawing and painting. The course is designed as a workshop in which students will learn to use materials and techniques of this art form. By engaging with a non-western traditional practice, the aim of the course is to expose students to a pluralistic engagement with art making. Students will learn paper and pigment preparation, as well as the basics of traditional drawing and painting techniques. The class will learn from studying a selection of original masterworks of Indian art from the Williams College Museum of Art that will be displayed in the Object Lab. Working with original artworks will help students situate the hands-on study of Indian painting practice alongside exemplary historical examples. [ more ]

    ARTH 237 SEM Making Things Visible: Adventures in Documentary Work

    Last offered Spring 2019

    Photography, like ethnography, is an art of looking carefully and taking notice. This course will explore the overlaps between documentary photography and field methods of social science, concentrating particularly on the genre in which the two intersect: the photo essay. The students will learn methods of visual narrative and storytelling, using techniques of interviewing, still photography, and video. Concurrently, we will explore a number of examples of investigative work that blend word and image. We will ask questions about the changing practices and expectations associated with the documentarian's role, and the evolving media in which such work can be presented. Lastly, we will discuss ethical questions that haunt documentary work, including issues of responsibility and politics of representation, as well as the perennial question of whether "objective representation" is even possible or desirable. Experience in photography and/or video is not required, but students will be expected to master basic technical skills in image acquisition and audio editing taught in a separate lab section. Students should also be prepared to interact extensively with people in the community and spend a significant time off campus doing fieldwork. [ more ]

    ARTH 238 LEC Greek Art and the Gods

    Last offered Spring 2020

    In the Iliad, when the god Apollo is visualized, it is as a man, angry in his heart, coming down from the peaks of Olympos, bow and quiver on his shoulders, the arrows clanging as the god moves, "like the coming of night," to bring dogs, horses, and men to their deaths. By the end of the Classical period, one statue of the archer god depicted him as a boy teasing a lizard. In this course, we will examine the development of the images the Greek gods and goddesses, from their superhuman engagement in the heroic world of epic, to their sometimes sublime artistic presence, complex religious function, and transformation into metaphors in aesthetic and philosophical thought. The course will cover the basic stylistic, iconographical, narrative, and ritual aspects of the gods and goddesses in ancient Greek culture. The course will address in detail influential artistic monuments, literary forms, and social phenomena, including the sculptures of Olympia and the Parthenon; divine corporeality in poetry; the theology of mortal-immortal relations; the cultural functions of visual representations of gods, and the continued interest in the gods long after the end of antiquity. Readings assignments will include selections from Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Aischylos, Euripides, Plato, Walter Burkert, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Erika Simon, and Friedrich Nietzsche. [ more ]

    ARTH 240 LEC Histories, Communities, and Collections

    Last offered Fall 2018

    What can the College's collections of documents, artifacts, art objects, natural history specimens, and rare books--whether housed in the Special Collections of the Library, Archives, or at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA)--teach us about our institutional past? How do we put that past into dialogue with our present? Planned specifically to engage with the WCMA's The Field is the World, an exhibition that investigates two invisible histories contained within collections here on campus, this course will approach the questions of histories, communities, and collections in two ways. First, in lectures we will survey the history of collecting in Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century up to critical reinterpretations by contemporary artists and consider how collecting was often tied to other endeavors like establishing national institutions, researching human variety, representing colonial expansion, or documenting missionary efforts. Second, in interactive sessions we will meet with curators, librarians, and guest speakers to look at objects first hand and to discuss the relationship between collecting and scholarship. Over the course of the semester we will examine the historical models of knowledge production and audience engendered by collections and their display. Moreover, we will work together to formulate new models of interpretation that address overlooked histories and engage with the current interests of our campus community. [ more ]

    ARTH 241 LEC Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Modernity

    Last offered Fall 2020

    In 1874, an art critic mockingly termed Claude Monet's painting of a sunrise over the sea "impressionist [...] more unfinished than wallpaper in an embryonic state." With this phrase, he gave a name to a new style of painting that profoundly shaped the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Europe and beyond. Beginning with the invention of photography in the early nineteenth century and ending with the advent of cinema, abstraction, and mechanized warfare in the first decades of the twentieth, this course will trace the origins and afterlives of "Impressionism" in art and cultural history. Many of the artists who continue to draw the largest crowds in museums around the world today--among them Manet and Monet, Degas and Seurat, Van Gogh and Rodin, Klimt and Picasso--fall within our period of study and will be subjects of our examination. Designed for students who have no prior experience studying art history, the course will prioritize methods of close looking and formal analysis. (If social distancing protocols allow, the course will include optional study visits to examine first-hand examples of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and printmaking at the Clark Art Institute and Manton Study Center for Works on Paper and Williams College Museum of Art). At the same time, the questions and methods at the core of our inquiry will be fundamentally interdisciplinary, and will engage students all across the humanities and sciences (major scientific figures such as the inventor Thomas Edison and the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin will figure prominently in our narrative). Readings will emphasize close engagement with primary sources drawn from multiple disciplines: writings by artists and art critics from the period, as well as scientists, philosophers, psychologists, political theorists, and poets. We will approach "Impressionism" and "Post-Impressionism" as episodes in the cultural history of Europe that are uniquely revealing of a historical experience we still acutely feel today, which was called, for the first time in the nineteenth-century, "modernity." [ more ]

    Taught by: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

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    ARTH 552 LEC Art and Enlightenment in Europe

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This lecture course traces the emergence of new modes of art- and image-making during two momentous centuries of European history that established the paradoxical foundations of our modern world. In this period, modern democracy was founded and determined by exploitative labor, the extraction of natural resources, and the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Over two centuries from the founding of the French Academy in 1648 to the 1839 invention of photography, this course traces these tensions in art and intellectual thought, examining beauty and the sublime, rationality and madness, personhood and enslavement, natural history and extraction, democracy and tyranny. Often defined in terms of the "Enlightenment," this intellectual and artistic period engaged with freedom of religious thought, scientific experiment, and a belief that humanity was guided by reason and rationality. Yet these same discourses also laid the foundation for the invention of race, nationalism, and the expansion of European colonialism. Isolating a series of pivotal moments and emblematic figures in visual culture of this period, this course asks students to consider how art was implicated in Enlightenment, and, in turn, how Enlightenment was implicated in both newly liberatory and newly oppressive concepts of subjectivity and personhood. Particular emphasis will be placed on the history of science, and, relatedly, on the increasing global circulation of ideas, people, and goods. Artists in our purview include well-known figures like Velázquez, Rembrandt, Watteau, Hogarth, Goya, and Blake, as well as makers until recently left out of the art-historical canon, such as the Frankfurt-born botanical illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian, the Polynesian navigator and draftsman Tupaia, and the Guadeloupean neoclassical painter Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, the subject of a major upcoming exhibition at the Clark Art Institute. Designed for students with no prior experience studying art history, the course will work directly from objects in local collections, prioritizing methods of close looking and formal analysis. At the same time, the questions and methods of our inquiry will be fundamentally interdisciplinary. Readings will emphasize primary sources and recent scholarship. A separate discussion section will be offered for MA students. [ more ]

    Taught by: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

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    ARTH 244 LEC City, Anti-City, and Utopia: Town Planning from 1500 to 1800

    Last offered Spring 2018

    The Italian Renaissance gave us our modern conception of the ideal city, whose geometrically regular form was both symbol and instrument of a perfectly ordered society. This alluring notion has preoccupied artists and theorists from Michelangelo and Thomas More to Albrecht Dürer and Christopher Wren; it achieved tangible form in such new capitals as St. Petersburg and Washington, D.C. But the West has remained characteristically ambivalent about the city, especially in the United States, an ambivalence reflected in persistent attempts to decentralize the city (Frank Lloyd Wright), to beautify it (the City Beautiful Movement), reshape it (Urban Renewal) or abandon it (suburbanization). This course looks at the roots of those movements, and the development of urban and anti-urban thought from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. Topics include Renaissance fortification design, the colonial cities of the New World, the picturesquely landscaped English garden, and the separatist societies that sought to create communal utopias in the wilderness. [ more ]

    ARTH 245 SEM The Nature of Work

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Work is something that touches the lived experience and historical realities of almost every human being in every time and place. But how did ancient Mediterranean societies and cultures define and deploy the concepts of "work" and "working," as both an activity and as discourse? This is a question that has received remarkably little attention, in part since modern scholars have all too often followed the lead of elite authors, who obscure the nature of work through their focus on its products: agricultural prosperity, material luxury, urban grandeur, etc. In this course, we will seek to shed light on the world of work in antiquity, to better understand both the experiences of those who worked for a living across an array of spheres and professions, and the value of work as a cultural, aesthetic, and literary concept. Special topics will include: the place of work in conceptions of a "golden age"; the literary topoi of work (like the idle shepherd or the virtuous peasant); representations of "heroic work" (most famously, the Labors of Hercules); the elision or erasure of non-elite labor for elite audiences in art and text; the iconography of work in painting, mosaic, and sculpture; and investigations into specific trades, crafts, and other forms of "making" (from midwifery to shoe making). Readings will be a combination of primary and secondary sources. All readings will be in translation. [ more ]

    ARTH 246(S) SEM Museum Culture: Do you see what I see?!

    We are all citizens of global visual culture, subject to a daily assault of images, artifacts, information and experiences. What we see and how we make meaning from it all depends on so many variables--who we are, where we are, and what we choose to look at. A critical question is how art figures and what agency it wields in millennial settings. This class is an opportunity to explore these issues with particular reference to museums and the objects enshrined therein. Digitized collections enable us to wander freely in space and time, following ideas/images through history even as we might also engage the 'real thing' in person. Our approach will be comparative and interrogative; case studies might range from an oil painting to a wooden sculpture, a coin to an illuminated manuscript, a photograph to a video. Along the way, we will consider what "art" really is and how different visual cultures might be presented or distorted in museum exhibitions and public spaces. [ more ]

    ARTH 248(S) LEC Revolutions in Art 1750-1850

    This lecture course will focus on the dynamics of art, culture, and experience in Europe from the later eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Spanning such conflicts as the French Revolution of 1789, Napoleonic occupations, and imperial wars, this period of dramatic intellectual and social change ushered in a revolution in art in turn, keyed to new conceptions of subjectivity, freedom, and human experience. How did painting and sculpture of this period convey, wrestle with and embody these crises? We will examine the work of leading artists in depth, particularly as revolutions in art helped explore new accounts of the modern subject, both the interior self and that self in the public sphere. Additionally, we will discuss the ways in which these works have been in art-historical writing into the present. [ more ]

    ARTH 249 LEC Introduction to Visual Cultures of Contact

    Last offered Spring 2019

    This introductory lecture course will survey the visual and material products of European contact with Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas between 1500 and 1900. This period witnessed the establishment and loss of Spanish, English, and French colonies, a proliferation of exploratory voyages, and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of our objects of study will be European in origin from well-known artists including Rubens, Velasquez, Reynolds, and Gauguin. In many cases we will be asking questions about circulation--whether we are looking at Tupi featherwork from Brazil brought to Europe, Flemish prints adapted by artists in Central and South America, or tattoos on the bodies of people traveling to and from Tahiti. Against the backdrop of these context-specific case studies, students will be asked to consider contact, colonialism, exchange, and appropriation more conceptually. [ more ]

    ARTH 257 LEC Architecture 1700-1900

    Last offered Fall 2015

    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new conception of architecture arose, based on archaeological discoveries, the development of new building materials, and convulsive social changes. This course looks at the major architectural movements of this period, and the theoretical ideas that shaped them. Topics include Neoclassicism, new building types, Victorian Architecture, the development of the architectural profession, and Art Nouveau. Major architects to be discussed include Piranesi, John Soane, Schinkel, Pugin, and H.H. Richardson. When possible, primary sources will be used. Students will be given experience in reading plans and writing about buildings. [ more ]

    ARTH 259 LEC Bilad al-Sudan and Beyond: Arts of the Afro-Islamic World

    Last offered Spring 2020

    From the Swahili stone houses of East Africa to the massive earth and timber mosques of the Sahel, the story of Islam in Africa is one of cultural and spiritual hybridity expressed through material form. In this course, students will explore how artistic forms and traditions in Africa have functioned as vehicles of access and integration for Islam, enabling it to assimilate itself with numerous African contexts towards becoming the dominant religious force on the continent. In addition, students will investigate how the forms, functions, and meanings of Afro-Islamic objects across the continent reflect not just one African Islam, but many different iterations, each shaped by the specific frameworks of its cultural context. The contemporary component of the course will examine how modernity in the form of globalization, technology, and Westernization has affected Afro-Islamic artistic traditions, and how these shifts reflect larger evolutions within understandings of Islam in Africa in the contemporary period. [ more ]

    ARTH 262 LEC Modern Architecture

    Last offered Fall 2022

    A century ago, the Modern Movement promised the most sweeping cultural transformation since the Renaissance. Architecture was only one lobe of a comprehensive movement that embraced literature and painting, music and theater, all aspiring to the same radical emancipation from traditional form and structures of authority. What happened? How and why did modern architecture abandon its utopian vision. Students will explored the major developments in Western architecture from 1900 to the present, and become familiar with its major figures: Wright, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Kahn, Venturi, Gehry, Koolhaas, and Hadid. Students will learn a variety of skills: design a 1000-square foot vacation house; present to the class an analysis of a building; and organize a small exhibition of architectural treatises in the Chapin Library. [ more ]

    ARTH 264(F) LEC American Art and Architecture, 1600 to Present

    American art is often looked at as a provincial version of the real thing--i.e., European art--and found wanting. This course examines American architecture, painting, and sculpture on its own terms, in the light of the social, ideological and economic forces that shaped it. Special attention will be paid to such themes as the Puritan legacy and attitudes toward art; the making of art in a commercial society; and the tension between the ideal and the real in American works of art. [ more ]

    ARTH 265 LEC Pop Art

    Last offered Spring 2020

    The use of commercial and mass media imagery in art became recognized as an international phenomenon in the early 1960s. Items such as comic strips, advertising, movie stills, television programs, soup cans, "superstars," and a variety of other accessible and commonplace objects inspired the subject matter, form, and technique. This course will critically examine the history and legacy of Pop Art by focusing on its social and aesthetic contexts. An important component of the course involves developing skills in analyzing visual images, comparing them with other forms, and relating them to their historical context. [ more ]

    ARTH 272 LEC Art of the Noble Path: Buddhist Material Culture Across Asia

    Last offered Fall 2020

    Buddhism has spread throughout Asia and beyond since its emergence in India in the 5th century BCE, providing a shared philosophical and cosmological framework for diverse cultures. Artistic expression, regional politics and cultural landscapes have been shaped by its remarkable influence. With patrons ranging from powerful monarchs and monks to merchants and tradespeople, Buddhist art has historically reflected the religion's social inclusivity. This course will survey the architecture, painting and material culture of Buddhism in Asia, tracing its influence in diverse media, from rock-cut architecture to Zen painting. A close reading of primary texts, such as architectural inscriptions in India, manuscripts from Tibet, and travelogues of Chinese pilgrims, will provide greater context for the artworks. [ more ]

    ARTH 278 LEC The Golden Road to Samarqand

    Last offered Fall 2016

    The region stretching from present day Iran to India figures prominently in contemporary global culture but it also has a rich and complex history--an amalgamation of Persian, Turkish and Islamic influences. Home to Genghis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane), Akbar the Great and Shah Jahan, it has generated some of the most renowned monuments (e.g. the Taj Mahal and the blue tiled mosques of Isfahan) and refined manuscript painting ever known. We will cover a broad swath of time--from the 10th to the 20th century--concentrating on important centers of artistic production such as Timurid Central Asia and Mughal India. Students will have the opportunity to study original works of art in the college museum collections. [ more ]

    ARTH 281 SEM The Seeds of Divinity: Exploring Precolumbian Art & Civilization in a Museum Exhibit

    Last offered Spring 2019

    For all ancient civilizations, the gods were a powerful force, affecting all aspects of human lives and dominating ancient art. This course will explore concepts of divinity in five civilizations in Precolumbian Central America: Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, and Nayarit. The course examines how the broad concept of divinity is materialized in everyday life. We will query how the human body is used as the prism through which concepts about humanity, the human soul and the supernatural are perceived and depicted in the art of these civilizations. This is a project based course, and each student will study one or more art objects from these five civilizations, and consider how these objects could be presented in a museum exhibit. [ more ]

    ARTH 284(S) LEC The Postwar Avant-Gardes

    Artistic discourse in the Western hemisphere dramatically changed course in the wake of the Second World War. The mass trauma inflicted by the war prompted artists and critics throughout the region to reassess the role and potential of art in society. But the war's mass displacement of communities also displaced the centers for artistic activity, and avant-garde practices soon expanded vigorously throughout the Americas. Through comparative studies, this course will analyze the artistic avant-gardes that emerged simultaneously in the United States and Latin America after 1945. We will place these myriad practices in dialogue, to elucidate the complexity, richness, and vitality of artistic practices in the postwar era. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 586 LEC Japanese Popular Visual Culture

    Last offered Fall 2021

    The phrase "Japanese popular culture" often calls to mind comics and animation, but Japan's earliest visual pop culture dates back to the 17th century and the development of arts like kabuki theater and woodblock prints that could be produced for a mass audience. This course traces Japanese popular culture through a range of visual media: kabuki and puppet theater, premodern and postmodern visual art (ukiyoe, Superflat), classic film (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa), manga/comics (Tezuka, Otomo, Hagio), and animation (Oshii, Miyazaki, Kon). The class will also study material examples of Japanese popular culture on display in the Repro Japan exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art. We will develop visual reading skills to come up with original interpretations of these works, and compare different media to make them shed light on one another. [ more ]

    ARTH 289 SEM The Invention of Life Worlds

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This course looks towards alternate and coexisting imaginaries of life worlds, examining their development in the arts and letters. With attention to visual and literary ethnography, science fiction, feminist theory, and creative non-fiction, we will contemplate methods of making and inventing in the contemporary world, focusing on the transhistorical and transcultural production of knowledge. Speculative forms of creative production and seminar discussion, as well as some of the most challenging ethical proposals for the future will guide our investigation of artworks, media, and literary production. Climate change, environmental justice, indigeneity, and multispecies interaction will resonate at the political center of this experimental seminar. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 290 LEC Enslavement and Colonialism in Dutch Painting, ca. 1500-1800

    Last offered Spring 2022

    This introductory lecture course to Dutch art from 1560-1795 will study how the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism were central to the mythic construction of a Dutch Golden Age. From the iconic paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer to the pictorial reproductions of the plantations in Indonesia and the Americas, we will ask how the visual record of this period has both written and erased the violent histories that are integral to the canon of Dutch painting. The course will begin with the iconoclastic riots in Antwerp in the 1560s and end with the slave revolt in the Dutch Colony of Curaçao in 1795, and throughout we will ask how to tell this history of enslavement and colonialism over two centuries when the voices of the enslaved and colonized were excised from the historical record. [ more ]

    Taught by: Caroline Fowler

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    ARTH 301(F) SEM Methods of Art History

    This course on the methods and historiography of art history offers art-history majors an overview of the discipline. The course surveys influential definitions of the discipline, the evolving tasks it has set itself, and the methods it has developed for implementing and executing them. Works of art will inevitably enter into our discussions, but the main objects of study will be texts about art as well as texts about methods for an historical study of art. The course is designed to offer a pluralistic perspective on key theoretical and methodological approaches to art history. Readings will regularly compare the Western discipline with frameworks from other parallel cultures.Topics include: style and periodization; iconography, narratology, and phenomenology; the social functions of images and the social history of art; the materiality of art; race, gender, and sexuality; the global scope of art and art history. [ more ]

    ARTH 301(S) TUT Methodologies of Art History

    The purpose of this course is to trace the origin and development of key ideas that define the discipline of art history. They include the idea that art has a history, that style is unique to individuals but also definitive of entire periods or cultures, that interpretation should be contextual, that representation is fundamentally subjective, that art can be an instrument of power, that reception is as much a part of the history of art as production, among many others. This course begins with a series of texts from around 1900, which drew upon nineteenth-century fields such as cultural history, psychology of perception, and psychology of empathy, to articulate the first methodologies of art history. The course then considers the critiques of those methods that emerged in the middle twentieth century from the fields of iconology, marxism, feminism, structuralism, and ethnic studies, among others. The course concludes with a consideration of the current revival of interest in the writings of the first art historians coming from perspectives such as phenomenology, aesthetics, anthropology, new materialism, "Bildwissenschaft," and neo-formalism. In this way, it becomes possible to see that the history of art is not merely the sum total of information available throughout the world about art objects, but also a coherent tradition of methodological debate about what are the most effective and responsible ways of writing the history of art. [ more ]

    ARTH 304(S) TUT Indigenous American Urbanism: Teotihuacan and its Legacy in Comparative Perspective

    This course offers students the opportunity to undertake close study of Teotihuacan, Mexico, (ca. 0-600 CE) the largest urban development of American antiquity as measured by spatial, and possibly also, population metrics. The first half of the semester involves an immersive look at the urbanism, architectural history, archaeology, and historiography of Teotihuacan, the present-day name of which means, "Where Men Become Gods," in the Mexica (Aztec) language of Nahuatl. The following four weeks of the course will consider those major Ancestral American polities with which Teotihuacan interacted, including Monte Alban, Oaxaca and Tikal, Guatemala, or upon which its legacy exerted influence, including Chichen Itza, Yucatan and Tenochtitlan, Mexico City. The final two weeks of the course will consider comparative settlement and architectural data from Indigenous North and South America. Topics to be addressed over the semester will include the role of space in forging complex ancient societies; criteria for the identification of cities through archaeological remains; definitions of "complexity;" economic inequity within and between city-states; and comparative settlement patterns. [ more ]

    ARTH 305 SEM Queer Art, Queer Archives

    Last offered Fall 2019

    Focusing on a number of recent museum exhibitions dedicated to queer art and artists in the U.S. and abroad, this course critically examines the emergence of queer art histories. How are queer art histories being written and presented? And how is queer art being collected and preserved? We will explore these questions (and others) through the lens of the archive and the research and collecting practices associated with archives. As a class, we will critically examine the role, limits, and possibilities of archives in art historical research, curatorial practice, and museum exhibitions. Course readings will consider various historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the archive and curatorial practice. We will also consider artists' archives and what has been described as an "archival impulse" in contemporary art. This course is being developed in conjunction with Williams College Museum of Art's presentation of the traveling exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., the first historical exhibition on queer Latinx art. Select assignments and student presentations will encourage first-hand experience with artworks in the exhibition. [ more ]

    ARTH 306(S) SEM Building Power: Race and American Architecture

    This course explores the many ways race is constructed through American architecture. We will survey different methodologies for linking architecture and race, including uncovering the history of buildings in the nation's capital, analyzing public housing and "domestic war," and theorizing how racial difference and racialized power -- including white supremacy -- are implicated within modern architectural theory. Our readings will be drawn from Asian American, Latinx, and Black studies, as well as architectural history, art history, and urban studies. Together we will attempt to answer several questions about racialized architecture, such as why Asianness has often been associated with domestic interiors, how Blackness is coded in particular built forms, such as skyscrapers, and how architects and planners deploy the visual language of the Latinx barrio to mitigate anti-immigrant fear. We will also explore how BIPOC artists, architects, writers, and scholars engage architecture as a standpoint of critique, pushing back against the racialization of architecture and offer alternative or new ways of thinking about structures and space. While foregrounding race, the course will necessarily require intersectional thinking in relation (but not limited) to class, gender, citizenship, and ability. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 307 SEM Contemporary methodologies in History and Practice

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This course explores contemporary methodologies that traverse both collective research and artistic production, providing an overview of theoretical and practical frameworks in contemporary art through case studies, close reading, and interdisciplinary artistic projects. We will speculate on the role of the artist, the curator, and the critic as "host" in order to foreground how a care-centered and collective approach to knowledge production can run counter to existing power paradigms, such as patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Building on existing exchanges between disciplines--from feminist thought, queer theory, disability studies, visual and media studies--this hybrid studio and critical theory course presents contemporary art as a field uniquely suited to imagine alternative structures of institutional support and mutual aid. Through engagement with critical and creative texts, as well as a series of making exercises, we will experiment with practices of care and resource-sharing through art production, and imagine how arts practitioners can take a critical position that counters prevailing logics of individualism and enclosure. [ more ]

    ARTH 308 TUT African Art and the Western Museum

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This tutorial provides a focused study of the issues associated with the exhibition of African objects within Western institutions from the formative period of the practice in the early 19th century to the modern era. Covering topics ranging from early collection and display methodologies to exhibition-based practice in the current digital era, this tutorial will provide an opportunity for robust discussion about the interactions that have occurred between the arts of Africa and the Western museum over the lengthy history of their engagement. Students will investigate the nature of the cross-cultural dialogues taking place and the politics of display at work in regional museum spaces that display African art towards fleshing out how exhibitions function through the strategic organization and display of objects. Further, students will explore how the dialogues created between objects, individuals, and space often speak to the voices and agendas that collide, collaborate, and even compete with each other within the environment of the museum. [ more ]

    ARTH 310 SEM An American Family and "Reality" Television

    Last offered Spring 2023

    An American Family was a popular documentary series that featured the Loud family from Santa Barbara, California, whose everyday lives were broadcast on national television. The series generated an enormous amount of media attention, commentary, and controversy when it premiered on PBS in 1973. Today, it is regarded as the origin of so-called "Reality TV." In addition to challenging standard rules for television programming, the show challenged social conventions and asked viewers to think seriously about family relations, sexuality, domesticity, and the "American dream." Documenting the family's life over the course of eight months, the series chronicled the dissolution of the Louds' marriage and broadcast the "coming out" of eldest son Lance Loud, the first star of reality television. In this class, we will view the An American Family series in its entirety, research the program's historical reception, and analyze its influence on broadcast and film media, particularly on "reality" television. A final 14- to 18-page research paper will be prepared in stages, including a 6- to 8-page midterm essay that will be revised and expanded over the course of the semester. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 311 SEM Women and Art in East Asia

    Last offered Spring 2022

    For over a thousand years, women in East Asia profoundly influenced the development of the visual arts, yet their formidable presence remains largely hidden. This seminar explores the critical roles women played as patrons, artists, and collectors of the arts in China, Korea, and Japan. We cover historical periods from the 10th century to the present day and discuss both traditional and nontraditional media including painting, sculpture, photography, and embroidery. Topics include didactic paintings for women in the Song court, calligraphy and painting as gendered modes of expression in Heian period Japan, the revival of Buddhist arts in Korea under the patronage of aristocratic women, and artworks by modern and contemporary artists that contest dominant representations of gender and sexuality. The course does not simply focus on artistic production, but also contextualizes these topics in light of emergent theorizations and readings on femininity, feminism, and the sexual politics of representation. Along with a final research paper, students will generate a substantial Wikipedia entry on a certain aspect of the course to promote the coverage of women and the arts online. No prior knowledge of Asian art history is required or assumed [ more ]

    Taught by: Carolyn Wargula

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    ARTH 314 SEM Emperors of Heaven and Earth: Mughal Power and Art in India, 1525-1707

    Last offered Fall 2019

    The Mughal dynasty ruled over most of northern India from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The Mughal Empire was the grandest and longest to rule the Indian subcontinent--much larger than any European empire in the early modern world--and it continued to have a lasting impact on South Asia. Mughals established a centralized administration with a vast complex of personnel, money and information networks. Styling themselves as 'Emperors of Heaven and Earth', the Mughal kings were also globally viewed as political innovators and unprecedented patrons of art. Their visual practices were as much a part of their imperial ideologies as their administrative and military measures. This co-taught course combines the disciplines of Art History and History to explore the intricate workings of Mughal politics and ideologies. The first of its kind to bring an interdisciplinary approach to teaching South Asia at Williams, the course asks: How did the Mughals sustain their empire for three centuries? How did they use art and politics to rule over diverse and largely non-Muslim populations? How did these Muslim imperial patrons merge Persian and Central Asian cultural values with preexisting Indian forms of administrative and artistic expression? How does Mughal culture continue to shape the South Asian imagination today? Readings will include a variety of visual and literary texts. We will delve deep into the world of biographies, travel accounts, poetry, architecture and a plethora of artworks. Students will take a hands-on approach to Mughal painting through several visits to the WCMA and a dedicated Object Lab. The primary aim of this co-taught course is to introduce students to a multifaceted picture of one of the greatest empires in pre-colonial world history. Another goal is to familiarize them with a wide range of visual and written primary sources and develop a vocabulary for 'reading' these. [ more ]

    ARTH 315 SEM Underground Berlin: Art, Performance, and Film, 1980s to Present

    Last offered Spring 2022

    Subsequent to the National Socialist suppression of sexual expression, the intersections of politics and art in the post-World War II era reflected an organic embeddedness within the context of the city of Berlin. This course reflects upon this history to understand Berlin's present, its contradictory mix of new and old, "deep history" and nostalgia. Often described as an island moored within the communist territory of East Germany during the years of the Berlin Wall, West-Berlin became the city towards which many queer artists, musicians, and activists gravitated in order to avoid the involuntary conscription in the Bundeswehr, as an unexpected outcome of the government's plan to boost population in the former capital. We will focus on the excavation and recognition of inter/cultural positions that challenge German nationalism, at the same time that the country reestablished itself as a world power. Over the semester, we will rethink Berlin with respect to the once nascent geopolitics of the European Union, and the city's social fluctuations and periods of migration as registered through audiovisual and performative forms in advance of and in the decades following the fall of the wall in 1989. Focusing on art, performance, and film, we will examine the architectural, discursive, and cultural spaces in which these forms of creative and political expression take shape--from art museums and theater houses to occupied buildings, from independent publishing imprints and collaborative nonprofit organizations to night clubs. This course will examine the changing city with respect to activism, collectivity, alienation, solidarity, and belonging. [ more ]

    Taught by: Alena Williams

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    ARTH 318 LEC Environmentalism in Experimental Media, Art and Politics, 1960s to Present

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Over the semester we will address historical and contemporary debates on environmental politics from the critical perspective of artists, activists, and scholars from the 1960s to today. Organized thematically, this course addresses the aesthetics and politics of environmentalism alongside larger debates in the visual arts--including decolonial practices, globalization, conceptualism, collaboration and authorship, aesthetic reception, and the artistic transmission of ideas. We will place particular focus on lens-based and moving-image media practices with respect to the conceptualization of nature, as well as delve into the interrelation of materials and media in our greater cultural reckoning with climate change and environmental justice. Experiential engagement in the forms of screenings, group assignments, and the creation of site-specific and creative works in all media will amplify our art and media historical study of environmental politics in the public sphere. Students will also conduct independent research and essay writing in order to analyze the way we interpret, engage, alter, and mediate the natural world. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 322(F) SEM Cold War Aesthetics in Latin America

    The Cold War was far more complex than a military conflict, with battles waged more in the symbolic than in the physical realm. The Cold War was therefore "everywhere and nowhere," as new superpowers maneuvered to maintain geopolitical balance. Through a transnational lens this course considers the Cold War in Latin America as an aesthetic phenomenon with many facets, to recover how artistic practices unfolded myriad--and often conflicting--ideas regarding power, cultural influence, modernization, and revolution. [ more ]

    ARTH 525 TUT Japanese Art and Visual Culture: Private/Public/Pop

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This tutorial offers a survey of Japanese art and visual culture across time and media, with particular attention to two areas: the links between different artistic media, and the relationship between art and its audience. We'll begin with early court diaries and related scroll paintings as examples of "private" art. Then we'll move through progressively more public visual media of the 17th through 21st centuries: Kanô screen painting; nô, kabuki, and puppet theater; premodern architecture; popular woodblock prints; turn-of-the-century photography; and finally some examples of contemporary popular culture like comics, animation, and/or film. We will focus on the specificities of each medium while simultaneously developing formal visual reading skills that can work across different media. [ more ]

    ARTH 325 SEM The Arts of the Book in Asia

    Last offered Spring 2023

    From palm leaf manuscripts to scrolls to Islamic codices, books have long served as vehicles of religious, cultural and artistic exchange in Asia. Owing both to their portability and status as finely crafted art objects, books have transmitted ideas across the continent, spreading courtly styles of painting from China to India, esoteric Buddhist teachings from Kashmir to Tibet and Mongolia, as well as the Quranic arts of calligraphy and illumination from Islamic South Asia to Southeast Asia. This co-taught seminar will highlight the interwoven history of book arts as it developed and disseminated across different regions of Asia. The course will also introduce students to the major art forms of the book, such as painting, calligraphy and illumination. The aim of the seminar is to understand the book as object while also investigating its content and its larger cultural significance. A number of class meetings will take place in the Chapin Library, where students will have the opportunity to study original manuscripts from the Special Collections. The course will culminate in an exhibition at Chapin Library which the students will curate using the Special Collections holdings. [ more ]

    ARTH 527(F) SEM Acquiring Art: Selecting and Purchasing Objects For WCMA

    How do museums acquire art? Factors considered in selecting objects include: the museum's existing collection, its mission, the availability of suitable objects, evaluation of the art historical importance of potential purchases, and the available budget. How can objects be identified and obtained at the most reasonable cost? How do auctions work and what strategies are best for purchasing works at auction? Is it more economical to purchase art at auction or to work with dealers or (for contemporary works) directly with artists? Do museums consider value in the same way as private collectors? What role does an object's history and condition play in the evaluation process? In this course students will work as teams to identify and propose objects for addition to the collection of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). A significant budget will be made available for the acquisition. We will discuss approaches for identification, acquisition and evaluation of objects. Student teams will be responsible for identifying a set of objects that would make appropriate additions to the WCMA collection, and a strategy for acquiring one or more of those objects. Working with the advice of WCMA curatorial staff, one or more of these objects will be acquired using the agreed strategy, and the object will become part of the WCMA permanent collection. Graduate students will participate in all aspects of the class but may be required to undertake different assignments. [ more ]

    ARTH 330 TUT Michelangelo: Biography, Mythology, and the History of Art

    Last offered Spring 2017

    One might argue that Michelangelo's enduring fame, and his preeminence in the European art historical canon, is as much a product of his artistic persona as his artistic achievement. Indeed, the classic image of the artist as a brooding, tortured genius of unstoppable creative force finds its roots in the Italian Renaissance, and specifically in the fascinating biography--and mythology--of Michelangelo. With a life and career more fully documented than those of any western artist to precede him, Michelangelo provides the foundations for a triangulation of person-persona-artistic production that has a modern ring. But what are the limits of our knowledge, and what are the boundaries of interpretation? And how might we approach the study of an artistic self when that self is, also, a work of art? In this course, students will become well-acquainted with the life and work of Michelangelo, giving critical attention to the connection between the artist and his work. We will investigate, in particular, the practice of interpreting his work according to his philosophical outlook, political convictions, religious beliefs, sexual desire, and more. While this course will bring us deep into the life and work of a single artist, one of its goals is to generate ideas about the very act of biographically-based art historical interpretation. How can thinking carefully about Michelangelo reshape our own thinking about art historical practice? [ more ]

    ARTH 331 TUT Michelangelo: Self and Sexuality

    Last offered Spring 2021

    Who are artists? We each have different answers to this question, but our responses would probably share some common assumptions about human individuality and the centrality of the self to artistic creation. In this tutorial, we will take a critical lens to these ideas by studying the life, work, and passions of the Italian artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Michelangelo is a towering archetype of the autonomous artistic self: the distinctive personality who telegraphs individual beliefs, feelings, and desires through the creative act. His lifelong engagement with the physicality, beauty, and sensuality of the (male) human body has encouraged the connection between the man and his work on the most intimate levels of pleasure and desire. Ironically, Michelangelo would not have understood our modern conceptions of artistic selfhood or sexuality, but his own Renaissance moment was obsessed with questions surrounding the nature of human identity and subjectivity. His artistic practice--from painting to poetry--wrestles with them in countless, fascinating ways. Students' writing and critical conversation will venture into the spaces between man and myth, selfhood and self-fashioning, artist and patron, past and present. [ more ]

    ARTH 332 SEM Abstraction in Action: Global Modern and Contemporary Art

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Abstraction, be it gestural or geometrical, was a protagonist in the story of global modernisms and continues to be a powerful visual language in contemporary art. The term "abstraction" may first appear straightforward, but its associations are quite complex: in varying historical contexts, abstraction has signaled formalist rupture, cultural co-optation, revolutionary politics, as well as racial, feminist, and queer critique. This object-oriented course will delve deeply into non-representation in global modern and contemporary art; we will supplement our careful study of artworks with primary documents, as well as with canonical theoretical frameworks and the reassessments that have sought to complicate these. This seminar is organized into two weekly sessions--a lecture and a discussion-to introduce key concepts and issues and to allow for ample group dialogue on these. Ultimately, the course seeks to revise and expand the cartographies and ontologies of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries. As such, it welcomes students with an interest in modern and contemporary art, yet does not require previous coursework in either. [ more ]

    ARTH 333(F, S) SEM Once More With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Visual Culture

    The urge to relive the past is a fundamental human one, and artists have long drawn upon the ritualistic possibilities of reenactment as a way of interrogating time's uneasy returns and losses. In this course, we will study how artists working in a range of media deploy reenactment in collaboration with others, in order to ask what liberatory potential there might be in choosing to restage--and in many ways, relive--the past. This is a hybrid course with roughly 50% of the course dedicated to critical analysis and 50% studio practice. Case studies drawn from film, theater and other art forms will accompany scholarly readings and short writing assignments, and students will also devise their own reenactment experiments in order to access the embodied and experiential possibilities of the course topic. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 335 SEM Uncovering Williams

    Last offered Spring 2021

    Sparked by current controversies around visual representations at Williams, this course--a joint effort of the Williams College Museum of Art and the American Studies Program--interrogates the history of the college and its relationship to land, people, architecture, and artifacts. Students in this course will examine the visual and material culture of Williams and the land it occupies to uncover how the long and complex history of the college reverberates in the spaces and places students, faculty, and staff traverse daily. We take seriously that objects and environments are not neutral nor are the atmospheres that they reflect and produce. Our interdisciplinary approach draws from the methods and theories of American studies, art history, material culture studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and eco-criticism. Topics of discussion may include: the foundation of the college and displacement of native populations; buildings, objects, and monuments linked to Williams' evangelical history and the role of missionaries in American imperialism; the symbolic meaning of the varied architectural styles at the college; and the visibility/invisibility of the college's relationship to slavery and Abolitionism. [ more ]

    ARTH 337 SEM Visual Politics

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Even casual observers know that appearances matter politically and that the saturation of politics by visual technologies, media, and images has reached unprecedented levels. Yet the visual dimensions of political life are at best peripheral topics in contemporary political science and political theory. This seminar explores how our understanding of politics and political theory might change if visuality were made central to our inquiries. Treating the visual as a site of power and struggle, order and change, we will examine not only how political institutions and conflicts shape what images people see and how they make sense of them but also how the political field itself is visually constructed. Through these explorations, which will consider a wide variety of visual artifacts and practices (from 17th century paintings to the optical systems of military drones and contemporary forms of surveillance), we will also take up fundamental theoretical questions about the place of the senses in political life. Readings may include excerpts from ancient and modern theorists, but our primary focus will be contemporary and will bring political theory into conversation with other fields, particularly art history and visual studies but also film and media studies, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and STS. Possible authors include Arendt, Bal, Belting, Benjamin, Browne, Buck-Morss, Butler, Campt, Clark, Crary, Debord, Deleuze, Fanon, Foucault, Freedberg, Hobbes, Kittler, Mercer, Mitchell, Mulvey, Plato, Rancière, Scott, Sexton, Starr, Virilio, Warburg, and Zeki. [ more ]

    ARTH 338 LEC The Romantic Revolution: Art and Experience in 19th-Century Europe

    Last offered Spring 2020

    This course explores major moments in nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture in relation to sweeping transformations across multiple dimensions of human experience, including aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, politics, and beyond. Key artists include Friedrich, Delacroix Blake, Turner, Courbet, and many others. In each case we will interrogate their work across multiple art historical and intellectual perspectives, at once with a view to unveiling larger developments, but also to make the case for works of art as powerful bearers of meaning, and shapers of experience, in and of themselves. Assignments keyed to introducing students to a range of art historical methods and modes of argument and interpretation. [ more ]

    ARTH 342 TUT Monuments and Miniatures: Architecture and Painting in India

    Last offered Spring 2020

    This tutorial is designed to provide an in-depth comparative study of two of the most important cultural expressions in the history of the Indian Subcontinent: Architecture and Painting. From sprawling pleasure gardens and palaces to iconic tomb complexes and temples, the built environment has served various cultural, religious and communal functions in India. Intimate in scale, and made primarily for an elite audience, miniature painting has also performed a key role in preserving and transmitting cultural values over time and space. Despite obvious differences in scale and scope, architectural monuments and miniature paintings produced for manuscripts and albums reflect similar creative impulses. They are also often linked through their relationship to text, and can be interpreted through contemporaneous literature. In the tutorial, students will be asked to make careful analyses of the iconography, symbolism and historical frameworks of monumental architecture and miniature painting in India. Original literature in translation and recent scholarly essays will help provide the framework for considering the artworks from the perspective of their patrons, creators and audiences. We will also consider the shifting roles and meanings of these artworks through the ages. For example, what was the original symbolism of the Taj Mahal, and how has it become a highly contested, political space in contemporary India? How did grand picture albums from the seventeenth century, made for some of the most powerful emperors in global history, function as tools for political self-fashioning? And what do their modern reception as part of Western museum collections tell us about the transformation of India during the British colonial period? [ more ]

    ARTH 344 SEM Pacific-New England Material Histories

    Last offered Fall 2019

    This course looks at the indigenous, colonial, maritime, and missionary histories that connect New England to island nations in the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than thinking of Hawai'i and Massachusetts merely as opposite ends of United States colonial expansion, we will focus on the heterogenous cast of historical actors-from queens to whalers-who interacted in these places and generated new forms in architecture, painting, printmaking, the decorative arts, textiles, and publishing. Particular attention will be paid to the politics of Hawaiian visual culture and the histories of Williams alumni in Hawai'i, but the readings, discussions, and student papers will not be limited exclusively to those subjects. Our time together will be split between lecture and class discussion, with some meetings devoted to archival research and object-based case studies in collections on campus. As a group, we will establish a corpus of objects and conceptual frameworks for analyzing what "Pacific-New England" means and how that might challenge our existing assumptions about regional art histories. Finally, we will experiment as a class with the best ways to convey what we've learned through our collective inquiry-whether in different forms of writing or by workshopping more creative approaches. [ more ]

    ARTH 348 SEM Women, Men and Other Animals

    Last offered Spring 2019

    In this seminar, we will together learn to be "animal critics." We will explore ways in which human groups and interests, particularly in the United States, have both attached and divorced themselves from other animals, considering such axes as gender, race, ability, and sexuality as key definitional foils for human engagements with animality. What are the "uses" of "animals" for "us," and precisely who is this "us"? How and when are some willing to see themselves as animal--indeed, under what political conditions do they embrace it? What is the history of unique, often asymmetric, interdependencies between human animals and nonhuman animals? How do actual lives of humans and non-human animals merge and clash with the rhetorics and visualities of human animality? We will examine both "everyday" animality and the forms of animality that stand out only today in retrospect, in their exceptionality, or upon reflecting on structures of privilege. We will build a critical animal studies vocabulary from a range of readings in science, philosophy, art, feminism, indigenous studies, critical race, geography, fiction, film, rhetoric, history, activist movements, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and examine both visual and narrative cultural production. [ more ]

    ARTH 360(F) SEM The Gothic Cathedral: An Art History

    Through their enormous scale, through the gravity-defying complexity of their construction, and through the sumptuousness of their materials and decoration, Gothic cathedrals -- the medieval equivalent of the blockbuster movie, and then some -- have amazed visitors for centuries. The widespread social media reaction of shock and dismay to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris four years ago, moreover, indicates that this power of the cathedral to dazzle and to capture hearts remains very much alive. But how have art historians, specifically, made sense of these extraordinary, and extraordinarily complex, monuments? And how have the questions they have asked about the cathedral changed over time? Through a close examination of a number of influential books, in particular -- each one of them a kind of miniature cathedral in its own right -- this 300-level seminar will investigate the shifting interpretation of the Gothic Cathedral over the past 150 years. In so doing, the seminar aims to shed light not only on the fascinating multiplicity of realities that make up the Gothic cathedral but also on the changing shape of the discipline of art history itself, from its beginnings to the early 2020s. [ more ]

    ARTH 363 Space into Place: Composing Modernity through Maps and Landscape Paintings, 1500-1900

    Last offered NA

    Colonial expansion and growing trade networks created new needs for picturing the globe in early modern Europe. In other words, globalization required a world broken down into concrete units that could be known and recognized. The artistic and the cartographic were two fundamental modes of representing space. What we might learn by bringing landscape paintings and maps together in dialogue? What are the aesthetic expectations of each genre? How were subject, scale, perspective, and proportion determined and by whom? Moving beyond a binary opposition of science versus art, we will study conventions and changes in mapmaking and landscape painting from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries to analyze shifting conceptions of national identity, modernity, and the relation of humans to nature. Course lectures and an interdisciplinary array of readings will provide historical and conceptual support for object-based discussions in the Williams College Museum of Art, the Chapin Rare Book Library, and at the Clark Art Institute. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 367 SEM Documentary Fictions

    Last offered Fall 2019

    The first movies excited viewers not by telling stories, but by reproducing the world: a dancer's billowing skirts, the sight of Niagara Falls, the arrival of a train at the station--such vignettes felt viscerally real. Our fascination with documentaries derives, in large part, from the way seemingly transparent images are woven into narratives full of hidden assumptions. Every viewer of the Zapruder film sees the same thing: President Kennedy, struck by a bullet, lurches forward. But what that might mean--whether it points toward a lone gunman or a conspiracy, toward the Soviet Union or the CIA--still remains uncertain. We'll explore the tensions between image and story, evidence and context, in films ranging from Fred Ott's "Sneeze" (1894) to Josh Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), concluding with a look at the effects of contemporary image technologies on our sense of personal and national identity. Readings for the course will be drawn from narrative theory, epistemology, and cultural theory, as framed by writers including Trinh Minh-ha, Christian Metz, and Bill Nichols. [ more ]

    ARTH 368 HIV + AIDS in Film and Video

    Last offered NA

    Spanning activist works, experimental film, Hollywood dramas and documentary, this course examines the role of moving images in reckoning with the global AIDS crisis, its aftermath, and its ongoing aftershocks. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was, in the words of Larry Kramer, a 'plague' of epic proportions, with an entire generation obliterated before it could reach maturity. And yet, the 'plague' years also spawned a remarkable amount of creative and activist image-making aimed at fighting, mourning, and grappling with AIDS. Now, we find ourselves in another pivotal moment: the past decade has yielded a new wave of artworks dedicated to memorializing the crisis, while for many communities, the crisis never ended. Together, we will ask difficult and probing questions about this phenomenon called the 'AIDS epidemic,' examining the role of art in frontline activism, the ethics of AIDS historiography, mainstream visions of the AIDS body, and the need for a diversity of AIDS narratives. This seminar-style course will combine weekly screenings with readings and intensive discussion. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 379 SEM Writing Art

    Last offered Spring 2021

    This course is conceived primarily as an experiential adventure in creative forms of art writing. We'll read several recent examples of such work (from writers including John Ashbery, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Teju Cole, Jorie Graham, Robin Coste Lewis, Eileen Myles, Ali Smith, Roberto Tejada, and John Yau) to get a sense of the range of approaches, from the ekphrastic poem to the essay to the novel, alive today; and we will spend considerable time in local museums, engaging intimately with works of art through various writing prompts, as you create your own creative responses to visual art. Along the way, we will work to historicize and theorize the relation between the verbal and visual arts, and to ask what looking at art brings to creative writing, as well as the ways creative writing might extend or alter the work of art history. [ more ]

    ARTH 390 SEM Art and Representation in the Wake of Empire, Europe After 1945

    Last offered Fall 2022

    Foregrounding the exhibition as a critical form of aesthetic and political contestation, this course examines the transformation of colonial projects of early modernity to the post-World War II period. It will situate European visual culture within systems of transnational exchange and the art and cultures of other continents, while reflecting upon its economic and political impacts within its own newly reconfigured borders. National identity will be set in relief against a burgeoning cosmopolitanism, migration shifts, and increased tourism worldwide. Work in a variety of media will illustrate the multifaceted nature of these interactions and their engagement with materials, persons, and things in the commodification and use of natural resources. Of the themes addressed in this course--postcolony, anticapitalism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and existentialism--particular attention will be focused upon the history of independence movements in the former European colonies and their reflection in works of art in Europe and abroad. We will consider the role major international and perennial art exhibitions--such as Documenta in Germany and the Venice Biennale in Italy--have played in the reconceptualization of the field of contemporary art, as well as other institutions of art confronting new waves of fascism in Europe. With a transhistorical approach, we will assess the work of international curators and cultural theorists who have remapped the relationship between art and politics, and the Global North and South. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 500(F) SEM Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: The Image Multiplied: The Printed Image in Early Modern Europe

    The technology of mechanically reproducing complex visual images on paper, a development of fifteenth-century Europe, transformed the early modern world no less than the emergence of digital media has transformed our own. Techniques of woodcut, engraving and etching quickly became important media for innovation within the fine arts. At the same time, they became equally important as sources for devotional imagery, for disseminating copies of other artworks, for the expansion of knowledge through scientific illustration, and for the effective broadcasting of political and religious messages during centuries of extraordinary political and religious upheaval. In this seminar we will investigate the cultural history of printed images in Europe from the time of their emergence in the fifteenth century through the mid-eighteenth century, focusing on the changing cultural circumstances of their production and reception. We will consider the work of major printmakers such as Mantegna, Dürer, Goltzius, Rembrandt, Callot, Hogarth, and Piranesi, but also that of many lesser-known (and anonymous) artists. [ more ]

    ARTH 501(S) SEM Museums: History and Practice

    Art museums express the cultural, aesthetic and social ideals of their period of formation and many of those ideals remain embedded in the values and practices of institutions today. Comparing institutions past and present internationally, seminar participants will envision the art museum's future while addressing programmatic and organizational challenges at this moment of participatory civic engagement and social, political unrest. With growing skepticism of institutional collecting practices and authoritative narratives, art museums, especially those in the United States, face internal and external pressure to "decolonize" as they attempt to alter their canon through both acquisition, deaccessioning and repatriation initiatives. There is pressure, as well, to embrace a more active role in climate and social justice movements. It is a time also marked by calls for compensation transparency, participatory decision making, staff and trustee diversity, and greater scrutiny of funders. The seminar will consider this environment against past and current norms of governance, management and curatorial policies and practices. We will examine the traditional role of architecture and installation in interpretation and experience, prevailing and proposed guidelines in the accessioning and deaccessioning of works of art and both internal and external attitudes towards the repatriation and restitution of cultural property. Studying museums ranging in size and type from the "encyclopedic" to newly established contemporary arts institutions and alternative spaces, seminar participants will hear how museum leaders are dealing with challenges to current practice through weekly zoom sessions. Through the work of the seminar, participants will consider how future museums might strive to balance the institution's traditional scholarly and artistic role with new civic and social responsibilities, mindful of financial stability in a market-driven, metric-conscious, not-for-profit environment; doing so while addressing, in proposed program and practice, the demands on museums emanating from a more ethically insistent internal and external world. [ more ]

    ARTH 402(F) SEM Monuments and The Art of Memorial

    The urge to commemorate is a timeless human impulse. Individuals, heroic acts, and historic events have been marked by mounds, architecture, images, words, and ephemera for over 5000 years. The value of the subject or focus of a commemoration changes over time. Entropy, iconoclasm, and vandalism have been seen as either positive or negative modes of destruction. Recent events have brought into high relief monuments long taken for granted as markers of the American urban landscape. Calls for the removal of monuments that have elevated individuals implicated in colonialism and racism have led to a powerful surge in alternative monument-making, and brought commemorative images back into public consciousness. Over the course of the seminar students will document and explore the concepts behind monuments and memorials in the Western tradition from their origins in the ancient Mediterranean (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome), and chart their reception, interpretation, destruction, and/or influence in later periods. We will also analyze the abstraction and inversion of monumental form, seen in the counter monuments of the late twentieth century such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) or Gunter Demnig's Stumbling Stones project (Stolpersteine, 1992-the present), the world's largest decentralized memorial for the victims of Nazi terror. Our consideration of historical monuments will be paired with ongoing contemporary discussions of action around the removal of memorials, and the call for creative alternatives. During the second half of the semester seminar participants will research a memorial trend or a specific monument, and investigate and parse its context and reception over time. A short presentation and a substantial paper, written in stages, will be the end result of the research project. [ more ]

    ARTH 503(S) SEM Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Transatlantic Landscape

    Landscape and the American encounter are inextricably bound together. Through the conventions of landscape representation and cartography developed in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, previously unknown regions of the globe were made legible to European audiences. What were these conventions? What aesthetic, social, and political factors contributed to their development? And with what success were they carried across the Atlantic? If European landscape was an agent of empire, in what ways was it challenged and even transformed by encounters with people whose ways of experiencing and thinking with the land did not conform to its conventions? This seminar will explore such questions by investigating the historiography and theory of landscape, and by looking closely at a number of case studies in transatlantic landscape, including the sixteenth-century mapping of New Spain, the Dutch representation of Brazil in the seventeenth century, Caribbean landscapes, the representation of the arctic, early archaeological campaigns in North America, and the surveying and representation of the western United States in the nineteenth century. [ more ]

    ARTH 404 SEM The Enemies of Impressionism, 1870-1900

    Last offered Fall 2018

    This class explores European and international painting and sculpture of the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, particularly the work of artists once famous in their day but whose reputations collapsed with the rise of Impressionism and Modernism. Once dismissed as trivializing, sensationalizing, politically suspect, kitsch, and simply "bad"-- much of this art has attracted new attention and enthusiasm in recent year. Focus on aesthetic theory, narrative, cinema, and -- most of all -- viewer experience. Artists include Gérôme, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, and many others. [ more ]

    ARTH 405 SEM Seminar in Architectural Criticism

    Last offered Fall 2022

    How does one judge a building? According to its structural efficiency or its aesthetic qualities? Its social responsibility--or just its pizzazz? Depending on the building, and the critic, any of these questions might be pertinent, or impertinent. This seminar explores architectural criticism, that curious genre between literature and architecture, and looks at its history, nature and function. We will read and discuss classic reviews by historical and contemporary critics as John Ruskin, Mariana van Rensselaer, Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable and Herbert Muschamp. Insights gained from these discussions will be applied by students to writing their own reviews, which will likewise be discussed in class. Early assignments will concentrate on mechanics: how to describe a building vividly and accurately, how to balance description and interpretation judiciously, how to compare. Subsequent ones will be more synthetic, encouraging students to write bold, lively and critical essays. The ultimate goal is to develop a distinctive and effective voice, and to gain a better understanding of the nature of criticism in general. [ more ]

    ARTH 407 SEM Materials and Material Culture along the Eastern Silk Road

    Last offered Fall 2021

    The Silk Road, a network of land and sea trading routes stretching from the Mediterranean to East Asia, served as a conduit for dynamic interactions and cross-cultural exchanges in the era before globalization. As a great cultural highway, the Silk Road stimulated the movement of peoples, the trade of luxury goods, and the transmission of technologies, ideas, and artistic motifs. This seminar examines the materials and material things traveling along the Silk Road from the fall of the Han Dynasty in China to the rise of the Mongol Empire (ca. 300 to 1400 CE). We focus, in particular, on the movement and use of three key materials: silk, glass, and paper. Topics include the transmission of silk-weaving technologies between China and Central Asia, glass bead production on the Korean peninsula, and the role of Japan's Shosoin Treasury in the construction of kingship. The emphasis will be on the material culture and sites from China, Korea, and Japan, with forays to India, Afghanistan, Turkey, and beyond. You will learn to critically analyze issues related to cultural interactions and gain familiarity with critical approaches to materiality and material culture studies. As a class, we will also develop a collaborative timeline as a resource to remember historical developments as well as key dates, objects, materials, and individuals. No prior knowledge of Asian art history is required or assumed. [ more ]

    Taught by: Carolyn Wargula

    Catalog details

    ARTH 408 SEM Modernism in Brazil

    Last offered Fall 2018

    "Modernism" in art: when we think about it, we may not readily think of Brazil. But Brazil was in fact a vibrant battleground of ideas around what it was to be innovative, modern, and avant-garde. Between 1920 and 1945, artists, poets, and critics in the metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro actively debated on the creation, and potential, of a uniquely Brazilian modernist aesthetic that would stand on par with the European avant-gardes. But what did "Brazilianness" mean to these intellectuals? What role did gender and race relations--indigeneity in particular--play in the construction of this aesthetic? How did the necessities and demands of the national context shape these modernist practices? This seminar will take a deep dive in this fascinatingly contradictory moment in Brazil, a chapter that would become a fundamental reference to Brazilian artists in the 1960s and even to this day. In addition to detailed analyses of artworks, we will read manifestos, novels, and criticism from this period, and the most up to date secondary interpretive texts. [ more ]

    ARTH 410(S) SEM Art and the Myth of Community

    The idea of community spans various forms of artistic practice, including performance, socially-engaged art, public works, and collectively-run and curatorial initiatives. Often, community is defined as a group of people who identify with each other by a set of common concerns or backgrounds. It connotes a sense of togetherness, wholeness, and consensus--despite the fact that difference and disagreements are an important part of any group. The concept of community also conjures up a broad set of themes, including identity, desire, friendship, interdependency, collaboration, spectatorship, and accountability. This course examines community, in its many forms, through contemporary artistic practices and relevant discourses from art criticism, feminist, queer, and decolonial thought. Readings are intended to offer useful concepts and theories to guide our analysis of artworks, films, and curatorial projects. Additionally, we will explore course concepts through group experiments in creative writing, storytelling, and performance. The goal of the course is to consider the interrelation between art and social life across genres, to theorize the aesthetic and political possibilities and limitations of community, and to explore what it means to be in relation to one another. [ more ]

    ARTH 411(S) SEM Han Dynasty Art in the Ancient World

    Although the Han Empire (206 BCE-220 CE) is credited for defining the "Han ethnic identity" or the so-called "Chinese-ness" as we know it today, its culture was also richly cosmopolitan, marked by constant interaction with the outside world. This course considers Han dynasty art from a transregional perspective by examining artworks that attest to rigorous artistic exchanges with foreign cultures, ranging from the luxury items imported from the Hellenistic, the Central Asian, and the Steppe cultures and their domestic adaptations, to the exported Han artworks excavated in the South East and the East Asian regions. These objects illustrate the Han Empire's growing awareness of its neighboring states and the ambition to visually assert itself as a powerful and open "universal empire." Students will learn about important artistic trends during one of the most international periods in ancient China, while gaining a materially-based vision of a globalizing ancient world bound closer than ever by the rise of the "Silk Roads" and maritime trade. The course is divided into five main sections following the logic of space. Beginning with the Han Empire (the "Center"), the seminar covers key themes in the development of Han art over four centuries. Assuming the viewpoint of the Han Empire, the course then examines the artistic exchanges with civilizations in the West (the Mediterranean and the Central Asian cultures) and moves clockwise to the North (the Steppe cultures), the East (Korea and Japan), and finally the South (maritime trade with South East Asian states). This arrangement of the syllabus is designed to help the students grasp and internalize the dynamic cultural contacts in a more embodied manner, while providing a working version of a spatial "grid" for navigating the students in their own exploration of the history of art in the ancient global world. [ more ]

    ARTH 412 SEM The Politics of Aesthetics: Collaboration and Participation in Contemporary Art

    Last offered Fall 2021

    The social turn is a hallmark of contemporary art, as artists since the 1960s turned from the art object toward dynamic exchanges with the public, from sole author to collaborative engagement. This seminar provides a theoretical framework to historicize as well as to critically analyze the promise and pitfalls of collaborative works, of favoring active participants over passive spectators, and of the meteoric rise of what is now commonly known as "social practice" art. A wide range of case studies from around the world will also allow us to delve into the intersections and productive tensions between aesthetics and politics, or between art and life. [ more ]

    ARTH 414 SEM Modernist Architecture: The Rise and Fall of the Modern Movement

    Last offered Fall 2021

    Modern architecture was once a radical movement--as radical as modern art, music, and literature--but though its forms survive today, they have lost their revolutionary charge. It has dwindled, in the words of Nathan Glazer, "from a cause to a style." This seminar will examine the modern movement in architecture as a historical artifact, from its emergence in early 20th-century Europe to its worldwide dominance in the 1950s, and to its collapse into an ideology-free modern vernacular since the 1960s. We will look at the principal theorists of the movement, including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Adolf Loos, as well as the critics who undermined it, particularly Robert Venturi and Jane Jacobs. Potential research topics include the failure of urban renewal, the patronage of modernism by corporate America, postmodernist criticism, and the historiography of the modern movement--in short, any topic that falls between Mies's "less is more" to Venturi's "less is a bore." [ more ]

    ARTH 416 SEM Senior Seminar: The Art of Minor Resistance: Advanced Readings in Race, Gender, Performance

    Last offered Spring 2020

    This seminar will study stagings and aesthetic theories of dissent in feminist, queer, anti-colonial, and anti-racist performance. An attunement to performance and to the minor is also a turn toward minoritarian knowledges and lifeworlds. Of interest will be modes of sensing and relating that are not often legible as political--including aesthetics of opacity, quiet, disaffection, aloofness, and inscrutability--but could be understood as critiques of political recognition. Performance is a capacious rubric in this class that will include performance art, social media, photography, music videos, poetry, street protest, and everyday life. Students will learn to describe, interpret, and theorize performance through discussion, writing, and creative form. [ more ]

    ARTH 418 Gothic Wonder: Exploring the Medieval Cathedral Then and Now

    Last offered NA

    Through their enormous scale, through the gravity-defying complexity of their construction, and through the sumptuousness of their materials and decoration, Gothic cathedrals were built to amaze visitors--the medieval equivalent of the blockbuster movie, and then some. The goal was to activate and overwhelm all of the senses and thereby both to produce an experience of transcendence for the people entering and using the cathedral, and to capture their hearts. The widespread social media reaction of shock and dismay to the fire at Notre Dame in Paris last year suggests that this power of the medieval cathedral to captivate remains very much alive. But these cathedrals have also, over the centuries, embodied and perpetuated hierarchies of authority and privilege, and have consumed vast economic resources. As a result, they have often been centers of conflict--and this too remains true today, as the heated debate in France over the rebuilding of Notre Dame testifies. This seminar will investigate the multiplicity of realities that make up the Gothic cathedral, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Together, we will look at a number of Europe's most renowned cathedrals, through time--in France (including Notre Dame in Paris), England, Italy, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere--and consider both how each building has changed over the centuries and how it has been differently interpreted. As this collective conversation is unfolding, students will also pursue individual research projects on a cathedral of their own choosing, the aim being similarly to examine one of these remarkable monuments over time and in its shifting contexts. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

    Catalog details

    ARTH 419 SEM Going to Ground: Considering Earth in the Arts of Africa

    Last offered Fall 2015

    Drawing its inspiration from the landmark exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (National Museum of African Art, 2013), this seminar explores how earth has been conceptualized and integrated into African artistic thought as material, metaphor, geography, environment, and intervention, and how this interpretive flexibility has allowed it to become a symbol of power and presence in African art-making from prehistory to the present. The seminar will also focus on the ways in which earth has been used in contemporary art towards addressing the growing problems of pollution, unsustainable development, and the widespread depletion of earth-based natural resources in Africa. Over the course of this seminar, students will develop a knowledge base of earth-related issues that have been addressed in African artistic production, and engage with various cross-disciplinary methodologies to critically analyze the conceptual and aesthetic strategies deployed in these works. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with specialists from diverse disciplines and fields towards fleshing out their knowledge base. [ more ]

    ARTH 420 SEM Architecture and Sustainability in a Global World

    Last offered Fall 2020

    What does it mean to create a sustainable built environment? What do such environments look like? Do they look the same for different people across different times and spaces? This course takes these questions as starting points in exploring the concept of architectural sustainability, defined as "minimizing the negative impact of built form on the surrounding landscape," and how this concept can be interpreted not only from an environmental point of view, but from cultural, political, and social perspectives as well. Over the course of the class, students will explore different conceptualizations of sustainability and how these conceptualizations take form in built environments in response to the cultural identities, political agendas, social norms, gender roles, and religious values circulating in society at any given moment. In recognizing the relationship between the way things are constructed (technique of assembly, technology, materials, process) and the deeper meanings behind the structural languages deployed, students will come to understand sustainability as a fundamentally context-specific ideal, and its manifestation within the architectural environment as a mode of producing dialogues about the anticipated futures of both cultural and architectural worlds. [ more ]

    ARTH 421 SEM Picturing God in the Middle Ages

    Last offered Spring 2021

    How did medieval Europeans imagine their God and how did they give what they imagined pictorial form? How were these pictures used, both in public and in private life, and why? Paying particular attention to the function and experience of medieval works of art, this seminar will examine the evolution of images of God, in both the Eastern and Western halves of Europe, and the problems these images often generated. Through readings and class discussion, the course will investigate, among other specific topics: the varied attitudes toward the representability of God in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; the impact of the Roman cult of the emperor and of images of the dead on the earliest portraits of Christ; the cult of the icon, concerns over idolatry, and the destruction of images; ideas about spiritual versus physical vision and their influence on the making and viewing of pictures; the relationship of sacred images to relics, the Eucharist, and other aspects of Christian ritual; and the pictorial exploration of both the torture and sexuality of Christ. Students will also pursue an individual research project, in which they will examine in greater depth a specific depiction of divinity of their choosing, in light of what we have considered together in the seminar. [ more ]

    ARTH 422 SEM Art, Architecture, and Poetry: Islamic Devotional Culture in South Asia

    Last offered Spring 2019

    How have scholars interpreted and classified terms such as "Islamic art" and "Muslim culture," and how have these classifications affected the interpretation of the arts in South Asia? There are different points of view regarding what constitutes as "Islamic" art and culture. Is an imperial wine cup with "God is Great" inscribed on it an "Islamic" object? How is an erotic epic narrating the romance of a Hindu prince understood as embodying the principles of Muslim devotion? This interdisciplinary seminar, focusing on South Asian Muslim devotional culture as articulated through the material culture, the arts of the book, architecture, and poetry, will navigate these questions from two perspectives. The first is to understand how Muslim devotional cultural expression in South Asia circumscribes and interprets itself. The second viewpoint is that of scholarship and the various interpretive voices that have framed the field over the last century. [ more ]

    ARTH 523 SEM Heaven's Gate:The Romanesque Sculpted Portal and the Creation of Sacred Space Through Art

    Last offered Spring 2020

    During the course of the eleventh century, the designers of European churches fashioned a new architectural language that we now label "Romanesque." One of the most innovative and dramatic aspects of this new language was its assimilation of monumental sculpture, absent in Europe since the fifth century. The focus of attention in this regard was the portal, which marked the threshold between the profane realm of the outside world and the sacred space of the church. Often characterized as the "marquee of the Middle Ages," the Romanesque sculpted portal, with its startling juxtaposition of the spiritual and the physical, of ecstatic visions of the heavenly realm and writhing, biting monsters, constitutes one of the true high-points of creativity in medieval art. Through the lens of modern scholarship, this seminar will investigate the antecedents and origins of the Romanesque sculpted portal and examine in detail its most renowned manifestations. Emphasis will be placed on understanding these often complex sculptural schemes within their original functional and material contexts, especially in terms of how they helped to create the sacred space of the church behind. Students will then have the opportunity to develop their own research projects, informed by what we have learned in the seminar, but focused on an example of sacred threshold art of their own choosing. [ more ]

    ARTH 584(S) SEM Fragments and Healing: Disability Studies and Late Antique Art

    This seminar will investigate some of the ways that contemporary Disability Studies can help us see and think about the complexities of differently abled bodies in Late Antiquity (broadly, from ca. 200 until ca. 750), the formative period for Christian art (and consequently for much of Western art). Disability Studies is an extremely active and rich body of literature and art that has not often been brought into conversation with historical periods of art, and so this seminar seeks to open up discussion of the insights possible from that conversation, not only how Late Antique art can be re-interpreted, but also how that period of art can reveal under-explored areas in the field of Disability Studies. The seminar will undertake a mutual interrogation of accepted notions in both fields and, in this way, to explore some new understandings of Disability Studies' capacities for allowing us to think with our art, culture, and bodies. The means at our disposal for this seminar are art of Late Antiquity and of the contemporary world, and that idea of mutual interrogation also operates in our study and display of that art. The seminar will look at art of healing and recuperation, art produced by and directed at diversely-abled bodies, and at fragments and restoration, and think about art as documents, reflections, and determinants of those bodies, now and in the past. It will, for this reason, work around the collection of WCMA, with exhibition and collection research, and the historical archives of the Library holdings, so that the widest possible study of bodies and difference is opened for our thinking and dialogue. [ more ]

    ARTH 428(F) SEM Anticolonial Approaches to the Arts of Ancestral Indigenous Americans

    Approaches to the study of the arts of Ancestral Americans have traditionally emanated in both their conceptions and practices from settler colonialism, resulting in often hostile relations between investigators and descendant communities, the exclusion of Indigenous researchers, their sovereignties and knowledge regimes, and substantial distortions to historical understandings of the past. This course takes art histories of the Ancient Americas as its site for intervention as a means of introducing students to the oftentimes challenging labors of anticolonialism and the pursuit of the repair of past harms. Over the semester, students will learn how colonialism and its epistemologies have guided the formation of the field; how they can prioritize Indigenous and Native American ways of knowing and thinking in their understandings and research; how they can ethically conduct research without disturbing Ancestral American remains and the sovereignties of their descendants; and learn to make meaningful contributions to the projects of decolonization and repair. [ more ]

    ARTH 430 SEM Aesthetics and Human Variety: European Representations of Oceania

    Last offered Fall 2018

    Using European representations of the inhabitants of Oceania as the primary materials of our investigation, this seminar will explore the connections to be made among theories of beauty, practices of art making, and the construction of race as a scientific concept in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Europe, this was a period that gave rise to aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, to several theories of the origins of human difference, to debates over the abolition of slavery, and to no fewer than fifteen expeditions to the Pacific Ocean. This course will investigate the crucial role that pictures played in all of these developments. Though students will not be required to write their research papers on pictures of Oceania, they should consider the central questions of the course: What purposes do the various conceptions of race serve? What are the aesthetic assumptions made by theorists of race? How do models of making art influence European ideas about foreigners? How do the pictures of foreign peoples impact the construction of race? [ more ]

    ARTH 533 SEM Michelangelo: Biography, Mythology, and the History of Art

    Last offered Spring 2016

    One might argue that Michelangelo's enduring fame, and his preeminence in the European art historical canon, is as much a product of his artistic persona as his artistic achievement. Indeed, the classic image of the artist as a brooding, tortured genius of unstoppable creative force finds its roots in the Italian Renaissance, and specifically in the fascinating biography--and mythology--of Michelangelo. With a life and career more fully documented than those of any western artist to precede him, Michelangelo provides the foundations for a triangulation of person-persona-artistic production that has a modern . But what are the limits of our knowledge, or the boundaries of interpretation? How might we approach the study of an artistic self when that self is, also, a work of art? In this course, students will become well-acquainted with the life and work of Michelangelo, giving critical attention to the connection between the man and his work. We will investigate, in particular, the practice of interpreting his work according to his philosophical outlook, political convictions, religious beliefs, sexual desire, and more. While this course will bring us deep into the life and work of a single artist, one of its goals is to generate ideas about the very act of biographically-based art historical interpretation. How can thinking carefully about Michelangelo reshape our own thinking about art historical practice? [ more ]

    ARTH 434 SEM Renaissance Time

    Last offered Spring 2020

    Time defines the Renaissance, whether framed as the "rebirth" of the past or the foundation of the present. Either way, past historians molded this period with time as their medium, fixing the Renaissance at the dynamic center of history. Flowing from historiographic foundations, this course will follow diverse art historical streams of Renaissance time to the present. How do Renaissance images play along by pointing to times outside of their frames? What are the implications for the historical worlds-the contexts-we build around objects in order to understand them? How do we navigate the role our own perspectives, interests, and desires play in the form we give to the past? How has time shaped the historic hegemonies of geographic place, and how might we re-deploy temporal strategies to dislodge them? This is a Renaissance course that explores topics fundamental to the broader history of art, and one that ranges widely in focus from the theoretical to the concrete. We will base our discussions both on class readings and on object-based assignments in local museums designed to explore the living relationships we forge with the art of cultures long since gone. Accordingly, students will spend (lots of) time with Renaissance works at the Clark Art Institute, and work with/at WCMA to shape new narratives that bridge past and present while honoring them both. [ more ]

    ARTH 535 SEM The Medieval Object

    Last offered Fall 2018

    After years of focusing on theory, scholars of medieval art have returned to an examination of physical objects. Distinctly strange and even monstrous, such small material things as reliquaries, liturgical vessels, game pieces, and textiles transgress the traditional categories of art, some made from precious materials and others of such base substances as bones and dirt. Even books were treated as tangible things, not only to be read as texts, but also to be looked at, paraded, and displayed with the Eucharist. Collected in church treasuries during the Middle Ages, exchanged, and reconfigured, medieval objects served simultaneously as earthly assets and spiritual investments. The seminar will focus on the making, function, and collecting of medieval objects. Each student will participate in weekly discussions stimulated by the instructor's presentations and selected readings. Students will also conduct research on an object available for study, will present an analysis of it for discussion by the class, and submit a 15- to 20-page term paper taking into account any comments and criticisms. [ more ]

    ARTH 438 SEM Ambrotypes to Instagram: Photography and the Human Portrait

    Last offered Spring 2018

    "A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound?" exclaimed the nineteenth-century poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. With the invention of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century and with the digital revolution of the twentieth, portraiture arguably became more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound. In this seminar, we will explore this complicated and fascinating history. Photographic portraits are fine art and vernacular culture. They serve private and public functions. They help to fashion the self and construct group identity. They disguise and disclose the truth. In the classroom, galleries, and archives, we will investigate the problems of likeness and semblance, veracity and credibility. We will delve into the conflict between representations of individuals and representations of types, and we will attend to the complicated, sometimes fraught, relationship between photographer and subject, even when they are one and the same. [ more ]

    ARTH 442(F) SEM Richardson, Sullivan, Wright: The Roots of American Modernism

    Should a building express the facts of its program and materials--directly and without sentimentality? Or should a building be a physical manifestation of the personality and ego of its creator? These demands--one of radical objectivity, and one of radical subjectivity--seem to be mutually exclusive, yet together they form the basis for modern architecture at the start of the 20th century. The architectural lineage of Louis Sullivan, H. H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright is distinguished by the high degree of tension between the competing demands of factuality and selfhood. This seminar explores the theoretical roots of their architecture, its philosophical sources in transcendentalism, Unitarianism, German romanticism; and treating such aspects as decorative arts, architectural education and theory, and architectural autobiography. [ more ]

    ARTH 560 SEM Repairing a Broken World: Intro to North African Contemporary Art

    Last offered Spring 2023

    How do artists respond to a world in crisis? How does visual art engage violent histories, injured bodies, social injustice and ecological disaster? In this course we will explore the political and ethical concept of repair as it emerges in the work of contemporary North African visual artists. Repair is both a material and symbolic transformational practice of putting together something that is torn or broken. It is never complete, nor does it redeem a history of harm or violence. Rather repair is an invitation: a bringing of people, histories, objects, buildings, feelings and geographies into relation with one another in order to link worlds that have been splintered and separated. It is also a call to imagine other futures. North African contemporary artists have deeply engaged in this type of repair work, attending to colonial history, economies of extraction and environmental damage, race and slavery, housing inequity, gender identity and broken transmission of memory. We will dive into the work of individual artists as well as collectives while reading theoretical texts about broken-world thinking, reparative epistemology, alternative archives, and material reparations. [ more ]

    ARTH 466 SEM Hellenistic Art and the Beginning of Art History

    Last offered Spring 2019

    The Hellenistic Period (323-31 BCE) saw the small city-states of the Greek peninsula replaced by far flung kingdoms as important centers of power and culture. In the wake of Alexander the Great's extension of the borders of the classical world all the way to the banks of the Indus River, increased trade, and the movement of individuals between Greece, Egypt, and the Near and Middle East encouraged innovations in philosophy, medicine, religion, literature and art. In fact, a revolution in artistic ideas and forms centered on the social and ethnic diversity of human experience. Royal patrons, and wealthy private citizens including an increasing number of women, commissioned artworks for cities, sanctuaries, tombs, palaces, and estates on a scale rarely seen before. And with the rise of Rome, plundered artworks of earlier periods soon became the desired objects of wealthy collectors, contributing to a mashup of stylistic influence. In this course we'll look closely at influential works of art in bronze, marble, fresco, and mosaic, where artists push the limits of their media in order to express emotional states ranging from pathos to ecstasy, from the mental exhaustion of a defeated athlete, to the cool restraint of a powerful ruler. We'll attempt to understand the conceptual and cultural forces that encouraged artistic innovations of the fourth century BCE through first century CE. We'll also look for the influences of Hellenistic art on artists and writers from the Renaissance to the present day. Reading material includes ancient literature in translation, recent surveys of Hellenistic art, and recent critical essays. [ more ]

    ARTH 468 SEM Practicum in Curating: Visual Art for a Garden

    Last offered Spring 2019

    This course aims to develop the wide range of skills needed to realize an art exhibition in a botanical garden (specifically Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota where the instructor is Curator at Large. The course responds to her charge to exhibit artists with 100% name recognition for the first five years of Selby's new "Living Museum" initiative which puts works of art in dialogue with botanicals. In the wake of shows devoted to Marc Chagall (2017), Andy Warhol (2018) and Paul Gauguin (forthcoming, 2019), each student will research and choose a non-male and/or non-white artist of some renown and construct an exhibition of works that might be possible to borrow. Course work includes 1) research on the artist and the concept, the focal works of art, auxiliary objects that do not require climate control (e.g. photographs and other works on paper), social history and other methodological frameworks 2) writing requests e.g., loans, rights; and 3) preparations for several of the following: press release, wall texts, wall labels, audio guide, and programming for the exhibition. The final project includes a 10-page synthetic research paper, written for a general audience, about the artist and their use of flowers as well as the projected installation of the climate-controlled gallery. Students may have the opportunity to participate in a WSP in situ in which they will experience all sectors of the museum, glass house, and gardens. [ more ]

    ARTH 470 SEM Image-making, Orientalism and Visual Culture

    Last offered Spring 2017

    Images enjoy extraordinary power in the spaces between self and other, human and divine. They play myriad roles--witness, surrogate, instigator, supplicant--and travel freely across political, religious and cultural boundaries. This course is about three regions--United States, France and the Persian sphere--and the images that mediate and document their interactions. Along the way, we will address important issues like iconoclasm and aniconism, common types like veiled women and pious men, and asymmetrical relationships like Orientalism. The peculiar nature of portraiture will be a prominent theme. [ more ]

    ARTH 472(F) SEM Timelines

    "Art" is really time-consuming--to make, to view, to use, to understand. We enshrine it, excavate it, curate it, deploy it and sometimes we deliberately destroy it. We are always telling stories about the stuff. We seem to think that we control these many fabled things, though they meddle endlessly in the spaces between self and other, human and divine. Great art can be inspiring, enabling people to transcend time, or it can be traumatizing, making time stop altogether. Or both! To explore such powers, we will begin in the 19th century, when commonplace notions of past and present wobbled seriously with the invention of photography and the avid pursuit of archaeology. Thereafter, we will concentrate on the period between 1870 and 1930, but also operate across time and space. There will be no single story-line, but rather a series of case studies, ranging from iconic paintings and sacred spaces to photojournalism. Along the way, creativity and iconoclasm will be recurring themes. Choose this class if you are curious about the agency and power that art wields in our lives. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

    Catalog details

    ARTH 474 SEM Brazilian Art in the 20th Century: Aesthetics, Internationalism, Utopia

    Last offered Spring 2018

    In 1924 the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade radically called for Brazilians to engage in cultural "anthropophagy"--to cannibalize from European modernist ideas and synthesize these with local aesthetic and cultural values. Toward the mid-20th century, the narrative of Brazilian art was marked by the desire on part of artists and intellectuals to problematize its place in Latin America, and vis-à-vis the European avant-gardes. They did so with a strong utopian perspective, developing aesthetic strategies to confront and transcend Brazil's underdevelopment. Yet ideas around nationalism, internationalism, and utopia shifted dramatically when a military dictatorship came to power between 1964 and 1985. How did artists and intellectuals rethink the role of aesthetics in such critical sociopolitical conditions? How did these terms shift again after Brazil returned to democracy, and soon aggressively entered an increasingly globalized economic system? Our seminar will delve into these complex relationships for a comprehensive understanding of the development of modern and contemporary Brazilian art. This is a Writing Intensive course, and there are no prerequisites to enroll. [ more ]

    ARTH 494(S) HON Thesis Seminar

    To graduate with honors in art history, students are to enroll in the Senior Honors Seminar during the Spring semester of their senior year, where they will develop an original research paper based on prior research. Under the guidance of the instructor, students will present and defend their own work in both written and oral form, as well as respond to, and critique, the work of their peers. As students work toward transforming their existing paper into an honors' thesis, they will also be trained in skills necessary to analyze an argument effectively, and strategies of constructive critique. [ more ]

    ARTH 502 SEM History, Theory, and Techniques of Printmaking

    Last offered Spring 2016

    This course will consider the history of prints in Europe and America from the fifteenth century through the 1920s. Focusing primarily on the holdings of the Clark, classes will be held in the new Manton Study Center for Works on Paper where students will view original works of art. Equal emphasis will be placed on primary literature, theoretical texts, and a careful understanding of printmaking processes. Media to be investigated include, among others, 15th-century woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer, drypoints by Rembrandt van Rijn, engravings by Philibert-Louis Debucourt, aquatints by Francesco Goya, lithographs by Édouard Manet, etchings by James McNeill Whistler, photo-mechanical processes like photogravure by artist Alfred Stieglitz, and color woodcuts by the German Expressionists. The rise and fall of various processes and practitioners will be explored from a socio-historical perspective, considering market, taste, and changing exhibition strategies. Additionally, consideration will be given to the status of the printmaker over the centuries as their roles shifted from professional to amateur and back again. [ more ]

    ARTH 504(F) SEM Proseminar in Research and Method

    In this graduate Proseminar on Research and Method, we will read a number of texts that form the foundation of art history as a discipline, including the writings of Plato, Panofsky, Lessing, Heidegger, Wölfflin, and Barthes (among others). We will study these works against the grain, considering how art history is currently transforming under the fields of ecology, disability studies, queer theory, and radical black feminism. Students will work closely with the collections of the Clark to theorize how absences are integral to institutional histories, and we will think about how we can, as historians, responsibly address voices that have been removed from the canons of art history. This course considers not only central writings of art historical methodology but also the limits for decolonizing art history and the museum, as we will examine how the formation of the discipline depended upon absenting critical perspectives and voices. [ more ]

    ARTH 506(S) SEM Expository Writing Workshop

    This writing seminar for graduate students in Art History will afford intensive full group discussions of writing skills and substantial one-on-one writing consultations. Group discussions will center on three kinds of texts: Writing about writing, published writing in the discipline of Art History, and student writing in progress. In six such discussions we will improve our vocabulary and method for discussing writing; we will learn to build better and more sophisticated sentences, paragraphs, and arguments; and we will practice anticipatory reading and writing in order to strengthen our control of both voice and structure. Each discussion will be supported with both exempla and exercises, and our watchword in all cases will be "revision." In one-on-one consultations (3-4 per person), I will offer tailored critique of each student's work, setting aside time as needed to troubleshoot sentences, paragraphs, or arguments together. [ more ]

    ARTH 507(F, S) SEM Object Workshop

    Meeting for six sessions over the semester, this workshop is designed to introduce first-year graduate students to technical, material, and connoisseurial perspectives relevant to the study and analysis of art objects. We will draw on local collections and expertise for our case studies. [ more ]

    ARTH 508(S) SEM Art and Conservation: An Inquiry into History, Methods, and Materials

    In this course students will learn to recognize the materials present in cultural heritage collections, understand the history of artist's methods and techniques, and hone their observation and examination skills when working with material culture. Students will form a basis in art conservation and condition assessment vocabulary and will exercise handling and examination skills for a variety of materials and artworks present during each session. Those who are planning careers involving work with cultural materials will explore cultural heritage through the lens of the art conservator and form a broader awareness of the ethics and procedures of conservation and preservation. An understanding of the vulnerabilities and condition issues of cultural materials and how to care for them will be developed as an impactful, practical resource for future careers in cultural heritage. A multi-disciplinary group of teachers from the staff at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center (WACC) will conduct lectures, practicums, discussions on conservation research literature and visits to nearby art institutions. Sessions are held at The WACC in the Lunder Center at Stone Hill on the Clark Art Institute campus. Students receive a syllabus with session outlines and required reading lists. Required readings are available via GLOW and on reserve at the Clark Library. Three exams will be given throughout the course and attendance is required at all sessions in lieu of a final exam (each weighted at 25% of the final grade). [ more ]

    Taught by: Julie Reilly

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    ARTH 509(S) SEM Graduate Symposium

    This course is designed to assist qualified fourth-semester graduate students in preparing a scholarly paper to be presented at the annual Graduate Symposium. Working closely with a student and faculty ad hoc advisory committee, each student will prepare a twenty-minute presentation based on the Qualifying Paper. Special emphasis is placed on the development of effective oral presentation skills. [ more ]

    Taught by: Dina Murokh

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    ARTH 510 SEM Approaches to Drawing from Connoisseurship to Conceptualism

    Last offered Fall 2017

    This course will consider the art of drawing as a pedagogical tool and cultural practice from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Creative and commercial forces over four centuries have fostered different types of and reasons for production: presentation drawings in sixteenth century Italy, an increased market for drawings in seventeenth century Holland, a fashion for powdery pastels in eighteenth century France, and the critical promotion of drawing as a form of autographic thinking in the nineteenth century. Drawing has enjoyed a resurgence in the last fifty years as Minimalism and Conceptualism have the pushed the medium's boundaries. Equal consideration will be given to the history of collecting and to materials from the invention of the Conté crayon to the deteriorating effects of acidic paper. The seminar will coincide with a major loan exhibition at the Clark of over one hundred drawings from the Renaissance through contemporary: Drawing in Depth: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection. The class will be held in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper and the Clark galleries with visits to the Williams College Museum of Art. [ more ]

    ARTH 511(F) SEM Interspecies beings: demigods and monsters in art and culture, ancient to modern

    Horse-men, cat-women, bull-men, mermaids, snake-people: interspecies creatures are everywhere in ancient Greek and Roman art and poetry. Embodied in satyrs, sphinxes, centaurs, nymphs, and other part-human, part-animal beings is an alternative evolutionary and cultural history. In it, humans and animals live as one. There is no distinction between nature and culture. Male and female are equal. The industrial revolution never happens. This course traces the history of interspecies beings from their origin in ancient Greek art and poetry until today. Three points are important: 1) the relationship between the imagery and ancient political theory about "primitive" life; 2) evolving conceptions of biology and the environment, and 3) the role played by interspecies beings in the conceptualization of what is possible in art. The first half of the course examines the origins and character of interspecies beings in works of ancient art such as the Parthenon, and in ancient writers including Hesiod and Ovid. We examine relevant religious practices, materialist conceptions of nature, and biological theories of speciation, in Empedokles, On nature, Euripides' Bakchai, Plato's Phaidros, and Lucretius' De rerum natura. The second half of the course investigates the survival of classical monsters in the work of early-modern artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian, and Dürer, and the rediscovery of ancient materialist theory. We consider the role played by interspecies beings in the formation of late modernism in art and literature. Key texts include Rousseau and Hobbes, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Mallarmé's "L'Apres midi d'une faun," and Stoppard's Arcadia. Problems include the relationship between nymphs and sex-workers in Manet, the meaning of the Minotaur in Picasso, and the interest in interspecies beings in the work of women surrealists such as Leonora Carrington. We conclude with contemporary popular culture such as the Hunger Games. [ more ]

    ARTH 512 SEM Why Look at Animals? Some Contemporary Positions

    Last offered Fall 2019

    This seminar, named for a 1977 essay by the art critic John Berger, considers a recent tendency in contemporary art to see nonhuman animals less as objects for human delectation-to be owned, eaten, or symbolized with-than as subjects, endowed with specific forms of intelligence, agency, and/or cross-species kinship. We will take as case studies the work of artists such as Francis Alÿs, Xu Bing, Sue Coe, Coco Fusco, Pierre Huyghe, Jochen Lempert, Chris Marker, and Lin May Saeed, among others. Readings will come in part from the rapidly growing, multidisciplinary field of animal studies. In the process, we will consider concepts such as animacy; animal ethics; animalization; the anthropocene; biopolitics; and posthumanism. This seminar anticipates two exhibitions concerning animals at the Clark in Summer 2020. [ more ]

    ARTH 513(S) SEM Contours of Abstraction in Modern and Contemporary Art

    Abstraction, be it gestural or geometrical, was a protagonist of global modernisms and continues to be a powerful visual language in contemporary art. The term "abstraction" may first appear straightforward, but its associations are quite complex: in varying historical contexts, abstraction has signaled formalist rupture, revolutionary politics, appropriation, as well as racial, feminist, and queer critique. We will delve deeply into abstraction in global modern and contemporary art through myriad primary documents and theoretical frameworks so as to revise and expand its canonical contours and cartographies. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 519 SEM Architectural Theory and Modernity, 1750-1968

    Last offered Spring 2020

    Why do buildings need words, or do they? For most of the world and most of history, buildings are made without the benefit of formal architectural thought. But at various times, ideas about the aesthetics of buildings, their cultural and philosophical meaning, and their underlying principles, have been matters of great public interest. And architectural theory--in the form of treatises, manifestos, and critical reviews--has exercised an enormous effect on building. This theory can be prescriptive, presenting categorical rules for making good buildings; it can be descriptive, looking at how buildings perform in the real world; and it can be radical, seeking to change the essence and definition of architecture. Theory seemed very important to architects twenty years ago, but no longer. Why is that? We will investigate. Students will give short presentations on key theorists, such as Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Laugier, Boullée, A. W. N. Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Le Corbusier, and Robert Venturi. The semester will conclude with a 15- to 20-page seminar paper, based on comments and discussion following a classroom presentation. [ more ]

    ARTH 521(F) SEM Islam and the Image

    This seminar responds to a recent incident at a US liberal arts university where a professor was sacked for showing images of Prophet Muhammad as part of her section on Islamic art. Why is image-making so hotly contested in Islam? What is the history of figural depictions in this tradition? The seminar explores artworks made for Muslim patrons from the medieval period to the modern era, considering how paintings produced for Muslim audiences can be situated within the frameworks of "Islamic art," a loaded historiographical term that has been questioned in recent times. The seminar also addresses some of the major problems that continue to haunt art scholarship in the field. For most of its history, the academic study of Islamic art has seldom considered contemporaneous literary voices that shed light on the motivations behind artworks. Furthermore, the historiography, deeply entrenched in its colonial and orientalist roots, has largely isolated images from their supporting texts--a curious oversight in light of the fact that painting in Muslim lands has historically been primarily an art of the book. These biases have affected the way museums have collected, displayed and interpreted paintings. For example, Western museums continue to place figural depictions made for books and albums in "South Asian" collections while textual manuscripts and calligraphic specimens made for the same Muslim audiences--even at times bound in the same albums--are categorized as "Islamic art." What does this isolation of text from image imply about prevailing views of Islamic art? To better understand the cultural, historical and religious context surrounding artworks students will read primary literature ranging from autobiography to devotional poetry, often written by the very patrons and subjects of the paintings to be discussed. [ more ]

    ARTH 522(F) SEM Festivities in the Early Modern World

    In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt put festivals at the center of his influential study of Renaissance Italy. In the century and a half since, scholars have enriched and deepened our understanding of festivities across early modern Europe and the world during the era of early global interaction (ca. 1400­­-1800). In this seminar we will seek to establish why festivities were so intrinsic to early modern culture, and what work they did. To what extent was performing a form of knowledge? How did festivity mediate early global interaction? We will consider, moreover, the many ways in which ephemeral events were commemorated in paintings and prints, and to what extent historians can recapture the early modern festivity today. Beyond Europe, we will investigate how the festival cultures of the Americas, of Africa, and of Asia interacted with European festival traditions, whether in Goa, Pernambuco, or Mexico City. Ultimately, we will ask: what might an early modern cultural history focused on festivities reveal? We will approach this history through a combination of primary materials drawn from the holdings of Williams College's Chapin Library and secondary readings, which will range from classics in the field to the most recent scholarship. Students will take turns delivering presentations on preselected objects of the week. By semester's end each student will complete a 15-to-20-page research paper on a festival of their choosing. [ more ]

    ARTH 524 SEM The Watchful Object

    Last offered Fall 2018

    What is implied by an object that "watches"? Is it sentient? Animate? Through what apparatus does it gain the power to perceive and in turn generate some type of action? Watchful objects--sometimes known problematically as 'fetishes,' 'idols,' and 'totems'--have existed in numerous material cultures in Africa over time and have often been saddled with titles and labels that largely reflect colonial-era notions of primitivism linked with non-Western objects, spaces, and peoples. Even today, many of these objects are still inappropriately connected to systems of the occult rather than being recognized as crucial cogs in the socio-political, cultural, and spiritual mechanics of lived experience on the continent both past and in some cases present. The purpose of this seminar, thus, is to unpack the multiple identities that these objects have experienced as a way of understanding 1.) the circumstances and situations that catalyzed their production; and 2.) how their various material and metaphorical components function as power-producing elements that enable these forms to become 'watchful' presences in society that operate in accordance with their 'observations' of the human condition. This course will also address how the psychological agency of many of these material traditions has prompted their inclusion and absorption within contemporary artistic practices as well, often in the form of productions and performances that provoke unsettling and often transformative experiences in viewers. [ more ]

    ARTH 526 SEM Shadows of Plato's Cave: Image, Screen, and Spectacle

    Last offered Fall 2015

    In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates famously asks his interlocutors to picture people living in a cave, bound in chains and able to see only shadows on the wall. Thus begins the presentation of perhaps the most influential metaphor in the history of philosophy. One might even claim that when Plato deployed the metaphor in an extended allegory, he constituted the fields of both philosophy and political theory. In repeatedly examining the allegory over the centuries, later thinkers have elaborated their approaches not only to Plato but also to the nature of politics and the tasks of thinking. This class begins with the Republic's cave and other key Platonic discussions of appearances, visual representation, and (literal and metaphoric) seeing, asking how Plato's approaches to image, politics, and theory/philosophy shape each other. Building on those inquiries, we next take up important twentieth and twenty-first century returns to the cave, engaging such figures as Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt, Derrida, Irigaray, Rancière, and Badiou. Finally, we examine recent theories of screen and spectacle--read both for their resonances with and departures from debates over the Platonic legacy--and case studies in the politics of both military and racial spectacles in the U.S. The question of what is an image and what images do will run from the beginning of course to the end. Beyond the authors mentioned, readings may include such authors as Allen, Bruno, Clark, Debord, Friedberg, Goldsby, Joselit, Mitchell, Nightingale, Rodowick, Rogin, Silverman, and Virilio. Insofar as it fits student interest, we will also explore the cave's considerable presence in visual culture, ranging from Renaissance painting through such recent and contemporary artists as Kelley, Demand, Hirschhorn, Kapoor, Sugimoto, and Walker, to films such as The Matrix. [ more ]

    ARTH 530 SEM Demigods: Nature, Social Theory, and Visual Imagination in Art and Literature, Ancient to Modern

    Last offered Spring 2019

    Embodied in satyrs, centaurs, nymphs, and other demigods is a vision of an alternative evolutionary and cultural history. In it, humans and animals live together. The distinction between nature and culture is not meaningful. Male and female are equal. The industrial revolution never happens. This course traces the history of demigods from its origins in ancient Greek art and poetry until today. We pay special attention to three points: the relationship between mythology of demigods and ancient political theory about primitive life; evolving conceptions of the environment, and the capacity of the visual arts to create mythology that has a limited literary counterpart. The first half of the course examines the origins and character of the demigods, in works of ancient art, e.g. the François vase and the Parthenon, as well as ancient texts, including Hesiod's Theogony and Ovid's Metamorphoses. We examine relevant cultural practices, intellectual history, and conceptions of nature, in texts such as Euripides and Lucretius. The second half of the course investigates the post-classical survival of demigods. We consider the "rediscovery" of demigods in the work of Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Titian. We consider in detail the important role played by demigods in the formation of Modernism in art and literature. Key texts include Schiller, "Naive and sentimental poetry," Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Mallermé, "L'Apres midi d'une faun,"Aby Warburg, and Stoppard's Arcadia. Problems include the relationship between nymphs and prostitutes in Manet, and the meaning of fauns and the Minotaur in Picasso. We conclude with demigods in popular culture such as the Narnia chronicles or Hunger Games. [ more ]

    ARTH 531(S) SEM 19th-Century American Performance and Popular Culture

    This course will study a wide variety of performances and emerging popular culture in 19th-century America, many of which, although not unique to the United State, reflect the U.S. back to itself in complex ways. Topics will include blackface minstrelsy, circuses and humbugs, male impersonators and burlesque, ethnic caricature, allegorical paintings on tour, vast panorama painting, anti-slavery imagery, late 19th-century theatre and spectacle, wild west shows as well as other mythologizing of indigenous Americans and the American landscape, the birth of the American art museum, and representations of significant moments of popular resistance, from the Lakota to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The central questions animating this course will be around the nature of performance and the popular. What can these two concepts tell us about the nature of art? [ more ]

    ARTH 532 SEM Creative Life: The Visual Economy of Work

    Last offered Fall 2021

    This course is a seminar on life and work focusing on methodologies of production--art, creative writing, history, theory, and criticism. With an initial focus on the pivotal period from the invention of photography until the onset of World War II, the course will examine the economy of work within modern visual culture. What were the considerations at stake in capturing the "facts" of industrial production? We will examine historical definitions of work, and practices and activities from life that have typically qualified or have the potential to qualify as work (in addition to critiques of these equivalencies). The latter half of the course will be driven by considerations of these themes in relation to student and workers movements of 1968, and contemporary forms of globalization and pluralist subjectivities. One related concern will be the consideration of intersubjective relations--professional and personal partnerships, friendships, and networks--which not only influence the trajectory of one's life, but also the research one chooses to undertake. With the awareness that a range of drives and investments inhabit one's production, participants will be asked to reflect upon their own working practices as a means of critically engaging the affective relations governing artistic and intellectual labor. There will be an emphasis on cross-disciplinary ideas and influences--ranging from art history, film and media studies, the history of science, literature, and political history as a means of integrating theoretical approaches with a range of materials, including photography, cinema, illustrated magazines, advertisements, archives, world exhibitions, and product showrooms. [ more ]

    Taught by: Alena Williams

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    ARTH 536 SEM Charles and Maurice Prendergrast in WCMA Collections

    Last offered Spring 2020

    This seminar will investigate the careers of Maurice and Charles Prendergast, who occupy curious positions in American art. Students will work closely with the art and archival collections of the Prendergasts at WCMA, which is the largest repository of their work in the world. Maurice's Post-Impressionism placed him at the forefront of American modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century, culminating with his inclusion in the infamous Armory Show of 1913. Charles, a leading frame maker before adapting techniques of his craft to create incised panels, intersects with the Arts & Crafts Movement, Symbolism, and vernacular material culture. While the brothers are firmly canonical, they are often regarded as isolated from major formal and iconographic concerns of their peers. Scholarship, much of it produced at WCMA, has often focused on their subject matter. Participants in this class will consider new material and theoretical approaches to the brothers' work that may (or may not) prove productive in resituating their place in American art. [ more ]

    ARTH 537 SEM HIV + AIDS in Film and Video

    Last offered Fall 2020

    Spanning activist works, experimental film, Hollywood dramas and documentary, this course examines the role of moving images in the global AIDS crisis, its aftermath, and its ongoing aftershocks. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was, in the words of Larry Kramer, a 'plague' of epic proportions, with an entire generation obliterated before it could reach maturity. And yet, the plague years also spawned a remarkable amount of creative and activist image-making aimed at fighting, mourning, and grappling with AIDS. Now, we find ourselves in another pivotal moment: while the past decade has provoked a new wave of AIDS historiography, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused AIDS to reverberate with even greater force. Together, we will ask difficult and probing questions about this phenomenon called the 'AIDS epidemic,' examining the role of art in frontline activism, the ethics of AIDS historiography, mainstream visions of the AIDS body, and the need for a diversity of AIDS narratives. This seminar-style course will combine weekly screenings with readings, short writing assignments, student-led discussion, and a final research project of the student's design. In order to facilitate robust discussions and maximize student and faculty safety, the majority of this course will occur online. It will contain some in-person experiences when possible. [ more ]

    ARTH 538 SEM Realms of Earth and Sky: Indian Painting, ca. 600-1857

    Last offered Fall 2020

    On the basis of technique, Indian painting forms a continuum from the beginning of the first millennium down to the mid-nineteenth century: an outline in ink filled with flat, opaque colors which are burnished between each layer to give them opacity. In its media, its subject matter, regional variation, range of patronage, and artistic virtuosity, it displays startling diversity. From the northern Himalayan hills to Mysore in the south, artists, often working in family workshops for royalty, priests and wealthy merchants, have adorned caves and temples, illustrated books, and created lavish albums with themes ranging from the sacred to the secular. The study of Indian painting itself is a vast, evolving body of literature that continues to oscillate between discussions of artistic style and a concentration on content and context. The aim of this seminar is twofold: to outline the development of Indian painting historically; and to understand the political, social and religious circumstances that produced some of the greatest masterworks in Indian art. How was Indian painting used? Who were the patrons? How does the art form reflect the particular cultural values of its time? As an analytic framework, the seminar will consider Indian miniature painting both in light of primary literary sources as well as through current scholarship. [ more ]

    ARTH 540 SEM In Vinculus Invictus: Portraits in Prison

    Last offered Fall 2019

    Among all the portraits produced during the modern period, some have been painted or, more recently, photographed in prison. Portraits in prison exist at a crossroad of politics, law, and identity; they offer a great opportunity to think about art and society. Artists themselves have made self-portraits during their own imprisonments, or sometimes a portrait of one of their fellow prisoners. More often it was the prisoners or their relatives who commissioned an artistic record of their detention. The idea of commemorating such a moment, or to evoke it as a claim to fame, seems surprising at best, outrageous and provocative at worst. But there has been, since the 16th century, an enduring tradition of portraiture in prison with its masterpieces and its pantheon, a tradition that fits into the wider pictorial attention to the prison itself. With the French Revolution, the nature of prison changed. It became a tragic symbol of political "debates." Within a few years, a terrifying series of portraits appeared that would nurture Western political thought and visual culture until now. Since the 18th century, these portraits have become more concerned with ideas that stretch beyond the individual and into the realm of social justice, mass incarceration, and the prison-industrialization complex. [ more ]

    ARTH 541 SEM Aesthetics After Evolutionary Biology: Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud

    Last offered Fall 2017

    This interdisciplinary seminar examines the rise of evolutionary biology, a new explanatory paradigm that solidified in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its ramifications in art and aesthetic theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will consider how natural histories of creation, and corresponding reclassifications of the human as a species category, went hand in hand with a reconceptualization of the aesthetic faculties, and the processes of art's production and reception. A core component of this seminar will be the close study of key texts by Charles Darwin, and two thinkers who were among the most radical in extending his key insights into the domain of aesthetic theory--the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. These primary texts will provide points of departure for studying the work of a number of innovative practitioners working across a range of media, among them the composer Richard Wagner, the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, the architect Adolf Loos, the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and the art historian Aby Warburg. Methodologically a major aim of this seminar is to think together critically about the nature of art's relations to other domains of cultural production such as science or philosophy, and to interrogate what it means, both practically and epistemologically, to pursue "interdisciplinarity" as a strategy for art history. [ more ]

    ARTH 542 SEM Insubordinate Bodies: The Body in Conceptual Art in Latin America, 1960-1980

    Last offered Fall 2017

    The use of the body-be it the artist's or those of willing and unwilling participants-is among art's most significant developments internationally since the 1960s. In Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s, activating the body not only was a strong conceptual strategy to escape object-based practices; it was also a potent way for artists to disobey and confront forms of violence and control exerted by repressive regimes. But the body too was a forceful medium by which artists could subvert heteronormative frameworks, through the visualization and performance of feminist critiques and queer identities. This seminar will explore the role of the body in Latin American conceptual art through localized case studies, elucidating the body's particular strength as a vehicle for political and institutional critique, as well as its potential to unlock alternate narratives of conceptual practices in the region. [ more ]

    ARTH 543 SEM Color, High and Low

    Last offered Fall 2019

    Why should color in prints be controversial? For most of the nineteenth century-even as technical advances encouraged a flowering of color in woodcut, intaglio, and especially lithographic production-entrenched voices in the art establishment continued to insist on printmaking as an art of black and white. Drawing upon a wide variety of examples from the Clark's collection, this course will explore the range of associations that attached to color prints, along a broad spectrum from highbrow preciousness and subtlety to lowbrow commercialism and bad taste. Color lithography was a particular lightning rod for controversy: although chromatic experiments in this medium enabled striking aesthetic innovations, the extreme complexity of the process also meant that the designer of a print became farther and farther removed from its actual production. This was just as true for the delicate and exquisite suites produced in limited editions by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis as it was for the large-scale, brightly-colored lithographic posters of Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, used to advertise popular urban entertainments. Alongside the close examination of original works of art, a set of critical and theoretical readings will help us navigate the paradoxes of printed color. Apart from the standard requirements, including a research paper and class presentation, students will have an option to participate in a summer 2020 exhibition based on the course findings. This course will take place in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper at the Clark. [ more ]

    ARTH 544 SEM Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900

    Last offered Spring 2018

    In this seminar, we will examine the historically undervalued contributions of women in the art of the later nineteenth century. During this period, leading artists from around the world, including many women, were drawn to the academies, museums, salons, and studios of Paris.While women were largely excluded from formal training, many nonetheless navigated the complex systems of artistic production. We will focus on this multinational group of talented women (including Marie Bashkirtseff, Rosa Bonheur, Anna Ancher, Mary Cassatt), and we will assess their work against contemporary sociopolitical thought and aesthetic theories. Readings will draw upon early critical reviews of public exhibitions, biographical materials, studies of pedagogical and institutional practices, and social histories of art. In and through these materials, we will explore the marginalizing narrative that was created for women artists in Paris, and, most importantly, we will reconstruct an alternative history through our discussions and class presentations. [ more ]

    ARTH 545 Architectural Theory in Crisis

    Last offered NA

    Why do buildings need words, or do they? For most of the world and most of history, buildings are made without the benefit of formal architectural thought. But at various times, ideas about the aesthetics of buildings, their cultural and philosophical meaning, and their underlying principles, have been matters of great public interest. And architectural theory--in the form of treatises, manifestos, and critical reviews--has exercised an enormous effect on building. This theory can be prescriptive, presenting categorical rules for making good buildings; it can be descriptive, looking at how buildings perform in the real world; and it can be radical, seeking to change the essence and definition of architecture. Theory seemed very important to architects twenty years ago, but that is not the case today. Why? We will investigate. Students will give short presentations on key theorists, such as Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Laugier, Boullée, A. W. N. Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Le Corbusier, and Robert Venturi. The semester will conclude with a 20-page seminar paper, based on comments and discussion following a classroom presentation. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 546 SEM Texere: The Material Philosophy of Print and Textile, ca. 1500-1900

    Last offered Fall 2019

    It is a commonplace in the literature on textiles that the words for both text and textile derive from the Latin texere: to weave. As this etymological root indicates, the action of making cloth provides the metaphoric structure by which we conceive of language from the threading of thought to the weaving of prose and poetry. In the recent theoretical writings of Tim Ingold, among others, the processes of weaving-textility-offer a model against which to conceive of the dominant hylomorphic conception of matter and form as a process of imprint. Instead, textiles illustrate a world that is created through forces in motion, never imprinting, but moving against and within one another. This seminar will use these questions as the starting point to examine the interaction between printed matter (embodying a hylomorphic process) and textile (a material challenge to hylomorphism). The Clark Art Library contains a preeminent collection of textile material, and this seminar will dive into the Mary Ann Beinecke collection to examine histories of gender and labor, figuration and ornament, mobility and place, and finally, form and matter. The case studies will range from sixteenth-century needlepoint model books to twentieth-century kimono design. [ more ]

    ARTH 547 SEM The Studio, The Bedroom, & the Tomb: Artists and Artistic Biographies in the 19th Century&Beyond

    Last offered Fall 2020

    How was the vocation of the artist thematized in the European cultural imagination in the Romantic age and its aftermath? Even more, how did artists themselves articulate, experience, and reproduce that sense of vocation?--What were its mythologies and poetics, at once as they were circulated in visual culture, but also as they were lived, experienced, and reproduced by artists themselves? We will explore such question across three historically, psychologically, and tropologically configured "sites": the artist's studio, the artist's desire, and the artist's death. Readings by Freud, Balzac, Kris and Kurtz, along with scholarship largely centered on the visual arts of the 18th and 19th centuries. With instructor permission, students may undertake research projects in any field of the history of art. [ more ]

    ARTH 548 SEM Landscape, Theory, Ideology

    Last offered Spring 2020

    To use the term "landscape" is to imply and assume a subject position. Unlike the categories of "nature," "wilderness," "vista," or "ecology," a landscape is something invented and experienced (or observed, or represented, or cultivated) solely by human agents. The term "landscape" is variously deployed in the service of a range of political and philosophical positions. This seminar explores "landscape" as a fruitful agitation in critical theory and aesthetic discourse over the past thirty years. The course will interact with the artists and photographic works on view in the exhibition, Landmarks, a 150-year survey of landscape photography in WCMA's collection. We will examine i) how landscape as medium and as genre moves from literature to painting to photography; ii) how to read and employ contemporary theory in the service of artwork from bygone eras; and iii) we will ask who exercises the agency and privilege to name, to invent, to denote a space or a view as worthy of sight. [ more ]

    ARTH 549 SEM Art, Biology, Beauty

    Last offered Fall 2019

    This interdisciplinary seminar is offered in conjunction with the upcoming RAP Colloquium scheduled for March 2020, "Beauty, Sexuality, Selection: Darwinian Revolutions in Aesthetics." (Seminar participants will be expected to attend.) Our theme will be Charles Darwin's controversial theory of "sexual selection" as both a historical idea of aesthetic response and beauty, and as a theoretical concept that is back in play in current evolutionary thinking. Readings will be drawn from ancient philosophy, current science, art history, the history of science, and other fields, to engage the following questions: how did the existence of difference in the organic world--gender difference broadly but also more specifically racial difference in the human species--motivate Darwin's theory of an "aesthetic evolution" driven by animal and human perception of visual beauty? How did philosophical aesthetics contribute to Darwin's biological theory of beauty, and how did Darwin's biological theory of beauty unsettle the discipline of philosophical aesthetics? In which ways did the arts and visual cultures of Europe and elsewhere shape Darwin's aesthetic assumptions? How did, and how does, the concept of sexual selection destabilize the concept of "art" as a human cultural activity? How might "sexual selection" complicate historical and current delineations drawn between nature and culture, between the innate and the arbitrary? [ more ]

    ARTH 550 SEM The History, Theory, and Problem of Connoisseurship

    Last offered Spring 2020

    The museum and market have long relied upon the "talent" of a chosen few "connoisseurs," whose abilities (i.e. "the expert eye")-shrouded in mythology and vaguery-have profoundly influenced the interpretation of objects. This seminar will interrogate the problematic construct of connoisseurship in the market (Duveen), in the museum (Pope-Hennessy), and in the academy (Berenson). Through readings about the history and theory of the practice from the sixteenth century to the modern day, we will reassess the meaning, and validity, of connoisseurship in visual culture. And, through conversations about authorship, working methods, and artistic intent, we will question what we learn from close looking. This seminar will include case studies using objects in the Clark's permanent collection, focusing on in-depth discussions of materials, techniques, attribution, quality, and the burgeoning field of conservation science. Students will be asked to conduct their own rigorous object-based research. [ more ]

    ARTH 551 SEM Winslow Homer

    Last offered Spring 2016

    In this seminar we will explore the life and art of Winslow Homer (1836-1910). Paintings, prints, watercolors, and photographs in the collection of the Clark and the Williams College Museum of Art will focus our discussions and provide the basis for understanding Homer's art-making and his place within the art-culture of his day. A consideration of his subjects will necessarily intersect with many of the nation's most pressing issues during his era: the Civil War and Reconstruction; the rise of middleclass leisure; the relation of man to the environment. [ more ]

    ARTH 553 SEM New Ecologies in Contemporary Art

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This seminar will consider a range of current artistic approaches to environmental questions, especially through the relational, systemic terms implied by ecology. As scholars have argued, where "nature" connotes that which is monolithic, ahistorical, and apart from humans, ecology reveals a situated and specific web of relationships, interdependencies, and power in which we are all implicated. Our seminar will pay particular attention to intersectional practices that acknowledge the ways extraction, exploitation, and dispossession have produced the environmental crises of the present, which also affect the most vulnerable and least responsible--both human and nonhuman--with greatest force. In addition to studying the work of emerging and established artists, we will read texts by the academics and activists with whom they are in dialogue, and welcome some of them as guests to our class. This seminar anticipates a group show on the subject at the Clark in summer 2023. [ more ]

    ARTH 554 SEM The Matrix and the Market: Printmaking and Photography in the Nineteenth Century

    Last offered Spring 2017

    During the last half of the 19th century, technical, commercial, and aesthetic approaches to printmaking and photography experienced dramatic paradigm shifts. Etching, for example, simultaneously functioned as a reproductive medium and one that carried experimental, vanguard associations. Practitioners of lithography strove to distance themselves from denigrating commercialism and raise the medium's status to a respected art form. Photography, in turn, negotiated the boundaries between "documentary" and "artistic." This seminar will address the complex issues that swirled around printmaking and photographic matrices, critical responses to the various processes, artist-driven initiatives, and the formative role of the art market and book trade in shaping popular opinion. We will consider these topics across political and geographic borders from Europe to the United States, reading both primary and secondary sources. The class will be held in the new Manton Study Center for Works on paper with visits to Chapin library and the Williams College Museum of Art likely. [ more ]

    ARTH 558(S) SEM Circa 1850: Artistic Currents and Cross-Currents

    Although the history of nineteenth-century European art has often been narrated as a succession of "sms," the notion of discrete artistic movements following one upon the other is of course highly misleading. Despite common perceptions of Realism as the prevailing force at mid-century, many contradictory impulses were simultaneously at work. The Romantic strain in visual art continued, though sometimes in sublimated form, and historicizing and avant-garde perspectives alike jockeyed for influence in art criticism, sales rooms, and exhibition venues. Abetting this collision of styles was a proliferation of new media in visual culture more broadly. Focusing on European and American examples from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, this course addresses the emergence of new tendencies in art and the persistence or revival of old ones. We will explore a variety of topics, including the invention of photography and its impact on other image-making techniques; the opening of Japan and the vogue for Japonisme; medieval nostalgia in the face of rampant Haussmannization; and the role of tradition in vanguard art. On the American side, we will consider printmaking and photography as tools of documentation and self-fashioning during the Civil War era. This course will take place in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper. Each session will engage directly with works from the Clark's collection, to be discussed and analyzed in conjunction with critical and theoretical readings. [ more ]

    ARTH 559 SEM Photographing City Life: Diane Arbus/James Van Der Zee

    Last offered Fall 2022

    Diane Arbus and James Vander Zee in Manhattan. In this seminar we will discuss two photographers of city life: Diane Arbus (1923--1971) and James Van Der Zee (1886--1983). So doing, we will also observe how life in New York changed during their years of great productivity. In the first part of the course, "Diane Arbus in Manhattan," we will talk about Arbus' relationship to New York--the city of her birth. For most of her career, Arbus worked in Manhattan; indeed, one could think of the city as another character in her work. Arbus' relationship to myth--to storytelling--was profound. A great reader throughout her life, she was drawn to those writers who saw cities as very individualized places. In addition to looking at Arbus' photographs of life in Manhattan in the nineteen fifties, sixties, and in 1970, we will read her published letters, and those authors who inspired her with their artistry, and fascination with myth, including Borges, and Kafka. In the second part of the course, "James Van Der Zee and the Black Village," we will discuss the great Black photographer whose archives were just purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where Arbus' archives are as well). Born in Lenox, Massachusetts, Van Der Zee settled in Harlem in 1916; there, he opened a photography studio where he became known for his portraits of Black life as it was lived uptown. Admired by Arbus and others, Van Der Zee's interest in and commitment to his community extended to all aspects of Harlem life, including death. To support our discussions of Van Der Zee's Black village, we will read modernist classics, including Jean Toomer's "Cane," and Toni Morrison's "Jazz" that deal specifically with village life.Please note that seminar meetings will be held biweekly on 9/8, 9/29, 10/13, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17. The seminar will include several mandatory viewing excursions outside Williamstown. The dates of these excursions are TBD, but will be restricted to Fridays or weekends. Professor Als will hold office hours following the seminar at hours TBD. Application may apply. [ more ]

    Taught by: Hilton Als

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    ARTH 561 SEM Land, Memory, Materiality: Histories and Futures of Indigenous North American Arts

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This course engages Indigenous North American traditions of creative expression, remembrance, and representation in historical, contemporary, and future-facing ways. Drawing upon diverse Native American and First Nations theories and practices, it ranges widely across the continent to consider Indigenous arts and material culture within specific cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts. Part of the course is grounded in the Native Northeast, including the Indigenous homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community in which the Graduate Art Program and Williams College are situated. Other units will focus on continuities and transformations in artistic and maker-traditions within and across specific Indigenous nations and communities. The course is especially interested in connections between past and present, and the innovative ways Indigenous artists, makers, and knowledge-keepers have reckoned with what has come before, while also mapping meaningful future pathways. Topics will include repatriation and community-led restorative efforts to bring home ancestors and important heritage items "collected" over the centuries following 1492; concepts and practices of cultural, intellectual, visual, and political sovereignty; decolonizing museums; the complex dynamics of collaboration; Indigenous, African-American, and Afro-Indigenous artistic connections and solidarities; and Indigenous challenges to Eurocentric and settler colonial approaches to preservation, interpretation, and classification. Seminar members will develop familiarity with methods and ethics grounded in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and with new scholarship by leading and emerging critics and creators. [ more ]

    ARTH 563(F, S) SEM Contemporary Curatorial Workshop

    Bi-weekly seminar for graduate art history students to engage in discourse around contemporary curatorial practice with professionals in the field. Guest curators discuss their work and methodology and students enrolled in the course who are working on curatorial projects have the opportunity to workshop their ideas with their peers and guests. Under the direction of the chairs, students will participate in class discussions, present projects, host local and visiting curators, travel to visit exhibitions regionally as the schedule allows, and explore key topics in modern and contemporary art and curatorial practice. [ more ]

    ARTH 565(F) SEM Sonic Ecologies: Queer Listening, Orientations, and Objects

    This seminar considers sound, the aural imagination, and practices of listening in visual art and time-based media. Focusing on work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, we will explore theoretical, media, aesthetic, and reception issues through an intersectional lens. While we will focus on queer theory and related artworks and art historical accounts, the course will also draw heavily on recent writings on and artistic practices that take up other related aspects of "ecology" broadly understood: interspecies relationality, the environment, the climate crisis, and scholarship grounded in the specificity of critical race theory, Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic studies. Readings will tend toward the theoretical--from Sara Ahmed and José Esteban Muñoz to Tina Campt and Ren Ellis Neyra, among many others--but will be accompanied by art historical accounts and each class meeting will be grounded by in-depth discussion of several specific works of art. When resonant, we will take advantage of access to relevant exhibitions, performances, or events at the Clark, Williams College Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, or Bennington College. The course will prioritize student-facilitated discussion, and student work will be focused on producing a substantial research paper (with an option to produce a hybrid research/creative project, developed in conversation with the instructor). Undergraduates welcome with permission of the course instructor. [ more ]

    Taught by: Caitlin Woolsey

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    ARTH 567 SEM What is Art Criticism? Current Debates, Past Precedents

    Last offered Fall 2016

    Taking as its point of departure recent debates concerning a purported "crisis" of art-criticism, this seminar considers traditions of writing about the work of living artists in modernity. We will begin with current literature and then pivot back to the eighteenth century, tracing a sequence of episodes in art criticism's evolution as a genre by looking at key works of art as mediated by their first critics. Emphasis will be placed on close readings of primary historical texts as prompts for thinking through the following broad questions, among others: What is critique, and what is art criticism? Is the art critic a judge, a historian, a partisan, a participant, or an artist in her own right? How do forms of distribution impact the content of art criticism, and how does art criticism impact the form and content of art? What is the relationship, if any, between taste, assessment of value, and interpretation of meaning? Artists considered include, among others, Boucher, Friedrich, Whistler, Seurat, Pollock, Piper. [ more ]

    ARTH 569(F) SEM Gérôme

    This course explores work and career of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), perhaps the most renowned, popular, and influential artist of the later nineteenth century. With commercial and artistic relationships that spread his influence across the globe, Gérôme has come to seem very much like a highly successful contemporary artist, specifically with regard to his place in an international art world that married elite institutional practices to new technologies of reproduction, marketing techniques, and other instruments of modern mass culture. Gérôme's fame was short lived, however. In the wake of the Modernist revolution on the one hand, and Post-Colonial critique on the other, no discussion of the artist can avoid wrestling with complaints that have left him thoroughly diminished--though less forgotten than scorned. Not only did his art, as it seemed, help perpetrate a gigantic aesthetic error, it blundered onto ethically compromising terrain. Today Gérôme stands as Exhibit A in wide-ranging critique of Orientalism's ideological work. The course will interrogate the Modernist and Post-Colonial complaints against Gérôme in detail, even as it also explores his art from a range of other perspectives, many developed very recently. Topics include Gérôme's relationship to photography, to Orientalism and animal studies, to the cinema, to polychrome sculpture, his approach to historical narrative, and well as his voyeurism and other other manipulations of viewer experience so critical to his art. The seminar will engage the Clark's important collection of Gérôme paintings, and also travel to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, conditions permitting. Students may prepare papers on any aspect of global late-nineteenth-century "academic" or "official" art that was informed by Gérôme's example. [ more ]

    ARTH 570 SEM Image-making, Orientalism and Visual Culture

    Last offered Spring 2021

    Images enjoy extraordinary power in the spaces between self and other, human and divine. They play myriad roles--witness, surrogate, instigator, supplicant--and travel freely across political, religious and cultural boundaries. They are also subject to reproduction, alteration and destruction as disparate visual cultures interact and globalizing processes ensue. This course will focus on various regions--;e.g. United States, France, Turkey, and the Perso-Islamic sphere--and the images that factor in the intervening spaces, from 1800 to the present. We will begin with the theme of self-fashioning and the peculiar nature of portraiture. Thereafter, the entanglement of religious beliefs and visual traditions will broaden our inquiry, leading us to contested dynamics like iconoclasm and aniconism, and reductionist types like veiled women and pious men. Along the way, proliferating and palimpsestic forms of Orientalism will oblige us to consider the very concept of global visual culture. Students will submit weekly GLOW posts to foster class discussion and undertake a major research project over the course of the semester. [ more ]

    ARTH 573 SEM Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East and North Africa

    Last offered Spring 2017

    This is an exciting time for art from the Middle East and North Africa. Contemporary artists are exhibiting in international shows and biennales, and the global art market has responded to collector interest and crowned its favorites. The visibility and celebration of these artists, however, does not take into account the larger historical arena of cultural production and artistic practice from which they emerge. In terms of the discipline of art history, the field of modern painting and contemporary visual practice in the region is in its first generation of formation and definition. Drawing on very recent scholarship in art history and visual anthropology, we will explore the "history" of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa (from the 1920s-the present). We will pay particular attention to how key terms and categories such as: modern, contemporary, Islamic, and Arab, have been constructed, deployed and debated by artists, institutions and scholars in the field. We will explore the role of museums, art schools, archives and biennales in the region, the creation of art publics and communities, and how the international market has responded to contemporary production. And perhaps most importantly, we will study work by artists that identify with the region and engage and complicate constructions of race, gender, religion, environment, autonomy and community. [ more ]

    ARTH 575 SEM Regression as Modern Fantasy: Archaism, Primitivism, Prehistory

    Last offered Fall 2018

    This course analyzes the implications of European modernity's engagement with cultural artifacts it wanted to classify beneath the prefix "pre." We take as our object an aesthetic strategy employed with increasing frequency by modern artists in Europe after 1800: the self-conscious mobilization of visual forms thought to telegraph priority to later advancements, whether historically or developmentally. Our inquiry, beginning with the German Nazarenes and extending into the early twentieth century around the moment of WW1, foregrounds such strategies as key to grasping new notions of temporality and geography that emerged in European modernity. We will inquire into the historical and intellectual contexts that sustained chronological and cultural primitivisms, including the history of colonialism, discoveries of Paleolithic cave art, and the emergence of the modern disciplines of archeology, anthropology, ethnography, child psychology, and psychoanalysis. Alongside close visual scrutiny of some of modernism's most canonical and problematic objects, including key works by Picasso and Gauguin, we will examine the literature that proliferated in this period devoted to the art of peoples deemed "primitive," including the Greeks in the pre-classical period, non-Western peoples, and children. [ more ]

    ARTH 576 SEM Paper, Process, Practice

    Last offered Fall 2021

    Works on paper, particularly multiples, confound many of the received ideas around artistic invention and originality. This course will address the varied functions of printmaking in Europe over four centuries (1500-1900), giving special attention to the following questions: What is the relationship between prints and other artistic media? How do the material constraints involved in printmaking lead to a particular set of practices, and how in turn do those marry with technological advances to produce new aesthetic possibilities? To what extent did Old Masters such as Dürer and Rembrandt define the terms for later printmakers, and how did their example enable and/or discourage innovation in printed subject matter and style? What was the role of prints in creating both new forums for public discourse and new collecting publics? Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, this course will cover a wide array of printmakers and types of printed media. [ more ]

    ARTH 578 SEM The Idea and Materiality of Medieval and Early Modern European Books

    Last offered Fall 2022

    How did medieval and Renaissance "books" work, when the codex was only one form of the book, which continually evolved, and when they weren't only used for reading? This course will explore the book as object and the book as concept. Drawing on the collection of manuscripts, incunables, and later printed books at WCMA, Chapin, and surrounding university museums, the course will consider how the forms and materiality of books could have affected readers' reception and perceptions, and in turn, how religious, cultural, political, and economical forces shape their format, decoration, and paratext. While it will primarily deal with Western books, we will also consider early ones from around the world. Students will have the opportunity to engage with Embodied Words: Reading in Medieval Christian Culture, contribute to the exhibition's StoryMaps on medieval reading, and develop some codicological skills. Coming to the study of the book from the theory of thingness and cognitive linguistics, we will study our changing uses and relationships with and to books as instruments of doctrine and devotion, power and identity. [ more ]

    Taught by: Elizabeth Sandoval

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    ARTH 580 SEM Picturing God in the Middle Ages

    Last offered Spring 2022

    ARTH 5-- Spring 2022 Peter Low How did medieval Europeans imagine their God and how did they give what they imagined pictorial form? How were these pictures used, both in public and in private life, and why? Paying particular attention as well to the materiality, experience, and manifold audiences of medieval works of art, this seminar will examine the evolution of images of God, in both the Eastern and Western halves of Europe, and the problems these images often generated. Through readings and class discussion, the course will investigate, among other specific topics: the varied attitudes toward the representability of God in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; the tensions manifest in or evoked by this art, including picture vs. text, symbolism vs. mimesis, and asceticism vs. splendor; the impact of the Roman cult of the emperor and of images of the pagan deities on the earliest portraits of Christ; the cult of the icon, concerns over idolatry, and the destruction of images; ideas about the relationship between spiritual and physical vision and their influence on the making and viewing of pictures; the relationship of sacred images to the Eucharist and other aspects of Christian ritual; the role of the senses beyond vision in engaging with sacred art especially in the later Middle Ages; and the pictorial exploration of both the torture and sexuality of Christ. Students will also pursue an individual research project, in which they will examine in greater depth a specific depiction of God of their choosing, from any place and any time, in light of what we have considered together in the seminar. [ more ]

    ARTH 581 Creative Life: The Visual Economy of Work

    Last offered NA

    This course is a seminar on life and work focusing on methodologies of production--art, creative writing, history, theory, and criticism. With an initial focus on the pivotal period from the invention of photography until the onset of World War II, the course will examine the economy of work within modern visual culture. What were the considerations at stake in capturing the "facts" of industrial production? We will examine historical definitions of work, and practices and activities from life that have typically qualified or have the potential to qualify as work (in addition to critiques of these equivalencies). The latter half of the course will be driven by considerations of these themes in relation to student and workers movements of 1968, and contemporary forms of globalization and pluralist subjectivities. One related concern will be the consideration of intersubjective relations--professional and personal partnerships, friendships, and networks--which not only influence the trajectory of one's life, but also the research one chooses to undertake. With the awareness that a range of drives and investments inhabit one's production, participants will be asked to reflect upon their own working practices as a means of critically engaging the affective relations governing artistic and intellectual labor. There will be an emphasis on cross-disciplinary ideas and influences--ranging from art history, film and media studies, the history of science, literature, and political history as a means of integrating theoretical approaches with a range of materials, including photography, cinema, illustrated magazines, advertisements, archives, world exhibitions, and product showrooms. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 582 SEM On Race, Art, and Property

    Last offered Fall 2020

    In her seminal article "Whiteness as Property," critical race theorist and professor Cheryl Harris contends that the legal system in the United States "has come to embody and legitimize benefits that accrue to citizens who are white." The legacy of our legal system, which has dehumanized people by rendering them as property and legalized the theft of land by colonizers from Native Americans, is not confined to the past, but has shaped our world and thrives within our present moment. How has this legacy and Harris' theory been explored in contemporary art? How might it allow us to revisit artworks and practices by canonical artists from alternative perspectives? This course aims to study aspects of this complicated history through a broad range of texts from legal and literary theory to art history to Black and Native American studies to more immediately authored texts published on social media platforms. Students are encouraged to think dexterously as we study works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Heizer, Sondra Perry, Cameron Rowland, and Cauleen Smith--among others. [ more ]

    Taught by: Meg Onli

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    ARTH 583 SEM Graphic Content: Typography and the Book between Art and Design

    Last offered Fall 2020

    This seminar considers the entangled histories of fine art and graphic design by focusing on creative practices surrounding the letterform and the book form from 1900 to the present. We will study historical avant-garde movements active in publishing and making-public; the development of the graphic design discipline, in print and on screen; and logocentric artistic tendencies from concrete poetry and pop art to conceptualism and artists' books. We will also consider diverse literary practices, graphic visualization, and political agitation. The seminar will make use of the Clark library's outstanding collection of artists' books and the holdings of the Chapin library at Williams. We will welcome several guests, including art historians, artist-designers, designer-artists, editors, publishers, and bookmakers. [ more ]

    ARTH 585(S) SEM Facing Portraiture

    What constitutes a portrait? How do portraits act in the world? What histories do they hold, and what stories can they tell? This seminar will explore how artists, sitters, viewers, and historians have approached this genre and to what ends. We will interrogate the possibilities and limits of portraiture; examine how portraiture encodes forms of difference through ideological claims to power, likeness, and self-possession; and explore how technological developments inform portraiture's shifting private and public uses. Attending to historical and cultural specificity--with particular though not exclusive attention to the post-1800 period and the United States--we will also excavate the genre's legacy by exploring its contemporary presence, asking what concerns shape conceptions of portraiture in contexts such as the National Portrait Gallery's triennial Outwin Competition and popular discourse. Bridging past and present, and in conversation with objects held in the collections of the Clark, WCMA, and the Chapin Library, we will work toward our own definition of portraiture and, in so doing, discover and complicate the relationship between personhood, identity, and representation. Students are welcome to develop final projects on relevant topics and materials outside the temporal and geographic contexts addressed in class. [ more ]

    Taught by: Dina Murokh

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    ARTH 587 SEM Crash! The Car Accident as Myth and Metaphor in American Art and Visual Culture

    Last offered Spring 2019

    A year after MoMA elevated machinery to high art in 1934, Grant Wood painted Death on The Ridge Road (Williams College Museum of Art), a depiction of the deadly side of the streamlined modern machines that Alfred Barr might have presented at MoMA. A generation later, Andy Warhol's Death and Disasters series multiplied gruesome images of crushed cars and bodies to numbing effect. During the ensuing years, both Jackson Pollock and David Smith (among others) became traffic fatalities. Roughly bookended by the Great Depression and the 1960s, but also considering works of art and visual materials before and after those parameters, this seminar will explore the stakes of car crash imagery for American artists and culture. Readings may include topics in trauma studies, automotive technology, physics, posthumanism, law, and object oriented ontology as well as grounding participants in American art and history of the middle third of the twentieth century. Participants in the course will also have the opportunity to help shape the content, themes, and narrative of an exhibition on car accidents in American art being organized by WCMA. [ more ]

    ARTH 588 SEM The Scene of Decapitation in European Art (1600-1900)

    Last offered Spring 2023

    From Goliath to Medusa, from Judith to Salome, from the invention of the guillotine to the mythology of the executioner under "Oriental despotism," the "scene" of decapitation has long stood as a central focus of European art, visual culture, and letters. This course examines that scene as an artistic, psychological, and intellectual problematic across painting, sculpture, and other media, with particular although not exclusive attention to the nineteenth-century. Although part and parcel of the larger spectacle of juridical punishment, the scene of decapitation arguably constitutes its own series, and for this reason has attracted numerous artists and a prestigious, multi-disciplinary literature. Artists include (but limited to) Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Théodore Géricault, Gustave Moreau, and Henri Regnault. Readings by Freud, Kristeva, Bersani, and many others, including a large body of art historical literature. Weekly readings, discussion, oral presentation, and research paper on a relevant topic from 1600 to 1900. [ more ]

    ARTH 589 SEM Imitation, Copy, Reproduction

    Last offered Spring 2023

    Focusing primarily on European and American art before 1900, this course addresses the related categories of imitation, copy, and reproduction with particular attention to prints and other works of art on paper. We will consider the status of the multiple, the role of imitation in classical art theory and pedagogy, the motivations for (and protections against) different kinds of copying, the emergence of photomechanical processes, and the centrality of reproducible images to the art-historical enterprise, among other topics. The basis of our investigations will be works from the Clark's own collection, to be studied with a close eye to their medium and materiality. We will explore concepts of originality, fidelity, authenticity, and value in the light of critical and theoretical texts, while also examining the historical conditions that underlie distinct instances of image reproduction. This course will take place in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper. Each session will offer direct engagement with works in the Clark's permanent collection. The course will also benefit from the exhibition Promenades on Paper: French Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which will be on view from December 17, 2022 through March 12, 2023 in the Clark Center. [ more ]

    ARTH 590 SEM Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) and Caribbean Networks in France during the 18th and 19th centuries

    Last offered Spring 2022

    Born in the colony of Guadeloupe to a French father and a formerly enslaved woman, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) would become a key figure in the Neoclassical movement, a well-respected pedagogue with a sizeable workshop populated by notable students, an ambitious collector, director of the Académie de France in Rome from 1807 to 1816, a favorite artist of Lucien Bonaparte, and a member of the Institut de France. Despite his many accomplishments and sizeable corpus of paintings and drawings, Lethière has notably disappeared from the "canon" of art history. Such a lacunae begs many questions about the circles of sociability in which he traveled, the reception of Caribbean artists in France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the lack of widespread knowledge on these topics today. This seminar will be timed with the planning of a major monographic exhibition to take place at the Clark Art Institute in the summer of 2024, and students will work alongside the curators on various aspects of the exhibition's organization. The course will also provide an opportunity for close examination of objects in the Clark's permanent collection, including Lethière masterpiece Brutus condemning his sons to death(1788), as well an album of approximately one hundred drawings by the artist. [ more ]

    Taught by: Olivier Meslay

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    ARTH 591 SEM Borders/Walls: Liminality and Politics in Documentary Cinema

    Last offered Fall 2022

    Despite increased potentialities for mobility and exchange, borders and walls persist within contemporary culture. This research-based seminar examines where the foreclosure of these potentialities appears within global documentary cinema. It does so with the knowledge that walls have also played a significant role in cinema's ongoing reinvention. Auguste and Louis Lumière's first film featured not only the routine departure of the factory's workers at the end of the working day, but also the built structure of the factory wall separating spheres of labor and leisure. Examining the intersection of concrete reality with the moving image, this seminar considers the implications of these spaces of liminality for the possibilities or limitations of the cinematic medium. It considers the way these mental, physical, and geopolitical constructs emerge both theoretically and materially as spaces that are tangibly felt, negotiated, and experienced. Given that site-specific works, institutional and civic contexts, as well as museums, serve as spaces of liminality and knowledge production, attention in this course will also be directed towards the (im)materiality of cinematic practice with respect to projection and the screen. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTH 592 SEM Chance and Design: Ideas and Iconographies of Causality in Europe before 1900

    Last offered Fall 2021

    The idea of the work of art has a long history in Western philosophy and religious thought as the model for the idea of intentionality at the broadest scale; the relation of the artist to their artifact mirrored, in microcosm, the relation of an "intelligent designer" to a designed universe. The collapse of such models for thinking about both art and the natural and social world are characterized, typically, as intrinsic to the epoch of modernity. Within art history of the past half century, a significant amount of attention has been devoted to theorizing how many now-canonical artists (eg. the proto-conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham) harnessed chance procedures with the aim of vacating their agency from the process of creation and with the "purpose to remove purposes." This course attempts to look before and beyond these well-trodden histories. Probing the visual dimension inherent in the concept of design and its absence (a visuality epitomized by blindfolded allegorical figure of Fortuna), we will seek to trace a more capacious genealogy for the efflorescence of chance, accident, and randomness as aestheticized objects of fascination in the twentieth century. We will trace the prehistory of these concepts in relation to both the abstraction of numbers and the concreteness of organisms, situating ideas of chance in relation to both the rise of a globalization and racial capitalism grounded in risk, financial speculation, and probability, as well as the eventual emergence in the nineteenth century, of an evolutionary theory capable of producing statements such as, "what a chance it has been... that has made a man," and recognizing "blind chance" as the originary driver of change in the organic world. The class will include presentations by invited guest scholars and focus on a number of case studies spanning the early modern period through the late nineteenth century, including topics such as: the concept of disegno and art as a model of intentionality, the iconography of fortune, gambling, and accidents, the association of chance and seafaring, the iconography of falling and gravity, the incorporation of chance into the material processes of image-making (for instance, in the invention of photography), and the visual culture and visual metaphors of Darwin's evolution. In association with our historical inquiries, the course will also meditate methodologically upon models of causality in art-historical explanation, as well on broader questions of how chance and ideas of chance and causality mediated modern Europe's relation to other parts of the world. [ more ]

    Taught by: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

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    ARTH 593 SEM Sound/Image: Theories and Practices in Art History

    Last offered Spring 2022

    This seminar serves as an introduction and deep dive into issues of sound in the visual arts. While we will examine modern and contemporary examples of sound art and multimedia work, this course considers sound, the aural imagination, and practices of listening much more expansively to probe the theoretical, conceptual, as well as technological, aesthetic, and reception issues surrounding sound in visual art. Course readings will combine art historical accounts with texts from philosophy and sound studies. We will read Michael Gaudio on representations of "the New World" in colonial America, consider recent attention paid to sound and the infiltration of sound recording media in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century America (by Rachel DeLue, Leo Mazow, and Asma Naeem), delve into the politics and poetics of European avant-garde performance, the cross-pollination of musical and artistic experimentation in 1960s New York and elsewhere (John Cage and Pauline Oliveros in connection with the worlds of dance, performance, and Black Mountain College), and consider more contemporary practices, particularly by artists working in Asia, Brazil, and artists engaging in Deaf studies and critiques of ableist hearing ideologies (such as Christine Sun Kim). We will also draw heavily on writings on sound, sensation, art (and film) by twentieth-century continental philosophy (Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze) as well as recent work by contemporary theorists probing the intersections of the sonic with race, gender, and politics (among them Salomé Voegelin and Robin James), as well as other topics from sound studies such as the mediation of technology, social and historical frameworks (such as Alain Corbin's study of the culture of the senses in the 19th-century French countryside), and the "ontological" turn and focus on materiality (Christoph Cox, Steve Goodman). [ more ]

    Taught by: Caitlin Woolsey

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    ARTH 594 SEM Traveling Seminar: Slavery and the Dutch Golden Age

    Last offered Spring 2021

    This course takes as its starting point the exhibition at the Rijksmuseum opening in September 2019: Slavery, an exhibition. With this installation, the curators of the Rijksmuseum seek to correct dominant narratives of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch history, which have absented the role of slavery in determining the economic, social, and visual history of the Netherlands. With a Travel Grant awarded by the College Art Association, the students in this seminar will travel to the Netherlands to visit this exhibition and other relevant cultural institutions in order to examine the possibilities and limits for 'decolonizing' the museum. This course will study how slavery is imbricated within the mythic construction of a 'Dutch Golden Age' while also examining what happens when the history of enslaved peoples becomes translated into the space of a museum and exhibition. We will consider a revisionist history of Dutch artistic production, accounting for slavery in determining the Dutch economy and visual production while also asking what happens when slavery becomes narrated in the space of one of the nation's history museums. We will read contemporary black feminist theory such as Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe as a means to struggle with how the space of the exhibition chooses to activate and write those missing histories, and we will examine if it is even possible to responsibly tell the story of slavery over two centuries when the majority of the subjects have been completely defaced, removed, and excised from the historical record, and their voices are often the ones still absent. In the words of Saidiya Hartman, we will ask: "Is it possible to construct a story from the 'locus of impossible speech' or resurrect lives from the ruins?" [ more ]

    Taught by: Caroline Fowler

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    ARTH 595 IND Private Tutorial

    Last offered Fall 2022

    Students may petition to take a private tutorial by arrangement with the instructor and with permission of the Graduate Program Director. [ more ]

    Taught by: Kerry Christensen

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    ARTH 596(S) IND Private Tutorial

    Students may petition to take a private tutorial by arrangement with the instructor and with permission of the Graduate Program Director. [ more ]

    ARTH 598 IND Undergraduate Lecture Course Taken for Graduate Credit

    Last offered Spring 2022

    Undergraduate Lecture Course Taken for Graduate Credit [ more ]

    Taught by: Alena Williams

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  • ARTS 100(F) STU Drawing I

    Drawing provides a wonderful vehicle for encountering and interpreting your experiences. This course will heighten your awareness of the visual world, teach basic drawing skills, and demonstrate how drawing operates as a form of visual exchange. A variety of materials will be covered as you explore the 2-dimensional concepts of line, form, proportion, gesture, spatial depth, and value. Towards the latter part of the semester, more emphasis will be placed on the use of drawing as idea, and you will be encouraged to express yourself through the visual language of drawing. [ more ]

    ARTS 100(F) STU Drawing I

    This course is designed to introduce the fundamentals of drawing. A significant portion of class time will be devoted to learning some of the basics of drawing, such as line, gesture, composition, and value. Acquiring technical skill is an important goal of this class, and intensive weekly assignments are a significant part of that process. Studio classes will also provide a general overview of broader art concepts, such as theme, consistency and style, to further expand their understanding of contemporary drawing practices. [ more ]

    ARTS 100(F) STU Drawing I

    This inclusive drawing course welcomes students who are completely new to the study of art as well as those with prior experience. Using the tools of perceptual drawing as a shared language, students will embark on drawing inquiries and projects that bridge representational and abstract approaches to image making. Drawing from nature, communally built, immersive sculptural installations, architecture, light phenomena and the human body, students will actively seek new ways to engage with the visual representation of form and space, and the construction of meaning through images. The course will emphasize the craft of drawing through explorations of classic graphic media--charcoal, chalk, crayon, pencil--as well as experimental materials including foraged botanical inks, unusual drawing surfaces and collage. In addition to demonstrations and studio exercises the course includes weekly drawing assignments, group critiques, midterm and end of semester projects, and a final portfolio review. Skill-oriented formal learning will be supported by occasional readings, critical discussion and direct engagement with artworks from the drawing collections of WCMA and the Clark. [ more ]

    ARTS 100(S) STU Drawing I

    In childhood everyone draws. Like language drawing is a basic human tool to observe and interpret the world as well as to make comment about it and find agency within it. As an introduction to art making, this course will provide basic design and conceptual skills to engage feeling, develop content and communicate with others. Divided into sections on line, composition, proportion, value and space, the course is designed for those with no previous experience in drawing, but it is flexible enough to challenge experienced students. New concepts are introduced each week in slide talks and developed in workshops and through homework assignments. [ more ]

    ARTS 100(S) STU Drawing I

    This course is designed to introduce students to perceptual, experiential and analytical moments associated with the language of drawing, and to do so in ways that offer the opportunity to see the world with greater clarity, and with a broader understanding of art and the visual language. This course provides technical skills associated with observational drawing, experiential moments with a variety of materials, and the opportunity for self expression and the communication of ideas. Each studio class blends drawing practices and exercises designed to further one's understanding of the language of drawing, and more broadly, offers a foundation for further study in the visual arts. [ more ]

    ARTS 103(F, S) STU Visual foundations: Locating the Self

    In this hands-on, introductory level studio art class, students will learn methods in drawing, ink painting, and collage while being introduced to a variety of methods of organizing two-dimensional space (from Renaissance one-point perspective, to the multiple point perspective used in Chinese scroll paintings, and a variety of inventive contemporary approaches to addressing point-of view through composition). In this class, we will explore who we are in relation to each other, the places we come from and the place in which we find ourselves. Artmaking will be used as a means of mapping the self as a relational entity, while considering how each mode of organizing space brings its own constraints and possibilities. [ more ]

    ARTS 105 STU Video Essay

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This introductory studio course engages the genre of video essay within contemporary art. Situated at the intersection of video art and documentary film practices, video essay explores the interval between politics and aesthetics, fiction and non-fiction, in an attempt to create a personal language with which to describe the tension between social, political, and personal realities. Students gain hands-on video production experience with editing, cinematography, and sound design grounded in the editorial and rhetorical strategies of video essay which articulate a language of relationships: between sound and image, artist and subject, fact and feeling, memory and language. Self-referential and reflexive, video essay operates in a space of inquiry incorporating poetry, philosophy, autobiography, politics, and cultural studies. The course examines how artists working with video essay move across disciplines in pursuit of a renewed relationship to processes of observation, memory, and recognition. Assignments emphasize the creation and presentation of an original body of video work for critique, alongside research, writing, and discussion of theoretical texts and artworks, including the work of Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Arthur Jafa, Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, Renee Green, Moyra Davey, among others. [ more ]

    ARTS 110 Digital Photography, Identity and Place

    Last offered NA

    This introductory level course offers an in-depth exploration of digital photography. Emphasis is placed on the camera's relationship to the body and constructions of identity. Students will develop a fundamental control of photographic techniques through various exercises, experimentation, field, at home and/or studio experience. Students will learn how to use DSLR cameras and introductory level Photoshop editing techniques to create a personal body of work that examines the medium's role in representing various identities. Additionally, visiting artist lecture presentations and thorough critique will foster theoretical and visual literacy for the analysis of works. How is photography implicated in the construction and performance of identity? How does it complicate national, cultural, gender, race and sexual identity. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 111(S) STU Introduction to Video Art

    This course introduces students to video art as a time-based medium, encompassing both audio and visual elements, with vastly diverse, interdisciplinary approaches. Students will learn the basics of camera, sound, lighting, and editing alongside critical historical and aesthetic approaches to video art. Coursework includes screenings and discussions, hands-on tutorials, production assignments, readings and active participation in peer feedback. While this course engages collaborative learning, students are expected to do a significant amount of solo work outside of class as well as a self-directed final project. Students' final projects will explore the relationship between the technical and conceptual, through a subject matter of their choosing. [ more ]

    ARTS 112(F, S) STU Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking

    In a 2010 article, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott described documentary film as 'heterogeneous to the point of anarchy.' However, in the intervening decade, documentary has become simultaneously more commercial and formulaic. This course takes this notion of heterogeneity to heart, acquainting students with a wide array of creative approaches and key debates in documentary film. In addition to a historical, ethical and critical foundation in the field of documentary, students will acquire a basic grounding in the fundamentals of video production, including cinematography, sound and editing. Course requirements include class attendance and regular critiques, weekly film screenings and readings outside class, 2-3 minor filmmaking exercises, and major assignments in the form of 3-4 short nonfiction video projects. [ more ]

    ARTS 114 STU Art into Activism

    Last offered Spring 2022

    This introductory, hands-on studio art class will examine how art can be engaged with activist and political causes. Can art be created from social or political ideas? Is all political art merely propaganda? What makes a work "political"? What does artistic work that is topical, informed, and critical look like? What artistic strategies might be deployed for ends that are not considered art? In addition to looking at various works by contemporary artists and used in political movements, the majority of the class will be devoted to working on weekly assignments that will introduce students to 2-D image making, performance, and low tech video that will engage with the above questions. This class is a project based studio class which will require hours outside the class for the weekly assignments. [ more ]

    ARTS 115 TUT Sculpture: Poetry with Objects

    Last offered Fall 2020

    Sculpture employs the body and has the power to communicate via the physical world in powerful ways. ARTS 115 will offer instruction in how form and meaning can be created through the use of objects. Similar to poetry, where a particular word carries a specific history, meaning, and power, objects also contain complex associations. Through the process of alteration, transformation, and manipulation, sculpture reveals the narrative power of form and materials. This course will provide a historical framework for how sculpture- particularly contemporary works- have expressed ideas, while also providing instruction on techniques and methods used to build, dismantle, rearrange, combine and create art with objects as the inspiration. The ultimate goal will be to develop your individual voice and imagination, become familiar with processes and techniques, and to become fluent in generating meaning that is important to you. We will be integrating the study of a variety of artists whose work utilizes objects in their sculpture such as the work of: Jean Shin, Marcel Broodthaers, Dario Robletto, Doris Salcedo, Robert Gober, among others. Approximately two thirds of the term will consist of weekly meetings between myself and a pair of students, however, periodically throughout the term, we will meet with the entire class for PowerPoint presentations, demonstrations, visiting artist talks and group critiques. [ more ]

    ARTS 116 STU Monotypes

    Last offered Fall 2018

    Spontaneous and delightfully unpredictable, the monotype is a style of printmaking that creates exactly one image by applying ink onto a flat surface, and transferring it to paper using pressure - by hand or a through a printing press. It is neither drawing nor painting, it is both! In this class students will use the monotype to heighten their sensitivity to line, colour, tone, texture, transparency, pressure, ink viscosity, and overall composition. They will also explore techniques like tracing, stencilling, chine-collé, reductive + additive mark making, and hand rubbing, while acquainting themselves with the history of the medium -- its practitioners, and its scope. No prior experience in drawing or painting required, though it is quite welcome. [ more ]

    ARTS 117 STU Paint! An Introduction to Pigments and Binders

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This introductory studio course offers a materials-based approach to painting. Guided by ancient artists' accounts and contemporary craft manuals, we will begin by making our own paints using non-toxic and inexpensive ingredients, combining earth and mineral pigments with binders like egg, oil, sap, casein, and wax. Experimenting with mark-making on a broad range of found and prepared substrates, we will carefully observe the affordances and constraints of each medium. Assignments will be simple and iterative: the semester-long repetition of a single, uncomplicated form will allow us to focus entirely on qualities of hue, texture, weight, transparency and opacity. Supplementary readings, museum visits, and group discussions will touch upon histories of pigment extraction and circulation as well as the production and evolution of paint media with special attention to environmentally gentle and sustainable practices. This course will include an introduction to the rare and ancient technique of buon fresco. [ more ]

    Taught by: Mariel Capanna

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    ARTS 119 STU Miniature Stories

    Last offered Spring 2021

    What is the American experience? What does an American look like? This course uses miniature set and puppet building techniques, using easily manipulated materials in order to tell stories about the American experience. Greer Lankton's queer puppets and Charles Ledray's intricate thrift store men's suits use miniaturized scale as a vehicle to expand our understanding of the American experience through highly focused visuals. Students will explore how scale and point of view can be used to explore power dynamics, identity, and mythology. Students develop their own research methods based on short writing assignments, image and object collection, and material exploration. [ more ]

    Taught by: Stephanie J Williams

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    ARTS 121(F) STU Performing Identities: Introduction to Video and Performance Art

    This course introduces students to the intersections of video and performance art with a focus on the unique history of artists performing for the video camera. Engaging critical questions about the politics of the body, this course explores the wide range of ways artists have performed their identities through a direct engagement of the camera and centers the lineages of BIPOC, queer and feminist art. Students will learn video basics (camera, sound, lighting, and editing) while exploring the elements of performance art (identity, guise, self/representation, performativity, spectator, site). We will consider viewing contexts such as social media platforms and art institution installations. While no prior experience is required, students will be invited to engage their interests and experiences in performance, including theater, dance, music, speech/debate, comedy, athletics and more. Students are expected to do a significant amount of solo work outside of class as well as a self-directed final project exploring a subject matter of their choosing. [ more ]

    ARTS 122(S) STU Photography, Identity and the Absence of Representation

    This introductory level course offers an in-depth exploration of the DSLR camera and image by utilizing photographic digital technology. Emphasis is placed on the camera's relationship to the body, domestic space and constructions of identity. Students will develop a fundamental control of photographic processes through technical exercises and at-home/on-campus and online experimentations. Students will learn how to use DSLR cameras, editing techniques and photographic curation to create a portfolio and exhibition reflecting on a personal body of work that examines the medium's role in representing (or not representing) identities. There will be weekly readings and in-depth critiques to foster theoretical and visual literacy for the analysis of works. How is photography implicated in the construction and performance of identity? How does it complicate national, cultural, gender, race and sexual identity? [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 123 STU Drawing Dreaming

    Last offered Fall 2020

    Sometimes a drawing is a recreation of what is right in front of us, accepted and understood by us both. And sometimes a drawing is what we have never seen before/what doesn't yet exist, but want very much to be real: a house, a garden, a truth, accountability for an injustice, a declaration, a dream, a scream, a monument (or its absence), a sculpture, an institution, a circumstance, a love, futures. In this class, we will use mark making as a tool for making such imaginings a little more solid, and clear. Each week we will look at artworks (or what could be perceived as that) that embody dreaming, envisioning, manifestation, and transformation, including but not limited to the spectacular public drawings now part of Richmond's confederate monuments, Shaker gift drawings, house and garden plans, protest signs, commemorative murals and memorials, flags, emblems, dream entries and tarot decks. Every other week, our class will host visitors whose art+work+life has inspired this course, including artists, educators, and organisers. Though this isn't a traditional drawing class, it will include introductions to various foundational techniques and tools, along with intensive drawing exercises before delving into self driven assignments. [ more ]

    ARTS 125 STU Introduction to Fresco Painting Materials and Techniques

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This course offers a rare introduction to the materials, methods, and chemistry of buon fresco: the ancient craft of wall-painting with earth and mineral pigments onto freshly applied lime plaster. Fresco painting is an emphatically collaborative tradition, and as such we will treat the studio-classroom as a shared laboratory for collective study and practice. Working together, students will gain hands-on experience with every step of the fresco-painting process: we will grind earth and mineral pigments, sift riverbed sand, mix and apply lime plasters, and paint with pigment suspensions using bristle brushes while following recipes and instructions gleaned from artists' accounts and painting manuals. Testing a range of fresco techniques on a series of portable panels as well as on a classroom test-wall, students can expect to develop both troweling and painting skills, and to discover the nuances of color and texture that can be achieved through various combinations of natural pigments and plaster. The course will encourage descriptive and instructional writing, diagrammatic drawing, and photographic documentation as tools for craft stewardship and technical knowledge-sharing. Prior experience with drawing and/or painting will be helpful, but are not required. Lectures will provide a historic overview of fresco painting and its uses across cultures, and students will have an opportunity to explore a particular material, chemical, environmental, or socio-political aspect of the centuries-old wall-painting technique through the development of a final essay. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 126(F) STU Introduction to Digital Photography: Contemporary Photography Practices

    This introductory studio course focuses on the making, editing, and printing of digital photographs. Rooted in the creation of original artworks, the course exposes students to the digital camera as a tool for developing a personal visual syntax and a body of work throughout the semester. We study contemporary photography practices and issues from the 1970's to the present, including portraiture, abstraction, documentary, performance, and more. The course oscillates between lectures and class discussions, critiques, technical demonstrations, and studio work-time. Through discussions and the study of artworks and texts, students will develop visual literacy skills to aid in the critical analysis, and creation, of photographs. Technically, students will learn to understand light and exposure, composition, color correction, a digital workflow through Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, and inkjet printing. [ more ]

    ARTS 127(S) STU Introduction to Digital Photography: Photography & Identity

    This introductory studio course focuses on the making, editing, and printing of digital photographs, with particular emphasis on understanding photography's crucial role in shaping, revising, and visualizing identities. Rooted in the creation of original artworks, the course exposes students to the digital camera as a tool for developing a personal visual syntax and a body of work throughout the semester. The course oscillates between class discussions, critiques, technical demonstrations, and studio work-time. We'll consider how photography intersects with digital technologies, surveillance, media, colonial legacies, race, feminisms, gender, queerness, and archives. Through discussions and the study of artworks and texts, students will develop visual literacy skills to aid in the critical analysis, and creation, of photographs. Technically, students will learn to understand light and exposure, composition, color correction, a digital workflow through Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, and inkjet printing. [ more ]

    ARTS 128 STU Introductory Video

    Last offered Spring 2020

    In this course we explore how the proliferation of video has transformed the way we relate our own image, and that of others. Video has become a platform for hypervisibility. In an era of selfies, live-streaming, state sanctioned violence (and its digital record), how might we use video as a tool of empathy and accountability? We will pursue answers to these questions through the act of making. In this introductory level course students will gain facility in Adobe Premiere and other post-production tools in the Adobe Creative Suite. Students will explore camera technique, lighting, and how to work with appropriated footage. We will look at early and contemporary video works in order to situate the work being made in class. Video Art will also be contextualized within vernacular applications of video. Through regular technical exercises, readings, and group critiques, students will learn how to use video as critical tool in their practice. [ more ]

    ARTS 129 STU Institutional Critique

    Last offered Spring 2019

    This introductory course will investigate the performance potential of the radical art making methodology known as Institutional Critique. Influenced by Situationalism, and the Fluxus movement, Institutional Critique emerged as a way for artists to respond to the art worlds elitism, monopoly on culture, and dependency on Capitalism. Through collaborative performance based projects and readings students will explore the possibility of art to critically intervene in the hegemonic order and insight change within power relationships. We will also explore related movements such as Socially Engaged Practice, a term that describes art that is participatory and focuses as people as the medium. Artists covered will include: Thomas Hirshhorn, Tim Rollins, and Andrea Fraser. You do not need any prior experience just a willingness to use the power of voice and body. [ more ]

    ARTS 130 SEM Material Issues

    Last offered Spring 2019

    What kind of maker should one be, after reading the latest climate report? The tendency to build, design, love, and collect objects - in our shelves and in our museums and in our landfills - is central to the human story. We have (serious) material issues! This class looks at individuals that hold ecology and what the environment asks of us close to their heart and their making, moving beyond 'green' as metaphor. We will study creative practices that work in partnership with land, with forests, agriculture, radically sustainable materials, food and food cultures. Through the semester, we will alter how we consume and what we consume, we will learn to repair, learn to divest, and learn how to make our own: Food! Clothes! Quilts! Containers! Pigments! _________! Our projects will be cross cultural, interdisciplinary, slow, working at the pace of seasons, working with what is already present in our homes, in our neighbourhoods. Through guided assignments and discussions, students will draft a personal and collective manifesto detailing their relationship to material and climate change, and develop a final project, in any format, that engages with it. We will work with our hands often, and well. [ more ]

    ARTS 131 STU Moments of intimacy in photography

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This course is an introduction to the black & white silver photographic process. Students will learn the mechanics of the analog 35mm camera, the process of developing films into negatives, and the technique of making perfect prints. By studying different approaches in the works of photographers from the early 20th century to the contemporary period (August Sanders, Walker Evans, Roy DeCarava, Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Klavdij Sluban, etc.), students will develop their personal vision and create a portfolio related to the theme of the course, moments of intimacy. Finally, the students will experience how the ultimate step of the photographic film process, printing in the darkroom, can serve as an intimate and spiritual practice that reveals their creativity. Each student will exhibit a series of photographs along with an artist statement. [ more ]

    Taught by: Daniel Goudrouffe

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    ARTS 132(F, S) STU Sculpture: The Human Form in Contemporary Art

    The figure has an intrinsic relationship to us and our lives and has provided artists with creative challenges throughout time. This course uses the human form as the subject to introduce students to the three-dimensional world of sculpture. It combines the traditional study of figure modeling in clay, with a more contemporary approach to how the figure is used in art today. The first part of the semester has you working from observation while learning how to realistically construct the human figure in the third dimension. You will work in clay, gaining skills in modeling, anatomy, the study of proportion, gesture, texture, negative and positive space, balance and gravity. Within this first portion of the class you will learn to translate directly from observation and gradually move towards abstraction. The second part of the term will provide the opportunity to explore a more open and contemporary approach to how sculpture utilizes the figure to express meaning, explore materials and employ form. You will be introduced to a variety of skills, materials and concepts as you learn to work in the round making a form interesting from all views. Ultimately you will begin to explore and develop the ability to communicate your ideas in a visual manner as well as comment on the human condition. [ more ]

    ARTS 136 STU Multiples! An Introduction to Printmaking

    Last offered Fall 2021

    Printmaking is the process of creating an image by pressing an inked surface onto paper. In this introductory class, we will work our way through a wide variety of printmaking techniques to create a range of original works. These techniques may include linocut, woodcut, collograph, intaglio, monotype, and book structures. With the help of demonstrations, lectures, museum visits, and artist talks, we will explore the history and contemporary practice of each technique. You will gain familiarity with the printshop's tools and equipment; develop a sensitivity to different kinds of papers and inks; practice the proper usage of materials; and learn how to work in a shared and cooperative environment, collectively. Though introductory, this is a process based class with rigorous assignments. Absolute beginners can expect to refine their hand, expand their vocabulary of studio skills, gain deeper appreciation of materials, and learn how to plan and discuss their creative vision. For students with prior art experience, the course can help prepare for advanced print classes, and work towards creating a more interdisciplinary print portfolio. [ more ]

    ARTS 200(F, S) STU Designing Character: Introduction to Costume Design for Performance

    This course introduces students to the processes and techniques of costume design for performance. With a focus on building character through research and design, students will practice developing costume design concepts and using them to illuminate a script, tell a story, and explore characters. Coursework is project-based and will include reading plays, researching period, rendering characters in costumes, expressing design ideas, and sharing and receiving feedback. Class projects will include The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage. Drawing experience not required, but you must be brave enough to try. [ more ]

    ARTS 201(S) STU Worldbuilding: Design for the Theater

    This course examines designers' creative processes as they investigate a theatrical text and then dream-into-being the fictional worlds of a hypothetical production. Class will consist of several practical projects in multiple areas of design. We will practice a two-pronged technique in response to a text: developing a personal, intuitive creative response while simultaneously supporting all logistical requirements, resulting in an inventive yet dramaturgically sound design. Emphasis will be on folding this individual work process into a larger group collaboration by refining methods of communication, presentation, and group critique. [ more ]

    ARTS 202 STU Painterly Printmaking

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This course focused on monotype printmaking, an improvisational and expressive form of painting on a plexiglas plate to make a unique print. Students will learn a variety of painterly and experimental techniques including but not limited to: monotype, stencil, collagraph, embossment, chine-colle, and transfer techniques. Weekly assignments will be process-based with no limitations placed on subject matter or content, but students are encouraged to build their own lexicon of imagery and interests. The final third of the course will be a student-guided final project where interdisciplinary approaches will be welcome, such as installation, books/zines, animation, and site-specific interventions (to name a few!). Students will be expected to work a minimum of 10 hours outside of class in the print studio. $300 to 500 lab fee [ more ]

    ARTS 206(F) STU Installation Art

    This intensive studio art course welcomes students invested in any medium--including drawing, painting, sculpture, video and performance--to consider how the placement of materials in relation to each other shapes the meaning of an artwork. We will expand beyond traditional exhibition strategies by exploring the possibilities that various locations hold, both indoors and outdoors. When, how and where we see an artwork shapes the meaning of our encounter. Through workshops, presentations and studio projects, we will deepen our consideration of material relations within an artwork while also learning how to choreograph a viewer's encounter with our artwork. This course will introduce students to global trajectories of Installation Art that include the varied practices of Pope L., Kishio Suga, Sheela Gowda, Xu Bing, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Ann Hamilton, to name a few. [ more ]

    ARTS 212 STU Sculpture and Being a Sensorial Being

    Last offered Spring 2022

    Experiencing Sculpture is often primarily considered in terms of its visual components, but there are many senses at play. How do the different senses overlap and weave together to create the multifaceted and multi-dimensional experience we understand as Visual? How, in isolating a sense, can we alter the way we understand an experience, an object, or each other? What can taste tell us about seeing? How can silence change our relationship to time? This introductory, hands-on studio art course will examine how sculpture - in its making, conception, and reception - engages the full range of senses and further, how the artist manipulates and plays with these senses to influence form and meaning. In class we will explore the work of artists and thinkers whose work address the senses in some manner. We will engage in in-class exercises and games that deprive or enhance our sensorial experiences to consider and re-consider how we come to know the world and relate to its matter through our unique bodies and varying receptors. Students will develop a competence in fundamental sculptural processes including and not limited to woodworking and welding techniques. Students will cultivate a fluency in the contemporary discourse around sculptural concerns and a proficiency in sculptural critique. Students will work both independently and collaboratively to create a body of work that explores our varying capacities to experience and create art. [ more ]

    Taught by: Erica Wessmann

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    ARTS 215 STU Sustainabuilding (verb)

    Last offered Fall 2020

    Sustainability considerations figure prominently (and always have) in good building design. This architectural design studio will include instruction, research, and reading about current design and energy strategies. These lessons will be applied in two or more design problems. Drawings and models will be critiqued in class reviews with outside critics. [ more ]

    Taught by: Ben Benedict

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    ARTS 221 TUT Scenic Design and Experimental Performance

    Last offered Spring 2015

    The artistic, intellectual, and practical roles of a set designer vary widely, from the spectacle of Broadway to the do-it-yourself ingenuity of downtown theater. In contemporary experimental theater designers are essential parts of the ensemble, contributing equally to devised work alongside directors, writers, performers and dramaturgs. Design is not viewed as a response to the script, but rather an initial condition: a world whose creation describes the limits of the play while also providing the necessary components for that play to exist. In this way the act of designing and the act of devising can be seen as inextricably entwined--even interchangeable. This course explores a range of techniques and methodologies utilized to create stage environments in traditional and experimental modes. Grounded in textual analysis and research, and emphasizing process, critique, and revision, we will create theoretical stage designs in response to a variety of performance texts. These may include plays, musicals, operas, physical- and dance-theater, and other work that is deeply grounded in the physicality of performer, spectator and performance environment. Emphasis will be on sketching and model-making as the primary means for developing and communicating design ideas Drafting and digital tools will also be factors in course work, which will include training and mentorship in all materials and craft. [ more ]

    ARTS 222(S) STU Critical Practice of Architecture: Theories, Methods, and Techniques 

    In this course, students will transform an architectural or urban space through design interventions that contribute to reorienting public perception, imagination, and politics. Skills taught include methods and techniques for critical architecture practice, including architecture drawing, 2D graphic design, and 3D modeling (digital and physical). Students will also build on design strategies (e.g., spatial hijacking and détournement), community architecture, and visual techniques to rethink normative understandings of space and time. Through selected readings and discussions, we will examine key ideas that have inspired design thinking and activism. The class culminates in a presentation to external reviewers and a final exhibition. [ more ]

    ARTS 223 STU Fresco Mural

    Last offered Spring 2022

    This studio course invites students to encounter the pleasures and challenges of creative collaboration through the planning and development of a co-authored buon fresco mural. With lesson plans structured around a single semester-long project, this course provides a rare introduction to the materials, techniques, and chemistry of fresco painting, as well as an historical overview of the ancient wall-painting medium. While each student will have opportunities to explore fresco mark-making individually on small portable panels, this course is designed to emphasize the historically collaborative and site-responsive nature of fresco painting. As such, the studio-classroom will generally be treated as a shared workshop for collective work. Throughout the course the student community will be challenged to maintain a spirit of improvisation while organizing and executing a long-term project. Students will acquire hands-on experience mixing lime plaster, grinding earth and mineral pigments, and preparing pigment suspensions for a large-scale fresco mural. Considering the wall-painting as a small part of a dynamic whole that includes an architectural substrate and a geographic environment, we will look at varied examples of site-bound wallworks, and will discuss their inherent connection and vulnerability to their social, infrastructural, and climatic conditions. To conclude this course, we will consider various strategies for in-situ wall-painting preservation in order to make an informed plan for the stewardship and/or transformation of our co-authored fresco. [ more ]

    Taught by: Mariel Capanna

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    ARTS 225 STU Video Ecologies

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This studio course in video art investigates human connection with landscapes and multi-species worlds, developing strategies by which our environment is witnessed, altered, and negotiated through videographic acts. Video ecologies consider our environment as relational and invested with notions of identity. What can immersion in our environment as apprehended through the senses (including and beyond vision) reveal about historical and lived experience? How might video serve to open up new understandings, relationships, entanglements, accountabilities? This course will critically examine socio-political and personal dimensions of video art through readings and discussion engaging with environmentalism, intersectional feminism, feminist technoscience, queer theory, crip theory, and postcolonialism. With in-depth instruction on technical and conceptual strategies used in video art, the emphasis of the course will be on the creation of an original body of work that includes several short video assignments and a substantial final video or sound work grounded in research on a specific ecological subject chosen by the student. In-class tutorials provide hands-on experience with lens-based production strategies in the context of historical and contemporary examples of video art that explore land as a site for multiple temporalities and multi-species entanglements. [ more ]

    ARTS 226(F) STU Intermediate Photography: Photography and the Senses

    In the speed of a digital world, what can a slower, more tactile engagement with our materials and surroundings teach us about ourselves? This studio course builds on the skills of Introduction to Digital Photography through a multi-sensorial, tactile, and experimental approach. Students learn more advanced techniques in Photoshop and inkjet printing, and explore various paper types, material possibilities, and installation techniques. Through a series of creative assignments, we tap into all 5 senses (not just vision) in order to unlock embodied knowledge and new ways of seeing. Activities include, but are not limited to, engaging with sound experiments, creative writing games, activities exploring texture and material in nature, collage, and where appropriate, somatic exercises. An emphasis will be placed on play and experimentation, hands-on learning, and class discussions of artwork, texts, poetry, and other media. Students will work to create a series of works on a topic of their choice, to be discussed in regular critiques. [ more ]

    ARTS 230(S) STU Drawing II

    This intermediate drawing course focuses on technique, style and content. Class sessions will focus on representing the human figure in representational and abstract styles, including cubism and abstract expressionism. Homework projects will focus on developing individual concepts and personal expression. Exercises will include traditional materials on paper as well as non-traditional methods and exercises. The course culminates with an independent project of work in series. Critique sessions will be held every other week in small, breakout meetings, which will be scheduled when class begins. [ more ]

    ARTS 234 STU A Watery Place: Photography and the Fluid Process of Belonging

    Last offered Spring 2023

    "I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation," writes the feminist and environmental theorist Astrida Neimanis. How may we use lens-based media to think through belonging in more fluid terms? This studio course in photography explores belonging as an unfixed, continuous process. What does belonging mean to you? Can you belong to something that you can't see, or, as the poet Warsan Shire writes, to a place that won't let you stay? How are our attachments shaped, disrupted, and conjured? From instagram accounts archiving images of communities pre-gentrification, to experimental films about family made with weather-damaged film, to self portraiture and documentations of a changing landscape, this course explores the nuances that photography and lens-based media may reveal about the political and affective dimensions of belonging. The emphasis of the course will be on the creation of photographic and lens-based artwork, to be discussed in critique. We'll support our process by first studying texts and artworks that situate belonging in relation to place and place-making, geography, and ecology. We'll expand into more fluid embodiments of belonging, particularly in the context of migrations and diasporas, family and community, spirituality, climate change and our futures. We'll speculate how lens-based media may not only visualize experiences of belonging (or non-belonging), but facilitate connection. Technically, students will learn more advanced techniques in Photoshop and inkjet printing, and will explore various paper types, material possibilities, and installation techniques. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 235 STU Intaglio Printmaking

    Last offered Fall 2022

    Intaglio printmaking--also known as etching--is a graphic medium in which the surface of a metal plate is transformed, inked and pressed onto paper to create an image. From its 16th-century origins to the many innovative forms of intaglio being practiced by artists today, etching offers a surprisingly flexible and expansive array of graphic possibilities that intersect with drawing, painting, collage and arts of the book. This course will begin by surveying different approaches to transforming the surface of a copper etching plate through drypoint (drawing directly into the plate with a metal stylus); soft and hardground etching ("biting" an image into the plate using selective acid exposure); and aquatint (using acid to create a range of tonal effects). Students will learn methods for printing their etched plates in intentional and exploratory ways. As they work toward developing an individualized formal language appropriate to their subject matter and ideas, they will be encouraged to think about material decision making--their choice of inks, paper, registration, printing technique, etc.--in conceptual terms. The course will culminate with a final project in which students will develop a serial body of work exploring constellations of imagery and the idea of the multiple, taking strategic cues from collage, artist books and other forms of narrative object making. As a rigorously hands on experience, the course will foreground transformative material processes and self-directed studio practice, while also incorporating slide lectures, occasional readings and engagement with WCMA's contemporary print collection. [ more ]

    ARTS 236(F, S) STU LINOCUTS! An introduction to relief printing

    A subset of relief printmaking, linocuts are images made by carving the surface of soft linoleum blocks. Relying almost completely on our hands, we will learn to work with a variety of cutting tools, controlling their speed and pressure to create bold, clear imagery. The course will include introductions to various methods in lino printing including stencilling, collaging, reduction printing, while also familiarising students with the fundamentals of printmaking inks and papers--how to use them, choose them, modify them. Lectures will consider the history of the block print, its present day interdisciplinary potential, and virtual visits with contemporary practitioners. Students will work towards creating a diverse portfolio that demonstrates fluency across various techniques, using them individually or in combination. [ more ]

    ARTS 241 STU Introduction to Acrylic Painting: Five Modern Painters

    Last offered Spring 2021

    To learn the fundamentals of 2D design, as well as some of the concepts that inform modern painting, this class will engage the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henri Matisse, Amy Sherald, Alma Thomas, and Stanley Whitney. All distinctly modern, the styles of these artists range from figurative to fully abstract. The class will spend two weeks on each artist, analyzing and copying a work in the first week and producing a visual response in the second. Students will meet twice a week, once as a class for technical demonstration and slide presentations and again in small groups of 3 or 4 for reading discussion and critique. Some demonstrations and supporting materials will be available asynchronously. The goals of the class are to introduce students to basic painting skills like color mixing, brushwork, composition, and palette management, as well as concepts like color theory, modernism and self-expression in a cultural context. So that students may work in a domestic setting, the size of the assignments are modest and the materials like water-based acrylics, crayons, and paper are manageable. In order to post homework, students will need access to a digital camera. [ more ]

    ARTS 241(F, S) STU Introduction to Oil Painting

    This course is an exploration of the basic techniques of oil painting. We will push paint in color and form to wildly varying ends, each student being encouraged to develop a personal relationship to the materials. We begin with color theory: students will learn to identify, feel, and modulate value, chroma, and temperature. They will build their capacities to see and translate from observation, navigating the relationship between painting and drawing along the way. We will also cover the basics of stretching canvas, priming surfaces, and using mediums. Throughout the semester, there will be presentations, readings, writing exercises, and discussions that offer insights into the theory and global history of painting. Students will be expected to dedicate about 10 hours per week to work outside of class. [ more ]

    ARTS 244(F, S) STU Taswirkhana: Technique and Practice of Indian Drawing and Painting

    Small in scale but vast in its representation, the world of Indian painting is famous for its stylized naturalism and mastery of line. It is an artistic practice whose legacy stretches back to at least the first century CE. This studio course will introduce students to the technique and practice of traditional Indian drawing and painting. The course is designed as a workshop in which students will learn to use materials and techniques of this art form. By engaging with a non-western traditional practice, the aim of the course is to expose students to a pluralistic engagement with art making. Students will learn paper and pigment preparation, as well as the basics of traditional drawing and painting techniques. The class will learn from studying a selection of original masterworks of Indian art from the Williams College Museum of Art that will be displayed in the Object Lab. Working with original artworks will help students situate the hands-on study of Indian painting practice alongside exemplary historical examples. [ more ]

    ARTS 250 STU Devised Performance: The Art of Embodied Inquiry

    Last offered Spring 2018

    This studio course offers students hands-on experience in devising new performance work as an ensemble. Looking to the work of practitioners and collectives like Jerzy Grotowski, El Teatro Campesino, Tectonic Theater Project, Pina Bausch, Belarus Free Theatre, Nrityagram, and SITI Company, we will challenge ourselves to really probe what live performance is capable of. How might we think of performance as a research methodology? As a lifestyle? As a form of political action? This class will function as a laboratory, forming its own unique structure for developing and realizing a live performance. The course provides an opportunity to navigate the complex dynamics present in collaborative creation. Guest classes with practitioners will offer a fuller range of skills for the student ensemble to utilize during the devising process. Work-in-progress presentations spaced regularly throughout the semester will allow the ensemble to receive feedback from small, invited audiences, as well as the opportunity to apply that critique to an ongoing creative process. At the end of the semester the accumulated work will have a public presentation in a workshop format. [ more ]

    ARTS 251(S) STU The Personal Documentary

    In this course, we will survey the terrain of personal documentary in all its complexity--its marginal roots, and its current mainstream appeal. Examining a wide array of formal approaches from diary films, to archival excavations, to first-person odysseys, we will ask: what does it mean to tell a story that is personal, vulnerable, ethical? How is the current watershed moment of COVID provoking us to re-imagine our ideas of self and community, private and public? How to avoid predictability and narcissism, and instead use self-reflection productively? How do race, sexuality, class and gender inflect personal filmmaking? Major assignments will include 3-4 short videos; supplementary assignments include a daily diary, weekly film screenings, and 1-2 readings per week. In order to comply with social distancing mandates, the majority of this course will occur online and production assignments will be designed to ensure maximum student safety. While students will have access to campus equipment and lab space, assignments will embrace the possibilities of at-home, DIY approaches to filmmaking. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 252 STU The Human Image: Photographing People and Their Stories

    Last offered Spring 2015

    The single most photographed subject is the human form. The motivations and strategies for imaging faces and bodies, both individual and aggregate, are as varied as the subjects themselves. In this course, we will examine some of the many approaches used to photograph people. We'll start by exploring self-portraiture, and progress to photographing others--both familiars and strangers, in the studio and in less controlled environments. We'll end with a consideration of "documentary" photography and other visual narratives. In each case, we'll examine our reasons for making an image, and the methods available for achieving these goals. Thus, the class will have a significant technical component, dealing with the creative use of camera controls, the properties and uses of light, and digital capture and processing. We will also examine the conceptual and scientific bases for how we perceive and evaluate images. Students will initially use school-supplied digital cameras, and later have the option of using film. [ more ]

    ARTS 260 STU Objects in Video, Video as Object

    Last offered Spring 2020

    In a world where the screen is often taken for granted, how might we begin to dissect the ways video has transformed visual perception? This course will focus on video installation and how video is transformed by its physical context. We will examine how videos shift our relationship to objects in space. Students will experiment with lighting and set building, paying particular attention to how surfaces are transformed by the lens. We will also explore projection mapping, built installation, and the peculiarities of the screen. We will look at works by artists who have emphasized the physicality or immateriality of video through installation and web-based art. We will read a variety of texts, charting the shifting role video has played in contemporary society. Through weekly assignments and regular critiques, we will begin to unpack how the videos we make contact with daily can shift our relationship with our own bodies and our surrounding environment. [ more ]

    ARTS 261(S) SEM Design and Environmental Justice

    This seminar/digital art studio offers key literature to examine the relationship between design and environmental justice. It will help build a vocabulary to study the environment as disputed terrain between technological fixes and issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and colonial status. Students will develop textual/graphic projects about a chosen case study aiming to reorient public perception and imagination around environmental justice. Case studies include contemporary issues like "natural" disasters, eco-cities, and urbanization in the Global South and North. Skills taught include design-thinking and collaborative design, digital art (Photoshop), and participation in collective reviews and public presentations. The class culminates in a presentation to external reviewers and a final exhibition. [ more ]

    ARTS 266(S) STU Intermediate Digital Photography: Contemporary Photo Practices

    This course builds on skills developed in Intro to Digital Photo, with a focus on contemporary photography practices and issues from the 1970's=present. The emphasis of the course will be on the creation of photographic and lens-based artwork, to be discussed in critique. We will critically engage various aesthetic, cultural, social, and political points of view through the study of artworks, texts, publications, physical prints, films, and other media. Technically, students will learn more advanced techniques in Photoshop and inkjet printing, and will explore various paper types, material possibilities, and installation techniques. [ more ]

    ARTS 275 STU Sculpture

    Last offered Spring 2020

    This course is an exploration of the media and processes of sculpture, with the ultimate goal being visual fluency and the successful expression of your ideas. The focus will be on the development of technical and analytical skills as they relate to the interplay of form, content, and materials. You will be introduced to a variety of techniques and processes associated with the making of sculpture, including, but not limited to, woodworking, welding and building forms out of cardboard. The field of sculpture has expanded to encompass wide-ranging approaches towards manipulating form and space, thus a wide variety of media exploration is encouraged. [ more ]

    ARTS 287 Design for Film & Television

    Last offered NA

    The production designer is responsible for creating, controlling, and managing 'the look' of films and narrative television from page to screen. This hands-on course explores the processes of production design, art direction, and lighting direction processes as related to design for film and television. From initial Production Design sketches and 'Feel-Boards' to accommodating desired cinematographic angles when designing a studio set, design for film requires a designer to shape an entire visual world while keeping in mind the story as a whole. The goal of this course is to provide an initial understanding of the Production Design process in practice through studio work and instruction. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 303 STU Public Address System: Art, Language, Action

    Last offered Fall 2021

    This interdisciplinary tutorial engages the role of language in art, as students examine the role of text, speech, and gesture within their own work. The course engages the material and transformative effects of language in and alongside artworks, exploring the link between words and actions, the convergence of personal and political through speech and writing, and the role of the reader/viewer/receiver. Students engage a wide range of tactics for working with language within and alongside creative studio practices, through coursework that combines intensive studio work, writing, reading, and discussion. The tutorial format allows for a wide variety of media and approaches. Students will meet weekly with a peer and the professor to review work, as well as several sessions where the entire class will meet for presentation, critique, and discussion. The course demands significant outside studio time as well as maintaining a regular writing practice for the duration of the course. Emphasis is on the creation of an original body of artwork. Assignments include several independent studio projects (8 short assignments and 1 major final assignment) independent studio projects that engage language (text, speech, gesture) and weekly writing meditations (1-3 pages in length). Weekly writing meditations engage the text score, hybrid essay, film essay, memoir, and auto-fiction, auto-theory, paying close attention to repetition, difference, codes, systems of signification. [ more ]

    ARTS 304(S) STU Color Theory: The Poetics and Politics of Color

    This course will combine studio projects, workshops, and discussions to explore the multiple connotations of color. We will learn to use color not only as an aesthetic and emotional signifier, but also as a means of philosophical and political inquiry. The aim of this course will be to better understand and control the use of color by grappling with a wide range of perceptual, formal, and theoretical approaches. Shorter studio projects--including exercises in observational painting and color interaction--will lead to more sustained projects in which students explore their individual interests. Class presentations and short readings will introduce students to a variety of texts and artists, including Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color alongside Josef Albers' Interaction of Color and Byron Kim's Synecdoche and Hito Steyerl's video Adorno's Gray amongst others. [ more ]

    ARTS 307 TUT The Body Reorganized

    Last offered Spring 2021

    This tutorial course asks students to abstract and re-contextualize the body as a topic of conversation in order to expand our discussions about identity. We will discuss the work of artists in which the body remains conceptually central; such as Nick Cave, Saya Woolfalk, Sarah Lucas, Annette Messager. Students will look to their own lived experiences and supporting communities, research historical precedence for contemporary perspectives on identity, and find, through written and collected research, additional cultural work centered within multi-layered and non-normative experiences. Students will react to readings, Christian Enzensberger's "Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt", Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger", etc. Students will design their own methods of making with foundational introductions to flexible plane paired with movement-based workshops including stop motion animation shot with cell phones. Students will construct a structural and/or wearable work that references the body, it's topographies, and potential for performance/pose. Research will culminate in an online exhibition documenting student projects through photographic stills and video. [ more ]

    Taught by: Stephanie J Williams

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    ARTS 308 SEM Contemporary methodologies in History and Practice

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This course explores contemporary methodologies that traverse both collective research and artistic production, providing an overview of theoretical and practical frameworks in contemporary art through case studies, close reading, and interdisciplinary artistic projects. We will speculate on the role of the artist, the curator, and the critic as "host" in order to foreground how a care-centered and collective approach to knowledge production can run counter to existing power paradigms, such as patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Building on existing exchanges between disciplines--from feminist thought, queer theory, disability studies, visual and media studies--this hybrid studio and critical theory course presents contemporary art as a field uniquely suited to imagine alternative structures of institutional support and mutual aid. Through engagement with critical and creative texts, as well as a series of making exercises, we will experiment with practices of care and resource-sharing through art production, and imagine how arts practitioners can take a critical position that counters prevailing logics of individualism and enclosure. [ more ]

    ARTS 310 STU Hybrid Forms and Collaborative Structures

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This course is designed to explore how media such as photography, video, digital media, drawing and performance can become three-dimensional or "sculptural." We will explore the expanded potential of making three dimensional objects, installations, or experiences that are hybrid, interdisciplinary and collaborative. We will look at points of intersection and difference, boundaries both material, historically implied, and imagined. Students will be evaluated on their progress towards building a diverse and unique body of work, while strengthening their technical and analytical skills. This an upper-level course, prior studio classes are strongly recommended and a substantial amount of time spent outside of class is expected to complete projects. [ more ]

    Taught by: Erica Wessmann

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    ARTS 313 STU Inhabited Theatrical Environments: Scenic Design for Performance

    Last offered Fall 2022

    How do you develop a point of view and translate it to the stage? What is an effectively inhabited space for performance? We will explore the different ways a scenic environment provides the visual foundation for live theatrical events in theaters as well as site-specific shows. In addition to working intuitively, this course combines critical readings of texts to contextualize works for the current moment. Research will be at the center of our work -- deepening skills to source, curate, and present personal points of view as designers and creators. This work will serve to expand our imaginations to the aesthetic possibilities of performance. Students will also develop a basic knowledge of model building and drafting. Class time is a combination of discussions of theatrical texts, student project presentations, and studio work. [ more ]

    Taught by: Barbara Samuels

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    ARTS 314(F) TUT Design for the Pluriverse: Architecture, Urban Design, and Difference

    The built environment has a critical role in shaping how people enact, reproduce, and refashion social relations over time. Spatial forms, such as architecture and urbanism, are enmeshed in relationships, contestations, and change processes. This studio tutorial investigates the role of different environments in supporting or preventing specific spatial practices and ensuring spatial justice. Using approaches from activist design, students will work in pairs to re-imagine spaces where different ways of being in the world can thrive and coexist--the pluriverse. Students will use a media they master to investigate a theme connecting design, the built environment (architecture and urbanism), and spatial justice. [ more ]

    ARTS 315 TUT Humor

    Last offered Fall 2020

    In this tutorial, students will explore how humor has been used by artists to communicate ideas powerfully, while working to develop their own voice, ideas, and strengths, visually. Students will explore the nuances of humor as a way to effectively communicate ideas through a visual format. Humor will be used as a way to unpack themes around intimacy and estrangement, history and memory, activism and protest, storytelling, play and silliness. Students will explore how one's vulnerability in their work can become empowering. Being funny is not a prerequisite, nor the goal for this course, though it is absolutely welcome! The class will require good communication and will start with establishing a safe and trusting group dynamic that can encourage experimentation and risk taking. Through assigned readings, screenings, and visits to the WCMA students will explore themes of humor in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, design, film, comedy performance and literature. This course is interdisciplinary and open to all media. Assignments in this course will be conceptually driven with formal restrictions depending on the students chosen medium. Students are expected to have a working knowledge of their medium prior to taking this course. [ more ]

    ARTS 316(F) SEM Governing Cities by Design: the Built Environment as a Technology of Space

    Like in the classic era, cities of the 19th century were metaphors for government: good government could not exist without good governance of the city. This creative seminar charts the transformation of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) as a technology of space to govern cities and citizens from the mid-19th century until the present. Through debates and case studies across geographies and historical timeframes, we will analyze how regimes of government shape and are shaped by the built environment. The seminar has a studio component that consists of an urban project where students will apply theories and approaches to a real case study using digital art (2D and 3D modeling). [ more ]

    ARTS 317 TUT Water as Leitmotif: Queer Kinship and Collaborative Acts of Performance for the Camera

    Last offered Fall 2021

    This interdisciplinary tutorial course focuses on water as a poetic and political space of exploration. Through the discussion of critical and creative texts, visual and cinematic analysis, and a direct engagement with water, we will examine water as making material, a healing practice, a site of ecological consciousness, and a form of physical and psychic reorientation. The course content is informed by queer and feminist making practices, as well as contemporary environmental thought and aesthetics. Together we will speculate on new practices of intimacy, kinship and care-based relations through the lens of water and fluidity. Throughout the semester, students will make individual works at the intersection of performance, photographic and moving-image works, and will collaborate with their tutorial partners on a large-scale installation to be documented via still and moving image. [ more ]

    ARTS 319(F) STU Junior Seminar

    Junior Seminar is a dynamic and immersive class tailored for art majors, aimed at exploring and fortifying their creative interests through a rigorous studio practice, engaging group discussions, and exposure to current themes, topics, materials, and concerns in contemporary art and its allied disciplines. Through a multifaceted approach that includes readings, presentations, lectures by visiting artists, and visits to art institutions and artists' studios, students will be immersed in the vibrant and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art. They will be exposed to a diverse range of materials, techniques, and historical perspectives on art-making, while also contemplating the ecological, political, personal, cultural, and aesthetic implications associated with each of them. [ more ]

    ARTS 322 TUT The Empowered Object

    Last offered Fall 2015

    The development of "found object" in the language of art has played a significant role in constructing meaning in the consciousness of the twenty-first century. This tutorial will have students explore that tradition further through their own creative endeavors. They will be asked to add to the lineage of art that uses "found objects" in a creative and meaningful way. They will have the freedom to choose which medium will convey their ideas most effectively. They include, but are not limited to: sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and video. For example, within the investigation of the "found object", projects could include: still life painting with a focus on the objects, 2-dimensional work depicting or incorporating real objects, collage, assemblage, etc. The "found object" in art will be examined through: art practice, readings and presentations. As a tutorial, the course is designed to meet individual needs and to stress student participation and responsibility for learning. Students will meet weekly with a peer and the professor to review work. [ more ]

    ARTS 323 TUT Colour Function

    Last offered Fall 2019

    This tutorial places colour as a central consideration in our object making. Experiments and discussions will include development of dyes and inks, foraging for colours, understanding palettes and their relationship to 'the tasteful' and 'the garish', 'beautiful' and 'the unpleasant', colour blocking, monochromes, culture and colour, and the relationship between a variety of pigments, their medium of suspension, and the material they stain or sit directly on top of, unstable. In this way, we will work with a large selection of media and the assignments will be both foundational and highly experimental; you are creating a hundred new colours within a strict grid--you are mixing two new colours through light and projection alone, with no guides. The course is open to anyone who has taken advanced classes in printmaking + drawing, sculpture, and photography. [ more ]

    ARTS 328(F) TUT The Art of Almost Nothing

    In this studio tutorial class, students will create studio art projects by using materials that are mainly not bought but found, repurposed, and/or overlooked and ubiquitous. In this time of extreme material production and consumption, with a great deal being thrown out and unrecoverable, how can we make intentional, creative meaning from what is around us? This class is concerned with impacts on the environment but also with how consumer culture has wielded profound influence in the current production of studio art. How can we engage with our major concerns--aesthetic, topical, critical--and use what is around us mindfully and creatively with desired impact? Some of the artists we will look at: William Pope L., Ana Mendieta, David Hammons, Tania Bruguera,and the Yes Men. This class is a hands-on studio class with weekly assignments. [ more ]

    ARTS 330(F, S) SEM Once More With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Visual Culture

    The urge to relive the past is a fundamental human one, and artists have long drawn upon the ritualistic possibilities of reenactment as a way of interrogating time's uneasy returns and losses. In this course, we will study how artists working in a range of media deploy reenactment in collaboration with others, in order to ask what liberatory potential there might be in choosing to restage--and in many ways, relive--the past. This is a hybrid course with roughly 50% of the course dedicated to critical analysis and 50% studio practice. Case studies drawn from film, theater and other art forms will accompany scholarly readings and short writing assignments, and students will also devise their own reenactment experiments in order to access the embodied and experiential possibilities of the course topic. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 332 STU Living Things: Bodies and Objects in Sculpture and Performance

    Last offered Spring 2023

    This studio course seeks to promote art making that transgresses the boundaries between the visual and performing arts to see a life that animates both bodies and objects. Cultivating various approaches to the experience of embodiment and kinesthetic responses to objects, props, and clothing, students will perform sculptures and sculpt performances indoors and outdoors. Exploring relationships between time and space will support creating works that suggest and invite movement, encourage interaction, and investigate the physical potency inherent in objects, people, and performance. Emphasis will be made on collaborative process and developing dialogue between actors, dancers, and visual artists. [ more ]

    ARTS 333(S) TUT Narrative Strategies

    In this tutorial, we will examine the use of narrative in a range of fine art practices, which could include painting, drawing, video, sculpture, installation, public art, sound art, and mixed media work. Students who are interested in telling or referencing stories in their work in some way will be given the opportunity to develop their ideas and skills in a challenging studio class. In addition to intensive projects, we will look at and discuss the work of artists like Allison Janae Hamilton, Lorna Simpson, Joe Sacco, Lydia Davis, and Omer Fast among others. One of the aims of this course is to challenge traditional notions and expectations of narrative. For instance, what could minimally constitute a narrative piece? How do different mediums allow for time to unfold in unexpected ways? How does omission play a powerful role in a narrative? How might the role of the narrator (often so powerful and present in novels and short stories) change in a visual arts context? This is a studio tutorial with an emphasis on demanding, weekly projects. Students will work both in mediums of their choice and be asked to experiment with new, unfamiliar formats. Readings, outside lectures, and screenings may be required in addition to tutorial hours. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 337 STU This Is An Experiment!

    Last offered Spring 2019

    Keeping printmaking as our source and primary method, this class will use the possibilities within the discipline to create layered, expansive, and highly experimental surfaces. Students will work with a variety of printmaking techniques, and build on their existing knowledge of etching, relief, lithography, and screen printing. They will take risks with inks and their viscosity, the scale of their printing blocks, the temperamental nature of their material, the variety of methods on a single print, and consider outcomes that go beyond images on paper. Prior printmaking experience is strongly recommended. Students will be evaluated on their progress towards building a print based body of work. [ more ]

    ARTS 345 STU Art in Times of Crisis

    Last offered Spring 2023

    In an era of ever-increasing emergency, what is the role of art? Can poems save us? What media and forms of exhibition are best suited to respond to urgent crises? What creative methodologies might we develop in collaboration with one another, in the interest of building community as well as making great art? This course is an interdisciplinary, experimental intervention into our present era. In addition to producing multiple original artworks, students will do readings and investigations into art activist case studies from social movements such as Puerto Rican sovereignty, HIV + AIDS, and global climate justice. [ more ]

    ARTS 369(S) STU QUILTY!

    A quilt is a glorious formation to be asleep under, and in this class we will spend the entire semester making a single wonderful one. A dynamic composition for the home! Students will learn how to collect and choose fabrics, cut them into bold lively shapes, and practice efficient ways of using a needle and thread to sew them together. By looking at quilting traditions internationally, both improvisational and hyper precise methods of construction will be adopted - the quilt is for everyone! Students will also learn basic embroidery and applique techniques to embellish the quilt top, and draw with thread as they bind and stuff the layers of their quilt with (local) wool. [ more ]

    ARTS 376 STU Sculpture Expanded

    Last offered Spring 2016

    This course is designed to expand the definitions of sculpture by adding interdisciplinary solutions to the artistic ideas at hand. The class will be using a wide array of artistic practices towards developing three-dimensional spaces and emphasizing environmental or performative outcomes. Media such as video, drawing, painting, photography, architecture, as well as other artistic practices may be incorporated to create visual solutions to the projects. This is an upper level course focusing on developing one's artistic voice while simultaneously strengthening technical and analytical skills. A substantial amount of time outside of class is expected to complete these projects. [ more ]

    ARTS 383 STU The Actor-Creator: Introduction to Physical Theatre Tools

    Last offered Fall 2022

    This course is an introductory course to the Jacques Lecoq Pedagogy which was born in France and uses observation as a first creative tool. The body is at the heart of this pedagogy and we will have rigorous physical training in order to become more expressive, more precise, and more creative. Improvisation will be the key tool to learn and discover how to write theater on our feet. In the course, we will first observe life: spaces and people. What are the specifics of the different spaces that exist around us and how do they change the body that is in them? Then, we will look at the actor's body. How do you enhance its presence? What brings life to this body? How can we allow ourselves to start using the body as a creative tool that will be able to transform and write? We will next observe the body within the elements. What kind of character will come out of fire? Or of air? What happens when air meets fire? By letting the elements transform us we will find specificity in the character's physicality and relationships. Then we will look at painting, poetry, and music; How can we translate a poem on stage? How do words move? And colors? Is yellow's rhythm the same as brown? We will end the course by working with full masks created by the students/artists and also brought by the teacher. Mask work is an incredible tool to help actors articulate their thoughts, and feelings, and craft their acting. What stories will come out of that? Who's destiny will we learn about? This will be an occasion to bring forth stories you are interested in, that touch you and move you. This course is open to anyone who is interested in creating live performances. Whether you are a writer, a painter, a director, a musician, or an actor you are welcome to bring your fierce and curious artist spirit to create theater that will be telling the stories that matter to you today. [ more ]

    Taught by: Emmanuelle Delpech

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    ARTS 385 STU The Sculptural Costume and It's Performance Potential

    Last offered Spring 2019

    A team-taught studio art / theatre course designed to explore the rich territory of the wearable sculpture and its generative role in art and performance. From ritual costumes, to Carnival, to Dada performance, to Bauhaus dance, to Helio Oiticica's Parangole, and Nick Cave's sound-suits, there has been a rich tradition where sculpture and costumes merge. Students will study artists who have bridged distinctions between the theatrical costume and the sculptural object as well as produce hybrid objects that explore the range of possibilities within this collaborative practice. The students will produce object-costumes involving a wide variety of media, from recycled materials to new technologies, while striving to develop their individual artistic voices. [ more ]

    ARTS 396 WONDERFUL THINGS!

    Last offered NA

    A spinning top! A clock! A toy! A sundial, a deck of cards, a lantern, pompoms, building blocks that rise and topple, puppets, paper kites, paper planes, toy boats that float --play objects are born into the world over and over, transforming in colour and shape, yet holding onto an essential structure that give them their name and purpose. In this class, students will construct their own versions of (some of) these classic objects using humble and lovely materials: paper, glue, bamboo, cloth, light, wood, perhaps wind, string. Our guides will be existing histories of making, the wonderful image of disparate objects on a well made shelf, all the handmade objects we have loved, childhood toys, a desire to play still, and delight. [ more ]

    Taught by: TBA

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    ARTS 418(S) STU Senior Seminar

    In this capstone class for studio art majors, students define, research, create and present an original body of work which will be exhibited. The emphasis will be on producing a strong and coherent body of artwork for their senior exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, (in person or virtual). Students will focus on strengthening ideas, developing formal skills and practicing critical analysis. They may work in any medium in which they have developed a high degree of proficiency. To prepare to partake in an exhibition on this level, students must learn to schedule and pace themselves, communicate, deal with spatial considerations beyond their studio, document their work effectively and work within firm deadlines. The nature of this course will have you working closely as a team, as well as individually, towards creating a strong and exciting student show this May at the Williams College Museum of Art (or via a virtual platform).The class will meet in large and small groups throughout the semester for critique and discussion and also have assigned readings,films, and/or lectures. [ more ]

    ARTS 497(F) IND Independent Study: Art Studio

    With current staffing limitations, it is difficult for studio faculty to supervise more than a very few independent studies projects. We feel our curriculum includes rich and varied offerings and believe that the need for most independent work can be met through those regular offerings. [ more ]

    ARTS 498(S) IND Independent Study: Art Studio

    With current staffing limitations, it is difficult for studio faculty to supervise more than a very few independent studies projects. We feel our curriculum includes rich and varied offerings and believe that the need for most independent work can be met through those regular offerings. [ more ]