Upper-Division

Introduction to major issues of method and critique in study of art and visual culture. Focuses on understanding disciplinary and critical modes of scholarly inquiry in the visual arts, including role of historical research. Emphasizes intensive reading, discussion, and writing. HAVC 100A is a prerequisite for all History of Art and Visual Culture seminars.

Explores visual cultures of West Africa through time (Nok to present). Attention paid to relationships between peoples and impact of European/Arab presence on visual cultures. Prerequisite(s): HAVC 10 or HAVC 80 recommended.

Examination of visual cultures of Central Africa within a historical sequence from the Sanga archaeological excavations to contemporary easel painting.

In Africa, relationships exist between gender and visual culture. Course examines where categories come from, differences in men's and women's visual cultures, and how visual cultures teach, reinforce, and negotiate gender definitions. When are male/female boundaries crossed, and why?

Study of the built environment in Africa. The course explores the diversity of architectural types and how gender, politics, religion, and culture shape and are shaped by architectural spaces and how the natural environment shapes the built environment.

Examines contemporary arts in post-colonial Africa, 1960-present, including new popular cultural forms; arts resulting from new class and national structures; commodification of culture; Pan-Africanism; exhibitionism; and questions of destiny.

Considers contemporary art by African artists operating in metropolitan centers, as well as Afro-British, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American production. Topics are organized thematically and address constructing and deconstructing the idea of Africa; cultural authenticity; diaspora; Creolite and creolization; hybridity; cosmopolitanism; post-black; and globalism in the arts.

Using contemporary art and other visual materials, examines how select African cities are structured, imagined, and contested, and how migration, colonialism, race, ethnicity, and globalization inform their spatial politics. Draws from urban studies, political theory, memoire, anthropology, and visual studies.

An examination of the close relationship of religious traditions and the natural world in China, and its expression in visual representation. Particular emphasis on the ways in which competing groups sought to define or re-envision an understanding of the terrain.

Consideration of biographies and portraits in China as representations of human types and individuals, and the use of these representations as models for constructing lives. Attention to historical and social contexts, early times to present. Special focus on Chinese Buddhist traditions. A previous course that focuses on traditional China or Buddhist studies strongly recommended.

Examines material and conceptual phenomena of writing in Chinese visual culture. Focuses on the intersections of places and practices of writing through various inscribed sites, ranging from oracle bones, seals, and mountain facades to hand scrolls, architecture, and contemporary art.

Examines the history and significance of the subjects most prominent in Chinese painting during the past one thousand years, focusing on the cultural factors that made landspace a fundamental value in the Chinese tradition and the methods whereby painters created pictorial equivalents.

Introduces images, thoughts, and practices of bodies in Chinese culture. In China and Taiwan, the body is to be cherished, adorned, nourished, cultivated, and gazed upon, but also disciplined, altered, and controlled. Examines texts and images of the Chinese body in relation to religion, gender, ethnic politics, martial arts, sports, nationalism, food, medicine, and death. No knowledge of the Chinese language is required.

Deals with artistic responses to the forces of modernity, colonialism, industrialization and globalization in India during the 19th and 20th centuries. Addresses the complex and often painful climb toward re-establishing a truly Indian artistic identity. (Formerly Modernity and Nationalism in the Arts in India.)

South Asia is the home of many religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, and Sikhism). Introduces the role images (painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film) play in shaping these diverse religious traditions.

Focuses on Hindu and Buddhist arts of ancient Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand). Materials covered include indigenous megalithic arts, stone sculptures, and monumental temple architecture such as Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan, and the Bayon.

Examines how photography was used in Southeast Asia to document the racial difference and the exotic Others under the regime of colonialism. Considers the role photography played in documenting the Vietnam-American War and how contemporary Southeast Asian-American artists challenge this photographic history in their art.

Consideration of the arts and architecture in Theravada Buddhist traditions in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Topics and themes include ritual, relics, visual narrative, mural painting, contemporary art, mass-meditation movement, and political protest.

Examines the respective national notions of modernity in the region through a comparative lens. How global capital flow and transnational cultural exchanges impact the production of arts of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Themes and issues include: colonialism and art education; nationalism; identity politics; memory; trauma; gender; race; sexuality; and the body.

Focuses on Southeast Asian refugee visual culture in the United States. Themes and issues include: trauma; memory; the politics of race and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; and the politics of inclusion and exclusion from the nation-state.

Introduction to the study of Buddhist visual traditions, from their beginnings to the present day. Case studies examined with careful attention to historical, social and cultural contexts; particular emphasis on the relation of visual traditions to Buddhist practices.

Explores Buddhist imaginative worlds of the "pure lands": worlds in outer space, sacred mountains, internal states of mind. Study of related practices, including expression and representation of these concepts in paintings, scriptures, poetry, and built environments. Focus is on Chinese traditions.

Examination of interaction between image and ritual in Asian religious art. Case studies from different historical periods and geographical locations (e.g., China, Tibet, Japan, Indonesia, India). Examples include mandalas, ritual bronzes, tankas, sacred caves, temples, tea ceremonies, and calligraphy.

Combination of theoretical perspectives on narrative from literary criticism, rhetoric, folklore, and film theory with art historical focus on images (cave temples, stone reliefs on stupas, scrolls, dance-drama, etc.) from India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Examines 20th- and 21st-century architecture in the Asia Pacific. Examines how aesthetic, socio-political, economic, and technological networks have contributed to Asia Pacific's dynamic and experimental approaches to contemporary architecture.

Examines Asian American artists as well as representations of Asian Americans through U.S. history. Addresses such themes as migration and dislocation, race and identity, intergenerational relationships, origins and diasporas, and American foreign policies in Asia.

Many issues associated with contemporary artistic production and visual culture originated in the Middle Ages. Themes to be considered: role of secular art; women as artists and patrons; aesthetic attitudes; relationship between cultures in holy war, crusade, and pilgrimage.

Expressionism, agitprop, the Bauhaus, New Objectivity, attacks on modernism, National Socialist realism. Painting, sculpture, graphic art, and some architecture and film, studied in the context of political events from the eve of World War I to the end of World War II.

Lecture course focusing on the dynamics of art and politics in France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Spain, from 1750 to 1850. This period of dramatic social change gave rise to new conceptions of subjectivity, freedom, nationhood, and the public address of visual culture. (Formerly French Painting, 1780-1855.)

An exploration of the theoretical and practical or experiential applications of Jewish identity in European visual representation. Brief background on pre-emancipation textual and cultural issues followed by study of the Jewish subject and Jewish subjectivities in modernity.

The history of European books circa 500-1600, primarily medieval, illuminated manuscripts and the first years of printing. Focuses on the relationship between text and image. Topics include techniques of book production, the archeology of the book, and the life and travels of individual books. (Formerly course 191R.)

Examines images of war from 1400 to the present. Class discusses the many aspects of war while considering major painters of the last 600 years, including da Vinci, Rubens, Goya, Picasso. Class also discusses Callot, Marinetti, etc., and other media, including film, photography, and public monuments.

Consideration of how and why Europeans in Europe and Europeans and European-Americans in North America blended nature and human response between 1600 and the present in a variety of media and practices (painting, maps, photography, tourism, film, scouting, artist colonies).

Examines a select number of case studies from 1500-1900 to see how thinkers and makers relied upon science and art to help them understand the world, asking how have scientists and natural philosophers used art to make their claims more convincing, how have artists relied on scientific research to do the same, and what practices do they have in common.

Focuses on the public lives of printed pictures in Europe between 1789 and 1914. In lectures and in written assignments, the class analyzes how artists created works in multiple, which were then circulated by publishers and dealers and consumed by viewers across Europe. In-class discussions compare 19th-century print cultures to our current practices of engaging socially with digital images to see what each illuminates about the other.

Examines the places, spaces, practices, and representations of Paris in the 19th century. Tracing the changing face(s) of Paris by way of its literary and visual representations, students consider the experiences and constructions of the modern city.

Considers the painting and prints produced in Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Major issues include the status of realism and classicism, the role of religion and religious reform, and the rise of popular imagery.

Examines the issues surrounding the technology and uses of printed images from the early Renaissance through the end of the early modern period. Topics may include the political, religious, and satirical uses of prints and the representation of women in prints.

Introduction to American visual arts: architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, and performance art, from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Explore social and political meanings of art and what art reveals about our nation's values and beliefs, in particular, gender and race.

Examines how American writers and artists negotiated complexities of U.S. society during the 19th century. Emphasis on issues ranging from women's rights to laissez-faire capitalism, and from Reconstruction to manifest destiny. Considers how the era's cultural products provided artists, patrons, and audiences with metaphorical coping strategies to counteract what Victorians perceived to be the period's overwhelming social and political changes.

Investigation of the role played by visual arts in fashioning the racial identities of European-Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in the United States.

Taking the terms Chicano and Chicana as a critical framework, addresses cultural and conceptual themes in visual art production since 1970. Questions concerning aesthetics, identity, gender, and activism in painting, photography, murals, and installation art explored.

Examines the relationship between art and scientific inquiry in American visual culture from earliest European exploration through the 19th century, when new scientific theories and technological advancements challenged earlier modes of understanding vision, spirituality, and the physical world.

Explores critical debates concerned with the visualization of African-American identity. In the 21st century, we have seen a renewed interest in racial justice and a sense of urgency around eradicating the enduring scourge of intolerance and inequity. As a result, there is a great necessity to explore the complexities of race and representation. By surveying a range of visual forms—from narrative and documentary film, to Internet-based and print media—the course explores the current landscape of black cultural representation. Also looks at the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality as intersecting phenomena.

Examines how Pop Art and popular culture in the Untied Stateswere (re)formulated into public icons that challenged the visual and ideological associations between high and low art.

Modern art in Europe and America, 1848-1914. Consideration of painting, graphic arts, and sculpture in Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism (Symbolism) Art Nouveau, Fauvism, and Cubism as well as exploration of photography's changing status and influence.

Explores war, consumption and desire in the art of the 20th century. From Paris to New York, Cubism to Feminism, explores the relationship between the visual arts and intellectual movements such as psychoanalysis, existentialism, and phenomenology with particular attention to racial and sexual politics.

Surveys the art forms and critical ideas that have shaped artistic practice from the 1950s to the present, including an overview of the socio-political, economic, and cultural forces that inspire artists to articulate human experience in visual form. Examines how popular culture in the post-war United States became intertwined with visual art, forming into the artistic genre known as Pop Art. This important aesthetic shift challenged the political, ideological, and representational value systems that inform our understanding of so-called "high art."

Introduction to the histories of photography and the critical debates around different photographic genres such as medical photography, art photography, and political photography. Students will develop a critical language in order to analyze photographs while considering the importance of social and institutional contexts.

Through the study of historical and contemporary visual texts (from ethnography and portraiture to advertising and erotica), this course explores how photographic images of the body, while masquerading as natural, self-evident, or scientific, participate in highly coded sign systems that influence who looks at whom, how, when, and why.

An introductory examination of the writing about the issue of medium and media theory in visual culture. Technologies, discourses, and practices from all periods that use the comparison of media as a major approach to understanding the problems of the visual are highlighted. New media, film, television, video, traditional arts are also treated.

From the "happenings" of the late 1950s to contemporary ecological art, this course will examine temporary, site-specific projects of the U.S and Western Europe. Students will be introduced to theories of public art and the social production of space, and invited to explore practices that change the role of the audience, remake museum spaces, situate art in nature, or transform urban life.

Explores how theory can illuminate various forms of cultural production from art and cinema to popular and material cultures. Considers how scholars and visual producers utilize theory creatively and in the study of aesthetic objects and experiences.

Students explore art and technology produced for social change since 1960 within the context of major historical ruptures, such as the Vietnam War, the women's movement, environmental protection, AIDS activism, anti-capitalist, and international human rights movements.

Explores the world of museums in the age of digital technologies and the Internet. Key themes include digital repatriation, social media, interactivity, participation, net art, and digital aesthetics.

How are museums organized, categorized, visited? How are objects physically handled, documented, and displayed? Course explores various concepts upon which museum practices are based and the impact these concepts have on society and cultures.

Through critical readings, interactive assignments, and primary sources, this course explores cultural and political issues around data, emphasizing the impacts of relevant technologies and practices on art and visual culture. Sample topics: digital art, critical mapping, social media, and surveillance.

Focuses on contemporary experiments in artistic documentary practice, including photography and digital imagery, moving-image media, and artistic installations. Considers artistic case studies and leading theoretical and critical elaboration in relation to international cultures of documentary practice.

Through critical readings and primary sources, this course explores the historical and theoretical developments in the interactions of art, culture, nature, and technology. Sample topics include environmental art; media infrastructures; concepts of nature and the nonhuman; and climate change and visual culture.

Investigates contemporary art and the politics of ecology. Examines the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism, and postcolonial globalization, considering geopolitical areas diverse as the Arctic, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Europe, and the Americas.

Students work in collaborative teams to create an exhibition prospectus. Students take the roles of museum departments, in the process learning about how a museum works. The impact exhibitions make in culture and society is examined throughout each step of the process.

Examination of practitioners, projects, issues, and theories in contemporary architecture circa 1968 to the present. Topics include the architecture of aftermath, the ethics of memory and memorialization, the corporatization of museums, the role of criticism and exhibitions, and the cult of the brand-name architect.

Examines urban design from the Renaissance to the present, including Latin American colonial cities, Utopian plans, and sites such as Brasilia and Chandigarh. The course focuses on social justice, diversity, and the role of art and architecture.

Presents Latin America's modern architecture with relation to colonization; the influence of immigrants from Europe, Africa, and Asia; the presence of indigenous cultures; and the search for autonomy. Case studies include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, and Uruguay.

Examines the modern and contemporary depictions of cities in visual and material culture, from paintings and photographs to logotypes and souvenirs. Also examines the roles of narrative in spatial representations, including literature, film, and television productions.

Traces the connections between key movements in modern design and the evolution of technology in society. Also provides a framework for engaging critically with the proliferation of technology in society today.

How have architects engaged with ideas of memory and place in architectural projects and built landscapes from the 18th century to the present? This course examines topics such as memorializing, erasure of place, historic preservation, and cultural heritage in modern architecture. (Formerly Memory, Place and Architecture.)

Explores critical issues in the history of architecture and urbanism from 1968 to the present. Major themes in the development of contemporary architecture are introduced, including the uneven legacy of modernism, the growth of cities, changing technologies, environmental issues, and the social and political context of design.

Investigates Latin American and Caribbean art and visual culture. Studies decolonial resistances, alternative modernisms, examining the shaping of race and ethnicity under global capitalism. Looks at practices by Latin American and Latinx artists, focusing on Afro-Latinx and indigenous knowledges.

Myths dominated the culture and visual production of the ancient Greek world, and their presence is still strong today. How did they codify social, political, and religious realities and needs? How were they perceived in different time periods? In addition to ancient Greek and Roman and later European sculptures and paintings, this course considers less conventional sources, such as modern films, comics, and advertisements. HAVC 51 recommended as preparation.

Visual culture in the ancient Roman world, from temples and public monuments to houses and tombs, performances, and rituals. Examines the construction of social and cultural identities, including class, gender, and sexuality, through architecture, sculpture, painting, household objects, jewelry, etc.

Explores the lives of women in Late Antiquity and Byzantium through a critical analysis of primary visual and textual sources, most of which were produced by men. Looking beyond social expectations, we attempt to understand female experiences and agency.

Centered on the capital city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the Hellenized and Christianized Roman Empire of the Easter Mediterranean today known as Byzantium played a major, yet often overlooked, role in European history for more than a millennium. This course examines its visual production and relation to politics and religion in court and church ceremonial, expressions of Christian faith, and cultural interactions with Western Europe, Islam, and the Slavic world.

The construction of female identity and the production of history through the myth of Cleopatra. Critical analysis of archeological data and ancient sources, later sculptures and paintings, and contemporary films, movies posters, Internet sites, advertisements, comics, games, dolls, and household objects.

Lives of Italian Renaissance people from birth to death, examining the nature and roles of the institutions which defined human existence in this period. Uses visual arts both illustratively and to study how institutions fashioned their images through art and architecture.

An investigation of the High Renaissance as a period and stylistic concept, using the major artists and monuments of the period 1480–1525 to discuss issues of theory, history, and art. Artists considered include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

Considers Venetian art in the 15th and 16th centuries. Topics include major artists (the Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Palladio) and the relationship of the city to outside forces (Byzantine Empire, Turkish Empires) and other Italian cities.

Art and architecture of selected pre-Hispanic cultures from the gulf coast, central, western, and southern Mexico including the Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Mixtec, Mexica (Aztec), and others.

The art of selected pre-hispanic cultures of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia including the Nazca, Moche, Chimu, and Inca.

The art and architecture of the Maya of southern Mesoamerica from the first century C.E. to ca. 1500. HAVC 80, HAVC 60, or HAVC 160A are recommended as preparation. (Formerly Advanced Studies in Early Indigenous American Visual Culture: The Ancient Maya.)

The visual culture of the Inka of the Andean region of western South America including textiles, metalwork, and the built environment. HAVC 60 or HAVC 80 are recommended as preparation. (Formerly offered as Advanced Studies in Early Indigenous American Visual Culture: The Inka.)

Indigenous contributions to colonial Spanish American visual culture including architecture, manuscripts, sculpture, painting, textiles, feather-work, and metallurgy. Focus on colonial Mexico, the Andes, and California.

Examines the diverse art and visual culture of California's Indigenous communities, by learning about historic practices and revitalization, artistic engagement with the built environment, performance and public art, activism through visual culture, and the deconstruction of stereotypes.

The Missions of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia and Florida impacted the lives of Indigenous peoples who were vital to the artistic and architectural development of these spaces. Course examines Indigenous contributions and ongoing reactions to these sites.

Explores art of the body, defined broadly, from various perspectives. Examines colonial representations of Oceanic bodies, self-representation through bodily adornment and display (including tattoo, scarification, body painting, ornament, and dress), and bodily metaphors in Oceanic visual cultures.

Investigates how textiles contribute to cultural fabric of Oceania. Explores women's roles in socioeconomic exchanges and cultural production; gender issues regarding production and function of Oceanic textiles; and history of processes, functions, and aesthetics. Prerequisite: Prior coursework related to Oceania recommended.

Examines representations of Pacific Island cultures. Explores the history of indigenous communities' relationships with museums and heritage institutions, and strategies to represent Oceanic histories, knowledges, and futures. Studies how stakeholders in cultural representation develop collaborative approaches to pursuing decolonized heritage practices.

Examines selected and changing topics in the study of oceanic visual culture. The specific topic varies with each offering in order to keep up with recent directions in scholarship. Possible topics include: archaeological material and visual cultures; colonial-era images, objects, and spaces; architecture and environments; performance; gender; race and ethnicity; modern/contemporary art and visual culture; and/or a regional focus.

Examines major developments in art and theory, 1980s-present. Close consideration of how artists from around the globe innovatively respond to often fraught social, political, and economic circumstances. Topics include: experimental social relations, diaspora, migration, decolonization, institutional critique, globalization, the commons, and ecology. (Formerly Global Contemporary Art.)

Explores a variety of professional practices related to art history and visual studies. Focuses on critical issues central to community-engaged professional practice. Topics include: museums and communities, art and civic engagement, managing visual archives and collections, art law, cultural property, heritage preservation, art conservation, community arts organizations, public art, arts administration, academia, pedagogy, the vital role of the arts and the humanities in contemporary life. (Formerly Art and Community: Arts Professions and Community Engagement.)

Explores the theme of horror in 20th/21st-Century visual culture. Unpacks how horror is often reflective of entrenched cultural anxieties around the interplay between gender, morality, and female sexuality.

Examines how indigenous artists and activists visually respond to issues related to land and sovereignty. Looks at a broad range of media used by indigenous creative practitioners, including documentary filmmaking, printmaking, photography, and performance.

Students gain critical skills to grapple with queer art, visual culture, and theory of diverse histories and geographies. Students consider how queer is applied and appropriated in the scope of in/visibility in a transnational context.

Investigates display histories of natural, ethnographic, and historical objects as well as contemporary art curation practices. Explores how curatorial methodologies can reinforce or challenge inequalities implicit in choosing what and how objects are seen.

Explores the recent history of curatorial practice. Through studying important exhibitions produced in recent decades, students learn about the range of social, political, and economic factors influencing how art is conceived and displayed today.

Examines key moments and projects in site-specific art since the 1960s, including Earth Works, the rise of installation art, and the interplay between artists and institutional venues sponsoring such projects, including museums, private galleries and patrons, and biennials.

Considers visual and material culture (art, architecture, heritage sites, monuments, and museums) from around the world to explore how expressions of collective memory address the present through memorializing, commemorating, changing, or forgetting the past. (Formerly Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture.)

Advanced seminar requiring intensive research and writing on changing topics related to a specific area of African art and/or visual culture chosen to demonstrate critical mastery of this subject.

Compares how play and ritual construct worlds and regulate visual cultures—from dolls to ritual objects and performances. Attention given to areas where play and ritual overlap and the visual cultures that result.

Examines the visual culture of the Mediterranean from the 3rd to the 7th centuries A.D., focusing on the historical and cultural developments which led to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and its transformation to what we call Byzantium.

Close study of the principal text of East Asian Buddhism as a self-enclosed vision of reality, with careful consideration of the forms and functions of the world of visual and aural representation that it has inspired.

Explores the distinctive conceptual world of the Buddhist Huayanjing (Avatamsaka-sutra) and its expression in visual forms. This long text, composed in Sanskrit and later translated into Chinese, is a principal scripture of the international Mahayana Buddhist traditions of Asia.

Examines selected issues in history of Chan (Zen) Buddhist traditions in China from medieval times to the present day. Concepts, methods, and visual expression of Chan practice situated through study of texts and visual materials.

Careful study of Mahayana Buddhist perfection-of-wisdom traditions--texts and related material culture, including visual imagery and illustrated books--with focus on the particular vision of reality that they aim to produce or reveal.

Examines the visual culture of the Vietnam-American war and its legacy in contemporary art of Southeast Asia. Considers representations in different media: painting, drawing, photography, film, novels, and material cultures. Issues addressed include memory, trauma, identity politics, body, race, gender, pornography, and prostitution.

Undergraduate seminar that takes topical and thematic approaches to looking at the visual cultures of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Media and themes include textile, film and literature, comparative modernity, race, gender, and sexuality. The specific topic and them varies from year to year.

Deals with representations of the female divinity in Indian religious imagery, and of women in secular and courtly paintings. Also examines roles women play in the production of art in the Indian subcontinent.

Examines selected and changing topics in the study of Mediterranean visual culture. Topics vary with each offering to keep up with recent directions in scholarship. Possible topics: Bronze Age Aegean cultures; myth, ritual, and religion in the Near East; Greek and Roman gender and sexuality; seafarers and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean; Islamic cultures of North African and Spain.

Explores Berlin's urban and architectural history through themes: the meaning of memory in architecture; the political and cultural implications of preservation, globalization, and tourism. Because these questions are relevant beyond Berlin, course draws comparisons with other cities.

What are the relations between the mortal body and politics in times of crisis? What purposes can death, or the threat of death, serve? Examines representations of executions, assassinations, and funerals during the French Revolution, with an emphasis on the Terror.

Western portraiture and self-portraiture at certain key moments (early modern Italy, 16th-century Germany, 17th-century Holland, France from the reign of Louis XIV to the Revolution, contemporary U.S.) are explored by reading 20th-century interpretations and some primary sources. This course can be taken for senior exit credit only by permission of the instructor.

Reframes and recontextualizes works of 19th-century European art by looking at recent scholarly approaches as well as the critical commentary offered by contemporary artists. (Formerly 19th-Century Art Now.)

Explores how critical theory illuminates forms of cultural production, from art and cinema to popular culture. Considers how scholars, artists, and filmmakers use critical theory both creatively and in the study of aesthetic objects and experiences.

Seminar on changing topics related to the current scholarship on pre-Hispanic and colonial Spanish American visual culture.

Religious, scientific, and secular manuscripts of Byzantium: examines how words and images interacted to express and promote central concepts of Byzantine culture; serve liturgical needs of private devotion; reflect imperial ideals; diffuse moral values and knowledge; and proclaim social status and cultural affiliations.

Why did the cult of the Virgin Mary become so important in Byzantine culture? Examines historical, cultural, theological, political, and social reasons for this development, seen through the interaction of Byzantine visual culture and literature.

Examines impact of culture contact on Oceanic and Euro-American visual cultures in context of discovery, colonialism, and postcolonialism. Topics include 18th-century visual culture, colonial identities, primitivism, syncretism, impact of Christianity, contemporary art/market, media, tourism, transnationalism, and globalization. Prior coursework related to Oceania recommended but not required.

Theoretical discussions and Pacific Basin case studies on 1) definitions of cultural, ethnic, and national identities; 2) relationship between art, museums, and construction of historical and cultural narratives; 3) ways tradition defined in art practices and used by groups to assert an identity in their present. Participants first develop a theoretical framework and vocabulary for analyzing artistic production in a variety of cultures. Through specific case studies, will explore how art, architecture, and museums actively contribute to define and challenge ethnic and national identities. Prior course work related to Oceania recommended but not required.

What happens when, to control an object, it is destroyed? Examines destruction of art as a way of ending the object's life cycle, as a device of social tension/change, and as a colonial and post-colonial mechanism of religious/political control.

Focus on the histories of miraculous images of La Virgen de Guadalupe de Extremadura (Spain) and La Virgen de Guadalupe de Tepeyac (Mexico). The foundations and growth of the cult of the Mexican Guadalupe during the colonial period is examined along with the multivalent symbolism of her image. Considers contemporary appearances of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from the miraculous images on a tree in central California and the compositions of Chicano artists, to mass-produced kitsch.

Explores how visual representation (in fine art, popular art, film, and television) encodes difference in selected cultural and historical contexts. Considers (post)colonial image-making both as a strategy of domination as well as resistance.

How can visual culture be understood as the production, circulation, and recirculation of signs? This course offers a history of semiotics and its methodological application in the analysis of images in popular culture and within the discipline of art history.

A close reading of works of art and theoretical texts by feminists working from 1970 to the present. The course encourages debate around the past, present, and future relevance of feminist theories to visual cultural studies, paying particular attention to issues of cultural and ethnic difference.

Examines what visual representations (feminine and masculine) reveal of gender in 19th- and 20th-century European and American culture; how images reflect norms of gender; and how we are conditioned to read images in gendered terms. Explores how femininity and masculinity were conceived during historical periods and how gender ideals changed in response to social, political, and economic pressures. Students encouraged to consider the fluid nature of 21st-century notions of ideal femininity and and masculinity and possible alternatives.

Considers the relationship between art, cinema, and postmodernism. Specific, thematically oriented topics are considered including: the impact of cinema aesthetics on contemporary art; film and digital technology; cinematic structure as cultural critique; and filmic strategies as an ideological tool.

Examines contemporary art visual culture in relation to climate havoc. Climate-change threats and impacts grow more widespread, frequent, and severe wreaking environmental havoc worldwide. In the absence of effective governance and international leadership in addressing adequate solutions, artists and activists are inventing and participating in creative strategies of consciousness-raising, mass mobilization, and ecologically sustainable modes of thinking and living. Seminar focuses on creative practices of climate justice, considering ecological transformation in relation to justice-oriented frameworks that both stress socio-political and economic inequities, and seek ways to rectify such inequalities. Also maps out new trajectories of practice and methodologies of scholarship at the convergence of art history, visual cultural studies, and climate breakdown.

Focuses on selected topics in the history of art and visual culture. Topics vary depending on instructor.

Examines contemporary visual culture and processes of decolonialization in relation to topics including: petrocapitalism, indigeneity, ecology, race, gender and sexuality, and multispecies ontology. Case studies include cultural practices in North America and Mexico, with diverse theoretical approaches.

Examines the history of racist imagery and stereotypes that have shaped public perception of Indigenous American peoples. From imperialist propaganda through current-day manifestations, class examines the negative impacts misrepresentations have on Native communities and Indigenous responses.

Seminar on changing topics related to the current scholarship on the art and visual culture of the Renaissance.

Seminar on current scholarship on Oceanic visual culture. Topics include pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial visualities; place and the built environment; performance; race; gender; travel and tourism; cultural institutions. Prior coursework related to Oceania recommended but not required.

Addresses changing topics in contemporary art. The specific topic varies with each offering to keep up with new directions in scholarship.

Advanced seminar requiring intensive research and writing on changing topics related to a specific area of American art and/or visual culture chosen to demonstrate critical mastery of this subject.

Explores the history of campus design in North America. Traces the ways designers have used the campus for staging new ideas of education and work, stimulating social relations, and connecting architecture with the natural world. Emphasis is devoted to UCSC and the Silicon Valley tech campus.

The history of architecture and design along the California coast. Through a series of case studies selected from topics in twentieth century design, course explores the roles of designers in mediating relationships between infrastructure and landscape, technology and natural forces, ideas of the artificial and natural, as well as between humans and non-human species.

Explores how art and other visual cultural practices--like participatory mapping, data visualization, and image sharing--negotiate the material and social consequences of both sudden and slow-moving disasters. Emphasizes critical, activist, and regenerative methods of representation, collaboration, and response.

Integrates academic study with meaningful community service to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities. Projects may serve non-profit agencies, schools, or art/culture institutions. Enrollment is restricted to junior and senior history of art and visual culture majors and minors. Enrollment is by instructor permission.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent field study away from the campus. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Independent field study away from the campus. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Individual study in areas approved by sponsoring instructors. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Individual study in areas approved by sponsoring instructors. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.