Art History Catalog

AHIS BC1001 INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY I. 4.00 points.

The first half of the Introduction to Art History explores premodern art and architecture around the world, from cave paintings to Song dynasty landscapes and Renaissance sculpture. Lectures and discussion sections are organized around themes, including nature and naturalism, death and the afterlife, ornament and abstraction, gender and sexuality, colonialism and conversion, and ritual and divinity. Visits to museums across New York are also an integral component to the course

AHIS BC1002 INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY II. 4.00 points.

The second part of the Introduction to Art History goes from about 1400 to 2015, circles the world, and includes all media. It is organized around one theme for each lecture, and approximately 100 works of art. Visits to New York museums and discussions sections are crucial parts of the course

AHIS BC2001 DRAWING STUDIO. 3.00 points.

Note course is limited to 15 students with instructor's permission on the first day of class.

This course will explore drawing as an open-ended way of working and thinking that serves as a foundation for all other forms of visual art. The class is primarily a workshop, augmented by slides lectures and videos, homework assignments and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will discuss their work individually with the instructor and as a group. Starting with figure drawing and moving on to process work and mapping and diagrams, we will investigate drawing as a practice involving diverse forms of visual culture

AHIS BC2005 PAINTING I. 3.00 points.

This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production

AHIS BC2006 Painting II and IV. 3 points.

Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class.

A continuation of painting I & III, open to all skill levels.  Students will further develop techniques to communicate individual and collective ideas in painting.  This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making.  Students acquire a working knowledge of traditional studio skills and related concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor.  Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments.  Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production.

AHIS BC2007 PAINTING III. 3.00 points.

This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production

AHIS BC2008 Painting II and IV. 3 points.

Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class.

A continuation of painting I & III, open to all skill levels.  Students will further develop techniques to communicate individual and collective ideas in painting.  This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making.  Students acquire a working knowledge of traditional studio skills and related concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor.  Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments.  Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production.

AHIS BC2019 Pedagogy of Play. 3.00 points.

Pedagogy of Play is a course that explores the art of teaching and learning through play. This course draws inspiration from surrealist games, Dadaist wordplay, Fluxus movement prompts, radical and progressive education experiments, exhibitions like the 1970 Jewish Museum show, SOFTWARE Information Technology: its new meaning for art, the teaching practice of Sister Corita Kent, Audre Lorde and bell hooks’ discussion of the erotic, Elvia Wilk’s exploration of live-action role-playing, and C. Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency As Art (2020). In this course, students will have the opportunity to design and facilitate playful invitations, prompts, scores, and/or happenings for their classmates. Additionally, students will design and present a playful art object as a workbook publication or portable FLUXUS-like kit. We will focus on questions of trust, care, and intuition in the teaching and learning process. More than anything, we will explore teaching and learning as a relational art, or what Octavia Estelle Butler calls “primitive hypertext.” We will consider how the playful invitations we design and facilitate can actively build relationships between people, places, ideas, materials, time, etc Play is an invitation for collaboration, risk, and learning. This class is organized around creating art objects that can be touched, manipulated, transformed, and destroyed in the process of learning and play. This course is interested in creating art objects for public engagement, not exhibition

AHIS BC2350 Medieval Art and Architecture . 3 points.

Medieval painting, sculpture, and precious arts from Late Antiquity to c. 1400, including early Byzantine, early Islamic, Merovingian, Visigothic, Insular, Carolingian, Ottonian, Mozarabic, Anglo-Saxon, and especially Romanesque and Gothic art. Questions include those of style, function, material, historical context, the earthly, the divine, ornament, the figural, and the geographic Other.

AHIS BC2355 APOCALYPSE. 4.00 points.

This lecture course explores how art and architecture responded to changing attitudes toward death, the afterlife, and the end of the world over the course of the European Middle Ages, from early Christian Rome to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Medieval illustrations of the Book of Revelation in New York collections will play a central role in discussions of plague, rapture, and “eschatology”—or concerns over the fate of the soul at the end of time. We will analyze the visual culture associated with ordinary people preparing for their own death and the deaths of loved ones, saints and Biblical figures whose triumph in death served as exemplars for the living, and institutional and individual anxieties over humankind’s destiny on Judgment Day. Artworks under consideration will encompass various media and contexts, including monumental architecture and architectural relief sculpture, tomb sculpture, wall painting, manuscript painting, reliquaries, and altarpieces. The course satisfies the major requirement's historical period of 400-1400. Note course requires 1 hour weekly TA discussion sections to be arranged

AHIS BC2360 Northern Renaissance Art. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

The Northern Renaissance (roughly c. 1400-1600) spans an historical period of epochal transitions: Europe began this era with a globe and mindset that rarely ventured beyond its geographic boundaries, and it concluded these centuries as one continent within a world that was emphatically, unavoidably, and thrillingly global.  The paradigm shifts entailed were no less pronounced in the visual cultures and fine art traditions of Europe north of the Alps; this includes the growth of middle-class patronage, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the printing press and print media, the practice of portraiture, the spread of humanism, the foundations of what might be referred to as an art market, and a fundamental revision of purpose and definition of art and the artist.  Threaded throughout many of these developments run questions of mimesis, realism, skill, medium, and the growing cult of the artist, as well as the relationship with the Italian Renaissance, the Mediterranean, and the expanding globe.  The Northern Renaissance witnessed the exciting birth of new media genres, especially oil painting on panel and the print, that would help determine the course of Western art history for centuries to come; at the same time, while the cultural and intellectual ruptures of the Northern Renaissance should be acknowledged, continuities with the earlier medieval world must also be remembered.

This course explores these and other histories as they played out within panel painting, book painting, the sumptuous arts (e.g., tapestries and metalwork), printing, sculpture, and architecture, focusing mainly on France, the Low Countries, Germany, and England.  We will begin within the late medieval world of Burgundy, Prague, and Germany before progressing through such key artistic personalities as Sluter, Broederlam, the Limbourgs, Campin, the van Eycks, van der Weyden, Memling, Fouquet, Riemenschneider, Dürer, Grünewald, Altdorfer, Cranach, Bosch, Holbein, and Bruegel—such a narrative, however, will be equally enriched with less familiar and less canonical works. 

AHIS UN2405 TWENTIETH CENTURY ART. 4.00 points.

The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses

AHIS UN2601 ARTS OF JAPAN. 3.00 points.

Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts

AHIS BC2698 American Monument Cultures. 4.00 points.

Cities, institutions, and impassioned individuals are pulling down statues of people implicated in the histories of slavery, colonization and violence. This class explores why monuments are important, how they have been used historically to assert political and social power and different points of view on where to go from here. The nation is caught up in a vital debate about how historical figures and events should be recorded in the public square. Spurred by protests in Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017 and moved forward during the uprisings against police brutality in the summer of 2020, cities, institutions and impassioned individuals are pulling down and removing statues of Confederate leaders and other individuals implicated in the histories of slavery, colonization and violence even as objections are raised to these actions from both the left and the right. This activism led to the formation of a commission to study New York City’s built environment in fall 2017 and its resolution advocating both taking down and putting up monuments here. Why are Monuments so important? How have they been used historically to assert political and social power? This course introduces the history of monument culture in the United States, focusing on monuments related to three controversial subjects: the Vietnam War, the Confederacy, and the “discovery” of America. We will study when, by whom, and in what form these monuments were erected and how artists and audiences of the past and present have responded to them. In addition to gaining historical background, students will create a podcast exploring the history and impact of a public monument in New York City. Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion and will include several guest speakers

AHIS BC2901 Contemporary Latin American Art. 3.00 points.

Focusing on South America, this course examines contemporary art produced in the region known as Latin America and its diasporas, roughly since mid-1940s to the present. The first half of the class attends to two tendencies of the 1940s–1970s, abstraction and conceptualism, lionized through a slew of acclaimed group and solo exhibitions organized across the hemisphere in the last twenty years. We will analyze these two tendencies in the distinct social, political, and economic contexts of their emergence in various “centers” of the continent paying special attention to the ideologies of modernization, progress, and economic development; political upheavals including violent dictatorships and other crises; artists’ relationship to Western European and U.S. cultural centers, and transnational circulation networks; and the role of art institutions. To this end, we will pay special attention to how these trends have been historicized to date, and to what ends. The second half of the class will examine practices since the mid-1970s to the present in a comparative perspective: one, through the lens of identity politics and, two, analyzing the dynamics of the increased global dissemination of works from Latin America and by Latin-American descendants. Several visits to art institutions in NYC will be required as a part of the course

AHIS BC2904 Arts of North America. 4.00 points.

This class provides an introduction to the visual and material cultures of North America, primarily the United States, from the Colonial Period until World War II, produced by artists with a variety of cultural and social identities. Through the close visual analysis of images and objects, the careful reading of primary sources, and the strategic engagement with recent scholarship, we will study how what and who is “American” have been defined and redefined over the past three centuries. In 2024, the course will be organized into four large thematic units focusing on the relationships between visual culture and a) materials and material practices, b) a) social and political identities, c) nature and the environment, and d) cultural institutions and public spaces. Each of these themes is keyed primarily to a different historical moment, but will reach beyond those boundaries. Painters, craftspeople, sculptors and photographers discussed will include (but not be limited to) Miguel Cabrera, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Lilly Martin Spencer, Harriet Powers, Rafael Aragon, Robert Duncanson, Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Francisco Oller, Thomas Eakins, Timothy O’Sullivan, James MacNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Lange. Readings draw heavily on primary sources to give students a feel for how artists and audiences described their own historical situations

AHIS BC2905 Latin American Art. 4.00 points.

This course introduces key issues and phenomena in the arts and visual culture of the region known as Latin America from the rise of the great Indigenous civilizations, through the Spanish conquest to the early twentieth century and the full emergence of modern nation-states. We will examine the role of art and so-called art in the heterogeneous cultures across the continent and their role in the construction of its diverse regional identities and their attendant historical narratives, including the incorporation of Pre-Columbian and folk cultures. We will discuss the tensions between religious and secular, imperial, proto-nationalist, and nationalist visions for the function of arts and culture in its various regions. Finally, we will pay special attention to the representations of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and their role in the Latin American identities’ formation. By the first-hand interaction with the art objects available in NYC art collections, during class visits and individually, and using knowledge and concepts acquired in class, you will develop confidence in analyzing and interpreting artworks in both oral and written form, and contextualizing them in relation to existing scholarly discourses. Working in two-person teams, you will also become fluent in using libraries, archives, digital collections, and image repositories to create a proposal for an exhibition of art from Latin America on the subject of your choice. By paying special attention to the issues of methodology, this course serves as a springboard to further in-depth study of Latin American or other, non-US an non-European art forms, as well as the Chicano/Latinx cultural production within the current U.S. territory and beyond

AHIS BC2990 Sculpting in Time. 4.00 points.

This is an introductory course in time-based arts: video, sound, and performance, understood through the language of both short and long cinematic forms. We'll start with an in-depth study of the life and work of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), whose art has a unique sense of time, driven by the unknown, the immaterial, and the spiritual. This class is for artists who want to construct their own sense of time, punctuation, and duration, as well as those looking to discover the visual and audio aesthetics of their generation. How does a feeling become an image, and what sound does it make? What are our media aesthetics and skins? Is there a way to address the optical beyond the eye and engage what we currently consider secondary senses, take our bodies back? Our collective task is to construct a camera (both a room and an apparatus) that captures both aural and visual images, creating a sonorous space where we can encounter ourselves in our own time. No prior knowledge of any medium is required. Not for the faint of heart

AHIS BC3003 SUPERVISED PROJ PHOTOGRAPHY. 4.00 points.

In this course, you will conduct independent projects in photography in a structured setting under faculty supervision. You are responsible for arranging for your photographic equipment in consultation with the instructor. This course will afford you a framework in which to intensively develop a coherent body of photographs, critique this work with your classmates, and correlate your goals with recent issues in contemporary photography. Students are required to enroll in an additional fifteen contact hours of instruction at the International Center for Photography. Courses range from one-day workshops to full-semester courses. Permission of instructor only. The class will be limited to 20 students

AHIS BC3031 IMAGERY AND FORM IN THE ARTS. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class. Application not required.

Operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theater, visual arts and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored

AHIS BC3428 The Making of Global Contemporary Art: Exhibitions, Agents, Networks. 4.00 points.

This lecture class introduces the notion of global contemporary art through the history of exhibitions, chiefly biennials and other large-scale endeavors, and principal agents behind them. On the one hand, the course considers exhibitions as a crucial tool of cultural diplomacy, which seek to position and/or reposition cities, regions, and even entire nations or “peoples” on the international scene. Thus, we will explore how the artistic interests vested in exhibition-making intersect with other—political, economic, ideological, and cultural—interests. We will consider those intersections paying special attention to the shifts in political relations and tensions during and after the Cold War, including the moment of decolonization in Africa; the moment commonly understood as “globalization” and associated with the expansion of the neoliberal capitalism after 1989; and, finally, the current moment of the planetary crisis. This expansive view of the “global contemporary art” will allow us to distinguish different impetuses behind internationalism and globalism that not only seek to establish hegemony, artistic or otherwise, but also look for the means to forge transnational dialogues and solidarities. On the other hand, this class seeks to illuminate how certain artistic idioms and approaches developed after World War II achieved primacy that influences artistic production to this day. To this end, we will examine the rise of a “visionary curator” as a theorist and tastemaker. We will also explore how more recent exhibitions have sought to expand the geography of the “canonized” post-WWII art movements and valorize artistic production conceived outside of the so-called “West.” In addition to weekly brief writing assignments (150–300 words each), both in and outside of class, the students in the course will reconceive the installation of one of MoMA’s permanent collection galleries (1940s-70s or 1970s-present) and produce a podcast that provides the rationale for the reinstallation in form of dialogue

AHIS BC3530 ADVANCED SENIOR STUDIO I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Limited to Senior Visual Arts Concentrators. Permission of the instructor.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings. For further info visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

AHIS BC3531 ADVANCED SENIOR STUDIO II. 4.00 points.

Advanced Senior Studio II is a critique class that serves as a forum for senior Visual Arts majors to develop and complete one-semester studio theses. The priorities are producing a coherent body of studio work and understanding this work in terms of critical discourse. The class will comprise group critiques and small group meetings with the instructor. Field trips and visiting artist lectures will augment our critiques. Please visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

AHIS BC3626 IN AND AROUND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. 4.00 points.

This course focuses on the history of modern art in the mid-twentieth century. To place mid-twentieth century modernism within its proper historical context, we will explore artistic practices elaborated between the 1920s and the 1960s in a wide range of different locations. We will also survey the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts during these years. The course will first introduce the development of modernism, anti-modernism and avant-gardism in the period between the two World Wars, exploring the changing relationship between these cultural formations in Europe, the U.S.S.R., Mexico, and North America. The second part of the course will study the vicissitudes of modernism and avant-gardism in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s that led to the formation of Concrete art in Europe and Abstract Expressionism and the New York School in the United States. The third part of the course will examine the challenges to modernism and the reformulation of avant-gardism posed by the neo-avant-garde in North America, South America, Europe and Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s. The course will address a wide range of historical and methodological questions and problems. These include: the challenges to the idea of artistic autonomy, the evolving concept of avant-gardism, the ongoing problematic of abstraction, the formal principles of serialism and the grid, the logic of non-composition, the persistence of figuration, the changing role of cultural institutions, the impact of new technologies on cultural production, and the emergence of new audiences and patrons for art

AHIS BC3642 NORTH AMERICAN ART AND CULTURE. 3.00 points.

AHIS BC3666 DEATH DRIVE 3000. 4.00 points.

“The aim of all life is death,” Sigmund Freud’s historic words do not appear strange today. Under siege of the perpetual breaking news cycle, the apocalypse is easy to imagine. Will it be an asteroid, a zombie virus or an all out nuclear war? Death Drive 3000 returns to the inanimate. Through a variety of reading, writing and making projects, this seminar studies the implications of our unbound and limitless death drive. Can any viable futures be located under the regimes of such imagination, futures that do not involve disposing of ourselves? From de Sade to Malabou to Clausewitz, topics include: primary nature, partial objects, necrosodomy, dismemberment, omophagia, suicide pacts, plagues, holocausts, total war and other symptoms of our collective end. Not for the faint of heart

AHIS BC3667 CLOTHING. 4.00 points.

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Across history and around the world, everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies theories of clothing from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, and sustainability. Issues to be studied include gender roles, craft traditions, global textile trade, royal sumptuary law, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, blockbuster museum costume exhibitions, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. Required 1 hour a week TA led section to be arranged

AHIS BC3673 Intro History of Photography. 4 points.

This course will survey selected social, cultural and aesthetic or technical developments in the history of photography, from the emergence of the medium in the 1820s and 30s through to the present day. Rather than attempt comprehensively to review every aspect of photography and its legacies in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course will instead trace significant developments through a series of case studies. Some of the latter will focus on individuals, genres or movements, and others on various discourses of the photographic image.  Particular attention will be placed on methodological and theoretical concerns pertaining to the medium.

AHIS BC3674 Art since 1945. 3 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Introduction to the history of art in post-war Europe and the United States from 1945 to the present, emphasizing questions of methodology of modernist studies and the diversity of theoretical approaches.

AHIS BC3681 Directions in Contemporary Art. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Introduces the history of contemporary artistic practices from the 1960s to the present, and the major critical and historical accounts of modernism and postmodernism in the arts. Focusing on the interrelationships between modernist culture and the emerging concepts of postmodern and contemporary art, the course addresses a wide range of historical and methodological questions.

AHIS BC3687 Modern Japanese Art. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

This class will explore Japanese painting, prints, photography and performance art from the mid-19th century to the present. We will consider artists' responses to rapid modernization, debates over cultural identity, and the ever-changing role of "tradition" in modern art practice. We will also discuss the impact of natural disaster and war on the arts, and the role of art in mediating social conflict. There are no prerequisites, but the survey of Japanese art history and classes in modern Japanese studies would provide useful background.

AHIS BC3698 American Monument Culture. 4 points.

Class will meet twice a week plus digital workshops to be arranged.

The nation is currently caught up in a vital debate about how historical figures and events should be recorded in the public square.  Cities, institutions and impassioned individuals are pulling down and removing statues of Confederate leaders and other individuals implicated in the history of slavery even as objections are raised to these actions from both the left and the right.  This activism led to the formation of a commission to study New York City’s built environment and to commit to both taking down and putting up monuments here.

Why are Monuments so important?  How have they been used historically to assert political and social power?  This course introduces the history of monument culture in the United States, focusing on monuments related to three controversial subjects:  the Vietnam War, the Confederacy, and the “discovery” of America.  We will study when, why, and in what form these monuments were erected and how artists and audiences of the past and present have responded to them.  The assignments will mirror this structure: through an essay and two multimedia projects, students will both present an analysis of existing monuments and make a proposal for new ones.

Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion.  In addition, students must attend two two-hour digital workshop.  We will take two field trips and assignments will involve visits to offsite locations in New York City.

AHIS BC3831 Museums of New York City. 4.00 points.

New York City is home to one of the world’s best museum ecologies. This seminar studies that ecology by museum type, against the backdrop of the city’s cultural, economic, and social history. How can theories of collecting explain different museum types? How do museums anchor municipal identity? Class sessions will alternate between discussion sessions at Barnard, and field trips to museums

AHIS BC3841 REFRAMING OLD MASTERS. 4.00 points.

This course historicizes the medium of painting and the institutional frame of the art museum in order to posit new solutions for presenting Old Master painting. At an art historical juncture in which medium-specificity and national traditions are increasingly rare and at a political juncture attuned to unequal histories of race, class and gender, how to engage with these works? What is the potential for subverting longstanding assumptions about the role of art by reframing the Old Masters through innovative juxtaposition, installation and interpretation by contemporary artists, curators and the public? This course, led by a curator in European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes place primarily at the museum. Assignments take the form of acquisition and exhibition proposals

AHIS BC3842 DESIGN DESIGNING I. 4.00 points.

Everything we contact has been designed. Design makes and unmakes desires on a global scale. It organizes our lives—from the way we move to the interface that tracks our movements. We’ve trained for the end for a while now, apocalypse is announced on every image channel. In a world, soon impossible to physically inhabit, the things we consume now consume us. The stakes have never been higher. To make a new world, we must use design. Our planet need not be disposed. It is an infrastructure for another one. To make contact with it we need to understand design as a value system for propelling possibility, not possession. The designed world requires new relation to things and fullness of use. As we read, write, experience and make our own projects, Designing Design helps us: acquire intimate knowledge of how we got here, recognize our historical allies and foes, and foster imagination and intelligence to live and make responsibly. This course requires no prior design experience

AHIS BC3844 Revolution and Art. 4.00 points.

In 1789, a French revolution shook the government foundation of Europe, and with it, all the arts. The principles of monarchy were rejected, women gained unprecedented freedoms, and French slavery was abolished. How did the arts express those upheavals? By 1805, areaction against the Revolution. An emperor crowned himself, women’s rights were revoked slavery was reinstated. How did the arts deal with this backlash?

AHIS BC3846 Designing Design II. 4.00 points.

The way an environment is made remains deeply embedded within it. Our environments shape us like our families, they nourish and educate us, they prejudice us. What if they were not a given? If our relationship to them was something we choose and shape, less of a blood relation, more of a lifelong friendship? A friend is an equal with their own agency and act as, a partner in play and life. Friendship is a place where we interact, welcome each-other and make the world together. The common task of this class is to devise a studio for making living environments to study how we could make, exhibit and live with art. Through a variety of individual and group readings and assignments, in-class case-studies and interviews we will test our preconceptions of space and time so that we may experience and inspire the state of being present. We will study and practice presence to form intimate bonds with interior, exterior, bodily and narrative environments already in existence and of our own making

AHIS BC3851 What is Art For?. 4.00 points.

Does art matter? How does it think of people and things, materials and minerals, the dead and the living? Can anything be art? Is art a part of life? Can it love? Can it bring change? Should it? Who can make art? Who is art for? Should art be public? Should art be free? How should art be traded? What desires should it power? How is art related to politics? Are they immediate family or distant cousins? Where and how does art live? How do artists live? What do artists want? What do we want from artists? What is art for? This seminar returns to the basics. During the COVID pandemic, the time of retreat, we embrace the opportunity to rethink our values. Our course is a stadium for posing vital questions about art from the diverse perspectives of five practicing artists. They are our weekly guests whose life and wisdom finds form in the act of making. In this class we read, write, debate and work toward understanding and putting to use the boundless resourcefulness of art

AHIS BC3853 Exhibiting Modern Inuit Sculpture. 4.00 points.

In this seminar, students will create a digital exhibition of ten stone sculptures produced by Inuit artists working within an important artistic tradition interconnected with Indigenous-Settler interaction during the second half of the twentieth century. Initially cultivated to bring Inuit people into the cash economy as part of a broader colonial process of disrupting seasonal migrations and subsistence lifeways, modern Inuit sculpture has developed in ways that increasingly center community leadership and assertions of artistic and cultural sovereignty in the face of environmental, economic, political and aesthetic change. The assignments for this class foreground writings, films, and artworks by Inuit scholars, artists, and community leaders. In preparation of the exhibition, we will and also work closely with the Brooklyn Museum staff to gain an understanding of their collection of Inuit sculpture and the staff roles in caring for it

AHIS BC3865 Paris: Capital of the 19th Century. 4 points.

APPLICATION DUE TO 826 SCHERMERHORN.Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

The Impressionist painting movement was committed to the representation of modern life.  What did modern life mean to the Impressionists, and how did they represent it?  How did Impressionist paintings interpret mid-nineteenth-century ideas about empirical observation, the re-design of Paris, urban spectacles, fashion, and the new reproducible media of their moment?  Each student will choose one painting in the Met collection on which to give two presentations and write a final paper. Through close visual analysis, students will put their painting in its historical context, using comparisons with other works of art, as well as both primary and secondary sources included in the assigned reading.

AHIS BC3867 Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Interdisciplinary Practices. 3.00 points.

Contemporary practitioners of photography often treat photos as not just images to look at but materials to manipulate. They create objects that echo the basic elements of the medium—light and lens—and use altered or expired photo paper. They assemble physical albums, fictional archives, and sculptural installations. They play with the circulation of images online, or share virtual experiences of spaces via printed images. In this course, we will look projects from recent decades that examine and expand the parameters of photography, including works by Liz Deschenes, David Horvitz, Zoe Leonard, Allison Rossiter, Stephanie Syjuco, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Via writing exercises, material experiments, and generative prompts, students will create their own research-informed projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world

AHIS BC3868 Tokyo. 4.00 points.

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended

AHIS BC3869 Earth, Water, and the Anti-/Post- and Decolonial Turns in the Contemporary Art of the Americas. 4.00 points.

This theory-driven seminar focuses on the artistic practices that engage two primordial elements, earth and water, developed in the wake of land and environmental art of the late 1960s–early70s. It centers the projects concerned with the politics of land and water in the aftermath of colonialism in the Americas, paying special attention to the work of those dispossessed by colonial projects—that is, Indigenous, Black, mestizo, and other racialized, diasporic, and/or migrant-descendant artists (i.e. Latinxs in the United States). For one, these practices are contextualized within the larger history of land/water representations and their attendant, often explicitly nationalist, ideologies as the attempts to remediate their effects and aftereffects. Two, these practices are analyzed vis-à-vis a wide range of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theories developed in the Americas and beyond in order to facilitate their historicization and theorization. It is the historical development of these theories that serves as a structuring tool for the course. In that vein, we consider the methodological question of how and when “theory” can be useful to art historical analysis, and how the concepts operative in the present can be applied and useful to the past, on the one hand. On the other, the seminar posits our current moment as a discrete era within a long history of struggles for self-determination variegated by distinct understandings of what the “Americas” are and how they were “made,” both of matter, peoples, and ideas. Simultaneously, it investigates concepts of time and temporality in order to illuminate and consider distinct understandings of human and other-than-human relations fundamental to the making and inhabiting of a “place.” Some of the authors discussed include Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Rita Segato, Juan López Intzin, Glen Coulthard, Sheryl Lightfoot, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang

AHIS BC3928 Dutch Seventeenth Century Art. 4.00 points.

This course is devoted to a close examination of Dutch art of the seventeenth century, one of the most celebrated chapters in the history of art. Students will be exposed to seminal art historical texts on the period, at the same time as they receive exposure to connoisseurship, conservation, and technical art history

AHIS BC3929 Fashion Revolution, Instagram Art History. 4 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

This seminar launches on Instagram the most radical and influential fashion plates in European history, from the Journal des Dames et des Modes.  A rare complete set of the Journal’s revolutionary 1797-1804 plates has recently been rediscovered at the Morgan Library, and digitized. The Morgan has generously allowed us to be the ones to release the plates online.

The French Revolution of 1789 promised that women and men could completely reinvent themselves, with the help of a total style transformation.

Between 1797 and 1804, after the political crisis of the first revolutionary years and before Napoleon became Emperor, the Journal des dames et des modes showed all Europeans how to look, read, and entertain themselves as modern individuals. It rejected the dress rules and materials that had signaled static social rank in favor of mobile self-expression through consumer choice. The change was so radical for women that it was partially reversed after 1804, but for men it endured.

AHIS BC3931 The Body in Medieval Art. 4 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

This seminar explores how the body, broadly defined, was represented, stage, and theorized in the art of medieval Europe.  The bodies discussed include human, divine, demonic, fleshly, corruptible, saintly, sexed, and raced bodies.  The seminar will thematically approach these different body genres via painting, sculpture, architecture, and the precious arts.

AHIS BC3933 BUOYANCY. 4.00 points.

“Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.”,Michael Caine , We do not live our own desires. Pressing ourselves into heavy molds not made for our bodies compresses us, tears our skin, and bruises our features. It is hard to breathe. We sink. Weight harbors the downward pull. It attaches itself in many ways but there are countless ways to set it down, to be free. This takes practice and skill. The common task of this visual arts seminar is to distinguish ourselves from the weight we carry. Through a variety or reading, writing, and making activities we shall seek out and contact levity: that gravity that changes our bodies, make us light of touch, aerates and propels us toward the state of buoyancy. Not for the faint of heart

AHIS BC3959 SENIOR RESEARCH SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: Course open to Barnard Art History majors only. Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in art history and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year

AHIS BC3960 SENIOR RESEARCH SEMINAR. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: Course open to Barnard Art History majors only. Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in Art History and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year

AHIS BC3968 ART CRITICISM. 4.00 points.

This course is a seminar on contemporary art criticism written by artists in the post war period. Such criticism differs from academic criticism because it construes art production less as a discrete object of study than as a point of engagement. It also differs from journalistic criticism because it is less obliged to report art market activity and more concerned with polemics. Art /Criticism I will trace the course of these developments by examining the art and writing of one artist each week. These will include Brian ODoherty/Patrick Ireland, Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Smithson, Art - Language, Dan Graham, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Judith Barry and Andrea Fraser. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artists oeuvre

AHIS BC3969 Art/Criticism II. 4 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
Course Limited to 15 Students with Instructor's Permission. Application due 11/13/15. Go to the BC AH website for more information and to download an application. www.barnard.edu/arthist

This course is a seminar on contemporary art criticism written by artists in the post war period.  Such criticism differs from academic criticism because it construes art production less as a discrete object of study than as a point of engagement.  It also differs from journalistic criticism because it is less obliged to report art market activity and more concerned with polemics.  Artists will include Ad Reinhart, Daniel Buren, Helio Oiticica, Juan Downey, Hollis Frampton, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, Mike Kelley, Coco Fusco, Maria Eichhorn, Jutta Koether, Melanie Gilligan.

AHIS BC3970 METHODS ＆ THEORIES OF ART HIST. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism

AHIS BC3971 Rococco and It's Revivials. 4 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

The useful arts of eighteenth-century France – furniture, interior decoration, clothing etc.. --  have always been considered among the masterpieces of decorative arts history.  A revolution in scholarship has made it possible to understand how these objects inaugurated some of modernity’s key values: individualism, private home life, consumer culture, women’s involvement in the arts, global capitalism, and an orientalist fascination with the Near and Far Easts.  Several class sessions will take place in the great decorative arts galleries of the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection, where students will give presentations on individual objects.

AHIS BC3976 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY. 4.00 points.

AHIS BC3984 CURATORIAL POSTNS 1969-PRES. 4.00 points.

Contemporary exhibitions studied through a selection of great shows from roughly 1969 to the present that defined a generation. This course will not offer practical training in curating; rather it will concentrate on the historical context of exhibitions, the theoretical basis for their argument, the criteria for the choice in artists and their work, and exhibitions internal/external reception