Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
ARTH1100 Art Histories: An Introduction
This lecture course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Team-taught by several professors from the department in collaboration with educators and curators from the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, its aim is to familiarize students with the most significant areas, epochs and works of art as well as with methods to study them. The course will be organized around specific themes central to the history of art. The topic for 2018 is "World Art, Technology, and the Environment." This theme will examine the intersections of art, technology, and the environment from antiquity to the present in various geographical areas and illustrate their interdependence with material examples from the art historical archive. Art works include stone and brick architecture; cement; textiles; stone, bronze and plaster sculpture; oil paintings; prints; photography; film and digital media.

Full details for ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

Fall.
ARTH1165 FWS: Art History's Frame: Writing Across Art, Law, Technology and other Fields
Artists since the 1960s have turned their attention from "work" to" frame" by intervening in exhibitions, questioning how art history is written, and making "the context" of art a central concern. This class draws inspiration from that charge to take an expanded view of the authors and texts comprising modern and contemporary art history, and highlights art's relationship to seemingly unrelated areas like law, technology, finance, and government. Readings will focus on the intersection of these fields, and will range from art criticism, activist manifestos, oral histories, biography, as well as legal documents and financial analyses.  Assignments reflect this interdisciplinarity through archival research and artist interviews, writing Wikipedia entries and exhibition labels, inviting us to reconsider – and re-write – the authoritative record through which cultural history is framed.

Full details for ARTH 1165 - FWS: Art History's Frame: Writing Across Art, Law, Technology and other Fields

Fall.
ARTH2200 Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects
What is the origin of the Olympic games? Why are the most famous Greek vases found in Italy? What was the "worlds' first computer" used for? What can a brick tell us about still standing Roman buildings? This course on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome will address all these questions. Covering the time span from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE) to the time of Constantine the Great (4th century CE), the class will focus on one object or monument per lecture and how it can be considered exemplary for its time. Students learn about and practice different ways of how to look at and analyze material evidence.

Full details for ARTH 2200 - Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects

Fall.
ARTH2255 Ecocriticism & Visual Culture
This course attempts to reconcile the split between art and science through a pluralistic perspective of environmental artistic processes. What is the role of visual culture in sustainable development? Cataclysmic change in the world has forced a turn in environmental art from isolated practices to having a fundamental role in shaping the transformation of our relationships to nature. Informed by Western and Indigenous philosophies, trace how artists enact ecological micro-utopias from earth art to ecological art as a catalyst for social change.

Full details for ARTH 2255 - Ecocriticism & Visual Culture

Fall.
ARTH2400 Introduction to Renaissance and Baroque Art and Society
This course examines some of the major works of European artists from 1400 to 1750, a period with huge changes in religion, political systems, and knowledge of the world. We learn chronological and geographical differences in artistic aims and styles, and explore various goals, among them representing the human body and emotions, telling stories, serving religious practices through visual images, and fashioning identities of different social classes. With the rediscovery of classical antiquity, both intellectuals and artists sought ways to synthesize classical and Christian. Tales of mythological gods could also convey philosophical ideas, gender relations, and concerns of love and lust. Artists include Jan van Eyck, Botticelli, Dürer, Bosch, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, among many others.

Full details for ARTH 2400 - Introduction to Renaissance and Baroque Art and Society

Fall.
ARTH2600 Introduction to Modern Western Art, from the Age of Revolutions to the Age of Capital
This course surveys major artistic movements and artists in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s New York. It introduces students to the study of "modernism" as a broad designation of the defining aesthetic innovations of this period. The course will consider the main currents of modernism with a focus on both formal analysis and historical context: Neoclassicism and Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, Abstraction, Dada and Surrealism, the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism. Major themes will include the onset of capitalist development within a metropole-colonial world system, the arrival of new scientific and technological discoveries promising transformations of everyday life, the emergence of new forms of individual and collective experience, and the impact of revolutionary political alignments on avant-garde practice and the novel theorizations which addressed it. Finally, the course will consider the formative encounters of various modernisms with a non-European world of art, and offer critical perspectives on the contemporary philosophical responses to this encounter. Considers modern art in a historical and cultural context, from painting associated with the French Revolution through American pop art. The emphasis is on major movements and artists: Neo-Classicism (David), Romanticism (Delacroix), Realism (Courbet), Impressionism (Monet), Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh), Cubism (Picasso), Fauvism (Matisse), Surrealism (Miro), Abstract Expressionism (Pollock), and Pop Art (Warhol). Different critical approaches are examined.

Full details for ARTH 2600 - Introduction to Modern Western Art, from the Age of Revolutions to the Age of Capital

Fall, Summer (Offered on Demand).
ARTH2805 Introduction to Material Worlds: Trade and the Arts of Asia
Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world.  The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds.  People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

Full details for ARTH 2805 - Introduction to Material Worlds: Trade and the Arts of Asia

Fall.
ARTH3100 History of Photography
How did photography become the world's most dominant kind of visual representation?  This course investigates photography's scientific origins and complex relations to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology, exploration and travel, and labor and industry.  By the 20th century we find photography enriched new developments that include its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion, and its centrality in the practice of conceptual art, postmodernism, and the art and surveillance of the digital age.

Full details for ARTH 3100 - History of Photography

Fall.
ARTH3250 Introduction to Dendrochronology
Introduction and training in dendrochronology and its application to archaeology, art history, and environment through participation in a research project dating ancient to modern tree-ring samples especially from the Mediterranean. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. A possibility exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean.

Full details for ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

Fall.
ARTH3419 Rembrandt's Circle: Global Dutch - Travel and Trade in Africa, the Americas, Asia
The variety of visual experience in 17th-century Dutch art is legion: still life, portraiture and self-portraiture, landscape and cityscape, architectural painting and scenes of everyday life, all in paint and print. New scientific technologies and trade routes, a proto-capitalist economy and highly networked society also place their mark on the cultural and artistic production in the Netherlands. This semester we will investigate the extraordinary global reach of the Dutch to both east and west, resulting in trade and luxury goods, new knowledge of peoples, flora, and fauna—considered marvelous—as well as encounters with and portrayals of difference. As they leave their marks on the visual, we will explore Africa and the African slave trade; East Asia, specifically Taiwan and Japan; South America, notably Brazil; New Amsterdam; Jakarta and Indonesia. Where available, we will address how indigenous peoples portrayed the Dutch. The course will involve meetings at the Johnson Museum.

Full details for ARTH 3419 - Rembrandt's Circle: Global Dutch - Travel and Trade in Africa, the Americas, Asia

Fall.
ARTH3505 Blaxploitation Film and Photography
Blaxploitation films of the 1970s are remembered for their gigantic Afros, enormous guns, slammin' soundtracks, sex, drugs, nudity, and violence. Never before or since have so many African American performers been featured in starring roles. Macho male images were projected alongside strong, yet sexually submissive female ones. But how did these images affect the roles that black men and women played on and off the screen and the portrayal of the black body in contemporary society? This interdisciplinary course explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in art, film, photography and the media. We will consider how the display of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world by examining the construction of beauty, fashion, hairstyles and gendered images as well as sexuality, violence, race, and hip-hop culture.

Full details for ARTH 3505 - Blaxploitation Film and Photography

Fall.
ARTH3510 African Art and Culture
This course is a survey of the visual artistic traditions of Africa. It investigates the different forms of visual art in relation to their historical and socio-cultural context. The symbolism and complexity of Africa's visual art traditions will be explored through the analysis of myth, ritual and cosmology, and history. In-depth analysis of particular African societies will be used to examine the relationship of the arts to indigenous concepts of time, space, color, form, aesthetics and socio-political order. The course will also investigate the modernist experience in African art. Therefore, art works produced within a modernist, post-modernist perspective, and other contemporary discourses will also be explored. Power Point presentations, films and videos will be used to illustrate material discussed in class.

Full details for ARTH 3510 - African Art and Culture

Fall.
ARTH3566 Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions.  This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile).  Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards.  This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Full details for ARTH 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

Fall.
ARTH3600 Contemporary Art: 1960-Present
This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.

Full details for ARTH 3600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

Fall.
ARTH3940 The Photobook
The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall.  This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book.  Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States.  Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing.  Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era. 

Full details for ARTH 3940 - The Photobook

Fall.
ARTH4101 Proseminar: Introduction to Methods
Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art," over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing of art history.

Full details for ARTH 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Fall.
ARTH4151 Topics in Media Arts
Topic for Fall 2018: Biological Art (Bio Art): From the late 20th-century to the present, artists have made art using live entities including plants, animals, cells, tissue cultures and bacteria. They have designed habitats, crops, body organs, created new species and attempted to salvage extinct ones. Some artists also have produced works in traditional media such as painting, sculpture and photography. While artists always have imaged and sometimes directly engaged with aspects of the natural world in their art, bio art responds to recent developments in genetics and information technologies. Because of its foundation on the life sciences this art entails significant ethical and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. For this purpose the class will consult with specialists and visit laboratories on campus relevant to the art covered in the course. We expect these interdisciplinary investigations to prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.

Full details for ARTH 4151 - Topics in Media Arts

Fall.
ARTH4162 The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies
This course examines the art and architecture of the Inca Empire (ca. 1438-1532), the largest indigenous empire in the Americas prior to the Spanish conquest. The first half of the course explores architecture, monuments, and portable arts from Cuzco, the capital of the empire, as well as smaller coastal and highland cities, to understand the complexities of Inca imperial aesthetics and their role in the administration of nearly 10 million inhabitants along the Andes mountain chain of South America. The second half of the course examines artistic production in modern-day Peru, Bolivia, and Chile during the period of Spanish colonial rule (1532-1824). Special attention will be given to the visual codification of collective memories of the Incas during the post-conquest era.

Full details for ARTH 4162 - The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies

Fall.
ARTH4171 19th Century Art and Culture
An examination and analysis of the major trends in art from Neoclassicism and Romanticism through Post Impressionism and the dawn of the twentieth century. Lectures and readings will concentrate on the historical context of great masterpieces by seminal artists. The class will investigate the imagery and theoretical foundation of nineteenth-century European and American art using a selection of appropriate methodological approaches. Major figures to be discussed include David, Copley, Goya, Delacroix, Courbet, Cole, Manet, Morisot, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, Sargent, Eakins, Homer, Rodin, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Part of each class will be devoted to discussions of the readings. Two classes will be held in the National Gallery of Art at times and dates to be determined. Exams, a term paper, and class participation will be used for evaluative purposes.

Full details for ARTH 4171 - 19th Century Art and Culture

Fall, Spring.
ARTH4233 Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology
Fall 18 topic: Archaeology of the Roman Provinces: Art and Archaeology of the Roman provinces as a 'sub-field' of Roman Archaeology has only recently gained traction in US academia, whereas in many European countries it still provides master narratives for national(ist) histories. Yet, in the wake of post-colonialism, the Roman provinces have proven fertile ground for more critical and theoretically informed archaeologies and art histories. What still needs more attention is the connectivity across provinces. The seminar therefore adopts a deliberately decentralized perspective. In looking at landscapes; infra-structure; production sites; military camps; the country side; urban centers; the material culture of domestic life and of the funerary realm, of religion, of gender and ethnicity we will emphasize interaction beyond or evading Rome. Rather than offering a systematic overview, the seminar proposes several lines of inquiry. Their main purpose is to interrogate the validity of several boundaries (geographical, methodological, theoretical, historiographical and institutional) that continue to define the field.

Full details for ARTH 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Fall.
ARTH4514 Post Colonial Studies and Black Radical Tradition
This course examines the intersection of Africana/Black Studies and Postcolonial Studies.  Although the two fields are often perceived as being distinct from one another, in reality they overlap in significant ways as the result of the immense contributions of African and African Diaspora theorists and intellectuals to the rise and evolution of postcolonial studies. Course readings include original texts by theorists and scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, W E B DuBois, Richard Wright, Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Sylvia Winters, in addition to Nawal Sadawi, Edward Said,and Gayatri Spivak among others. We will explore the contributions made to both fields by feminist, gender, race, and sexuality studies.

Full details for ARTH 4514 - Post Colonial Studies and Black Radical Tradition

Fall.
ARTH4816 Modern Chinese Art
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Full details for ARTH 4816 - Modern Chinese Art

Fall.
ARTH4854 Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia
This seminar will focus on the significance of water –economic, religious, political, social –and its role in the art and architecture of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Cambodia and Indonesia. While India and China can be seen to provide aquatic themes and patterns for transformation, the emphasis in this course will focus on local ingenuity, how technologies of water use and control at ancient sites in Southeast Asia can be seen to shape vivid symbologies, performing past and present. The course will be taught at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum with guest lectures presented by Visiting Scholar, Dr. Ea Darith.

Full details for ARTH 4854 - Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia

Fall.
ARTH4991 Independent Study
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 4991 - Independent Study

Fall.
ARTH4998 Honors Work I
A course for senior Art History majors working on honors theses, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the History of Art faculty.

Full details for ARTH 4998 - Honors Work I

Fall, Spring.
ARTH5991 Supervised Reading
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5991 - Supervised Reading

Fall.
ARTH5993 Supervised Study
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5993 - Supervised Study

Fall.
ARTH6000 Graduate Research Methods in Art History
This seminar introduces graduate students to a range of methodologies and approaches to teaching and researching topics in art history and visual studies. Each week, a member of the faculty will present his or her work to the seminar, highlighting unique research approaches, areas of specialty, technological challenges, and professional and pedagogical rewards. Topics include defining a research question; conducting archival research and fieldwork; syllabus design; identifying funding sources; and grant proposal writing. This course is required for all art history Ph.D. students and open to graduate students from other departments. Students are encouraged to use current technologies for presenting their coursework, including the creation of a blog for documenting ongoing research questions related to their teaching and dissertation.

Full details for ARTH 6000 - Graduate Research Methods in Art History

Fall.
ARTH6101 Proseminar: Introduction to Methods
Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art," over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing of art history.

Full details for ARTH 6101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Fall.
ARTH6151 Topics in Media Arts
Seminar topics rotate each semester.

Full details for ARTH 6151 - Topics in Media Arts

Fall.
ARTH6162 The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies
This course examines the art and architecture of the Inca Empire (ca. 1438-1532), the largest indigenous empire in the Americas prior to the Spanish conquest. The first half of the course explores architecture, monuments, and portable arts from Cuzco, the capital of the empire, as well as smaller coastal and highland cities, to understand the complexities of Inca imperial aesthetics and their role in the administration of nearly 10 million inhabitants along the Andes mountain chain of South America. The second half of the course examines artistic production in modern-day Peru, Bolivia, and Chile during the period of Spanish colonial rule (1532-1824). Special attention will be given to the visual codification of collective memories of the Incas during the post-conquest era.

Full details for ARTH 6162 - The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies

Fall.
ARTH6233 Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology
Topics rotate each semester.  Fall 18 topic: Archaeology of the Roman Provincs.

Full details for ARTH 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Fall.
ARTH6514 Post Colonial Studies and Black Radical Tradition
This course examines the intersection of Africana/Black Studies and Postcolonial Studies.  Although the two fields are often perceived as being distinct from one another, in reality they overlap in significant ways as the result of the immense contributions of African and African Diaspora theorists and intellectuals to the rise and evolution of postcolonial studies. Course readings include original texts by theorists and scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, W E B DuBois, Albert Memmi, Edouard Glissant, Leopold Cedar Senghor, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o in addition to Nawal Sadawi, Edward Said,and Gayatri Spivak among others.  In addition, we will explore the contributions made to both fields by feminist, gender, race, and sexuality studies.

Full details for ARTH 6514 - Post Colonial Studies and Black Radical Tradition

Fall.
ARTH6548 City-Scapes of the Late Ottoman Empire
This seminar is intended for Graduate students who are interested in exploring notions of space and place within the context of the late Ottoman Empire. Going beyond the examination of the "Islamic city" this seminar will bring theoretical readings about place making, in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, to bear on the late Ottoman case. From the urban frontiers of the empire to the capital, Istanbul, this seminar will tackle the latest in historical research on the late Ottoman Empire's parks, public monuments, city planning, public/private space, Ottoman official buildings, the "Turkish house," the "Arab house," city soundscapes, amongst others. We will critically examine how recent studies are re-shaping historians' knowledge of urban spaces and mental map of this vast empire.

Full details for ARTH 6548 - City-Scapes of the Late Ottoman Empire

Fall.
ARTH6566 Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas
ARTH6730 Ekphrasis: The Art of Description from Homer to Anne Carson
This course explores the use of "speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes." Known in classical antiquity as ekphrasis, this trope has received intense attention in recent decades across the fields of classical philology, art history, and literary studies. Setting ekphrasis within its broad context of use within antiquity (from rhetorical handbooks and speeches to epic poetry, epigrams, and technical treatises), we will trace the process by which the term has come to refer specifically to descriptions of works of art. From Homer's shield of Achilles to the vivid descriptions of the Greek novel, this 'sub-genre' of ekphrasis has also enjoyed a rich reception in later western literature, from Keats and Browning to Ashbery and Carson. Students will be encouraged to explore ekphrastic techniques across genres, cultures, and periods (and to practice writing ekphraseis themselves), whilst also considering the degree to which the discipline of art history is grounded in ekphrastic practice. All literature will be available in translation.

Full details for ARTH 6730 - Ekphrasis: The Art of Description from Homer to Anne Carson

Fall.
ARTH6816 Modern Chinese Art
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Full details for ARTH 6816 - Modern Chinese Art

Fall.
ARTH6854 Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia
This seminar will focus on the significance of water –economic, religious, political, social –and its role in the art and architecture of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Cambodia and Indonesia. While India and China can be seen to provide aquatic themes and patterns for transformation, the emphasis in this course will focus on local ingenuity, how technologies of water use and control at ancient sites in Southeast Asia can be seen to shape vivid symbologies, performing past and present. The course will be taught at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum with guest lectures presented by Visiting Scholar, Dr. Ea Darith.

Full details for ARTH 6854 - Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia

Fall.
ARTH6940 The Photobook
The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall.  This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book.  Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States.  Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing.  Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era.

Full details for ARTH 6940 - The Photobook

Fall.
VISST1101 Visual Literacy and Design Studio
This course is an introductory design studio.  The primary course objective is to introduce principles of visual literacy as it pertains to two-dimensional and three-dimensional issues in design at all scales.  Concepts about representation, expression, composition, color, form, light, structure, and function will be explored through project based learning.  The emphasis will be on learning explicit compositional concepts, visualization skills, and media techniques as well as implicit design sensitivities to serve the student throughout the rest of his or her DEA experience and beyond.

Full details for VISST 1101 - Visual Literacy and Design Studio

Fall, Spring.
VISST2174 Introduction to Film Analysis: Meaning and Value
Intensive consideration of the ways films generate meaning and of the ways we attribute meaning and value to films. Discussion ranges over commercial narrative, art cinema, documentary, and personal film modes.

Full details for VISST 2174 - Introduction to Film Analysis: Meaning and Value

Fall.
VISST2502 Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film
The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities.  This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.

Full details for VISST 2502 - Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film

Fall.
VISST2511 Beginning Dance Composition
Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography. Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work.

Full details for VISST 2511 - Beginning Dance Composition

Fall.
VISST2645 Introduction to Renaissance and Baroque Art and Society
This course examines some of the major works of European artists from 1400 to 1750, a period with huge changes in religion, political systems, and knowledge of the world. We learn chronological and geographical differences in artistic aims and styles, and explore various goals, among them representing the human body and emotions, telling stories, serving religious practices through visual images, and fashioning identities of different social classes. With the rediscovery of classical antiquity, both intellectuals and artists sought ways to synthesize classical and Christian. Tales of mythological gods could also convey philosophical ideas, gender relations, and concerns of love and lust. Artists include Jan van Eyck, Botticelli, Dürer, Bosch, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, among many others.

Full details for VISST 2645 - Introduction to Renaissance and Baroque Art and Society

Fall.
VISST2744 Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures
This course combines hands-on instruction in gamelan, Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music, and the academic study of the broader range of music found in contemporary Indonesia, including Western-oriented and hybrid popular forms. Students thus engage with music directly, and use it as a lens to examine the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it.

Full details for VISST 2744 - Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures

Fall.
VISST2805 Introduction to Material Worlds: Trade and the Arts of Asia
Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world.  The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds.  People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

Full details for VISST 2805 - Introduction to Material Worlds: Trade and the Arts of Asia

Fall.
VISST3175 Global Cinema I
Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history. Global Cinema I covers the period from 1895 to 1960. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: early silent cinema; the emergence of Hollywood as industry and a "classical" narrative form; Soviet, German, French and Chinese film cultures; the coming of sound; interwar documentary and avant-garde movements; American cinema in the age of the studio system; Italian Neorealism; the post-war avant-garde.

Full details for VISST 3175 - Global Cinema I

Fall.
VISST3342 Human Perception: Application to Computer Graphics, Art, and Visual Display
Our present technology allows us to transmit and display information through a variety of media. To make the most of these media channels, it is important to consider the limitations and abilities of the human observer. The course considers a number of applied aspects of human perception with an emphasis on the display of visual information. Topics include "three-dimensional" display systems, color theory, spatial and temporal limitations of the visual systems, attempts at subliminal communication, and "visual" effects in film and television.

Full details for VISST 3342 - Human Perception: Application to Computer Graphics, Art, and Visual Display

Fall.
VISST3419 Rembrandt's Circle: Global Dutch - Travel and Trade in Africa, the Americas, Asia
The variety of visual experience in 17th-century Dutch art is legion: still life, portraiture and self-portraiture, landscape and cityscape, architectural painting and scenes of everyday life, all in paint and print. New scientific technologies and trade routes, a proto-capitalist economy and highly networked society also place their mark on the cultural and artistic production in the Netherlands. This semester we will investigate the extraordinary global reach of the Dutch to both east and west, resulting in trade and luxury goods, new knowledge of peoples, flora, and fauna—considered marvelous—as well as encounters with and portrayals of difference. As they leave their marks on the visual, we will explore Africa and the African slave trade; East Asia, specifically Taiwan and Japan; South America, notably Brazil; New Amsterdam; Jakarta and Indonesia. Where available, we will address how indigenous peoples portrayed the Dutch. The course will involve meetings at the Johnson Museum.

Full details for VISST 3419 - Rembrandt's Circle: Global Dutch - Travel and Trade in Africa, the Americas, Asia

Fall.
VISST3463 Contemporary Television
This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how "new media" forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

Full details for VISST 3463 - Contemporary Television

Fall.
VISST3505 Blaxploitation Film and Photography
Blaxploitation films of the 1970s are remembered for their gigantic Afros, enormous guns, slammin' soundtracks, sex, drugs, nudity, and violence. Never before or since have so many African American performers been featured in starring roles. Macho male images were projected alongside strong, yet sexually submissive female ones. But how did these images affect the roles that black men and women played on and off the screen and the portrayal of the black body in contemporary society? This interdisciplinary course explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in art, film, photography and the media. We will consider how the display of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world by examining the construction of beauty, fashion, hairstyles and gendered images as well as sexuality, violence, race, and hip-hop culture.

Full details for VISST 3505 - Blaxploitation Film and Photography

Fall.
VISST3520 Light and Image
Light is the fundamental building block of all visual media. Whether a photographer, filmmaker, videographer, YouTube poster, or other maker of images, the strategic use of light can tell your story better, move your audience more deeply, and shape your composition more effectively. This studio course will take a hands-on approach to exploring different techniques of lighting, including location, kit, and grid systems. We will engage with both aesthetic and technical aspects of light. Students will come away with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for how light fundamentally affects and gives meaning to how we see the world.

Full details for VISST 3520 - Light and Image

Fall.
VISST3566 Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions.  This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile).  Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards.  This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Full details for VISST 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

Fall.
VISST3600 Contemporary Art: 1960-Present
This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.

Full details for VISST 3600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

Fall.
VISST3620 Lighting Design Studio I
The theory and practice of lighting design as a medium for artistic expression. This course explores the aesthetic and mechanical aspects of light and their application in a variety of disciplines. Emphasis is on understanding lighting's function in an environment and manipulating light effectively. Artistic style and viewpoint are also covered.

Full details for VISST 3620 - Lighting Design Studio I

Fall.
VISST3798 Fundamentals of Directing I
Focused, practical exercises teach the student fundamental staging techniques that bring written text to theatrical life. A core objective is to increase the student's awareness of why and how certain stage events communicate effectively to an audience. Each student directs a number of exercises as well as a short scene.

Full details for VISST 3798 - Fundamentals of Directing I

Fall.
VISST4101 Proseminar: Introduction to Methods
Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art," over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing of art history.

Full details for VISST 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Fall.
VISST4151 Topics in Media Arts
Topic for Fall 2018: Biological Art (Bio Art): From the late 20th-century to the present, artists have made art using live entities including plants, animals, cells, tissue cultures and bacteria. They have designed habitats, crops, body organs, created new species and attempted to salvage extinct ones. Some artists also have produced works in traditional media such as painting, sculpture and photography. While artists always have imaged and sometimes directly engaged with aspects of the natural world in their art, bio art responds to recent developments in genetics and information technologies. Because of its foundation on the life sciences this art entails significant ethical and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. For this purpose the class will consult with specialists and visit laboratories on campus relevant to the art covered in the course. We expect these interdisciplinary investigations to prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.

Full details for VISST 4151 - Topics in Media Arts

Fall.
VISST4162 The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies
This course examines the art and architecture of the Inca Empire (ca. 1438-1532), the largest indigenous empire in the Americas prior to the Spanish conquest. The first half of the course explores architecture, monuments, and portable arts from Cuzco, the capital of the empire, as well as smaller coastal and highland cities, to understand the complexities of Inca imperial aesthetics and their role in the administration of nearly 10 million inhabitants along the Andes mountain chain of South America. The second half of the course examines artistic production in modern-day Peru, Bolivia, and Chile during the period of Spanish colonial rule (1532-1824). Special attention will be given to the visual codification of collective memories of the Incas during the post-conquest era.

Full details for VISST 4162 - The Inca Empire and its Colonial Legacies

Fall.
VISST4436 Topics in Indian Film
The course will treat various aspects of Indian film, with focal topics to vary from year to year.  These topics will include religion in Indian film, Indian art films, and the golden age of Indian film.  All topics will be discussed in relation to the conventions of mainstream Bollywood cinema and their social and cultural significance.  Each week a film must be viewed to prepare for class discussion; screenings will be arranged as appropriate. No knowledge of an Indian language is needed.

Full details for VISST 4436 - Topics in Indian Film

Fall.
VISST4854 Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia
This seminar will focus on the significance of water –economic, religious, political, social –and its role in the art and architecture of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Cambodia and Indonesia. While India and China can be seen to provide aquatic themes and patterns for transformation, the emphasis in this course will focus on local ingenuity, how technologies of water use and control at ancient sites in Southeast Asia can be seen to shape vivid symbologies, performing past and present. The course will be taught at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum with guest lectures presented by Visiting Scholar, Dr. Ea Darith.

Full details for VISST 4854 - Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia

Fall.
VISST6151 Topics in Media Arts
Seminar topics rotate each semester.

Full details for VISST 6151 - Topics in Media Arts

Fall.
VISST6308 Expanded Practice Seminar
Expanded Practice Seminars bring students and faculty in the humanities and the design disciplines together around a common and pressing urban issue such as the cultural and material practices induced by national or ethnic divisions; the increasingly leaky taxonomy of the terra firma in areas where land/water boundaries are rapidly changing; and the inadequacy of static zoning models that fail to capture dynamic, urban economics and performance. The intent of the Expanded Practice Seminar is to study complex urban conditions using theoretical and analytic tools derived in equal part from the design disciplines and humanist studies. The Expanded Practice Seminar includes a site visit to experience the conditions under study and meet with local experts, designers, and authorities.  Expanded Practice Seminars are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. For current special topic seminar description and application instructions, visit: urbanismeseminars.cornell.edu/courses/.

Full details for VISST 6308 - Expanded Practice Seminar

Fall.
VISST6854 Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia
This seminar will focus on the significance of water –economic, religious, political, social –and its role in the art and architecture of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Cambodia and Indonesia. While India and China can be seen to provide aquatic themes and patterns for transformation, the emphasis in this course will focus on local ingenuity, how technologies of water use and control at ancient sites in Southeast Asia can be seen to shape vivid symbologies, performing past and present. The course will be taught at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum with guest lectures presented by Visiting Scholar, Dr. Ea Darith.

Full details for VISST 6854 - Water: Art & Politics in Southeast Asia

Fall.
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