Courses

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 a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with members of the staff and faculty of the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2019 is "Ornament," departing from a broad understanding of just what constitutes a work of art (in addition to painting, sculpture, and architecture, we will consider a range of objects of material culture, from ceramics to metalwork to the human body itself), paying particular attention to intersections of aesthetics and utility, and the attitudes of various cultures, from antiquity to the present, toward adornment and its interpretation. Full details for ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction	Fall.
ARTH1132	FWS: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra This course is centered on Granada's Alhambra, built, for the most part, during the middle decades of the 14th century A.D. Both the most complete surviving medieval Islamic palace and the most popular tourist destination in Spain, throughout the more-than-six centuries of its existence, the Alhambra has inspired admiration and interpretation, this latter being influenced by intellectual trends and cultural currents as varied as Romanticism, positivism, Orientalism, post-structuralism, post-colonial theory and literature for tourists it was even the setting for Washington Irvving's famed Tales of the Alhambra. In this class students will learn to view and to write about the Alhambra through the lenses offered by these various movements and currents, as well as through the eyes of its contemporary audience, the 14th-century poets, courtiers, kings, mystics and the occasional Christian ally who frequented its beautifully ornamented halls and patios. Full details for ARTH 1132 - FWS: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra	Fall.
ARTH1168	FWS: Traveling Pictures and Objects in Islam What is the position of art in Islam? What do objects and pictures tell us about the imagination of Islam and the circulation of Islamic ideals and thoughts across space and time? This course takes as its focus the lives and travels of pictures and objects that were implicated in Islamic imperial conquests and the Indian Ocean maritime trade. By looking at Islam through materialities in the context of cross-border relationships made possible by both conquest and trade, this course locates Islam in areas as far as Africa, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Using art historical methods for writing about objects and images, this class encourages students to think about the various (re)interpretations and imaginations of Islam and its manifestations in pictures and objects. Full details for ARTH 1168 - FWS: Traveling Pictures and Objects in Islam	Fall.
ARTH1169	FWS: Intersections of Art and Law Full details for ARTH 1169 - FWS: Intersections of Art and Law
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. 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 Asian Art: Material Worlds 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 Asian Art: Material Worlds	Fall.
ARTH3001	Documentary Art How do we define reality with pictures? In this transhistorical course we focus on the theory and practice of depicting real objects and spaces—on works that could be called "documentary." These works are made not necessarily to inspire feelings of beauty or sublimity, express inner worlds, or to parody the real, but rather to crystalize attitudes and knowledge about the everyday. Techniques of landscape and view painting, mapmaking, descriptive printmaking, documentary photography and film with varying "pragmatic" purposes, including scientific illustration, patent illustration, advertisement, and political rhetoric, will be given special attention. Works and readings will range from the early modern to the contemporary era. Full details for ARTH 3001 - Documentary Art	Fall.
ARTH3250	Introduction to Dendrochronology Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State. Full details for ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology	Fall.
ARTH3440	Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael transformed the art of their time. Leonardo was an extraordinary thinker, scientist, and engineer as well as artist. Michelangelo invented grandiose projects for ambitious patrons and created a novel visual language with parallels to his poetry, and in his later years, profoundly spiritual images. Raphael, the consummate court artist, antiquarian, and archaeologist, produced a new classical style. Leonardo and Michelangelo pioneered new approaches to the study and representation of the human body. They deployed wit and humor and reinvented the grotesque from ancient art, and all influenced the proliferation of erotic art. Biographies presented them as geniuses, leading the Florentine sculptor Cellini to model himself in his autobiography on a larger-than-life Michelangelo. Florentine painters and sculptors grappled with Michelangelo's enormous inventiveness. We will also examine prints in the Johnson Museum after Michelangelo and Raphael, and consider recent attributions of new discoveries to them. Full details for ARTH 3440 - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World	Fall.
ARTH3830	Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment. Full details for ARTH 3830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema	Fall.
ARTH4040	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 4040 - 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.
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.
ARTH4354	Byzantine Archaeology A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies. Full details for ARTH 4354 - Byzantine Archaeology	Fall.
ARTH4820	Art in Zen and Zen in Art This course explores how the art of Zen (Chan) developed in China and was transmitted to Korea and Japan. It will also examine how ideas of Zen informed Western Modern art in both Europe and North America, and how these artistic ideas in turn influenced postwar abstract art in many parts of the world. Full details for ARTH 4820 - Art in Zen and Zen in Art	Fall.
ARTH4852	Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Full details for ARTH 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance	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.
ARTH6060	Visual Ideology Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media. Full details for ARTH 6060 - Visual Ideology	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.
ARTH6354	Byzantine Archaeology A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies. Full details for ARTH 6354 - Byzantine Archaeology	Fall.
ARTH6736	Aesthetics of the Sacred in Classical Antiquity This course will explore archaeological and literary evidence for the production, display, ritual treatment, and cultural reception of sacred images in ancient Greece. We will focus on some of the most fertile and problematic themes relating to the representation of divine beings in material form, such as the potential and limitations of anthropomorphism; the use of alternative modes of material manifestation such as aniconism and theriomorphism (the representation of gods as animals); the relationship between "cult" and "votive" images; the replication and adaptation of cult statues to new contexts of display; and shifting attitudes to image-worship within polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Students in Classics, Art History, Religious Studies and Anthropology should find this course of particular interest. Full details for ARTH 6736 - Aesthetics of the Sacred in Classical Antiquity	Fall.
ARTH6820	Art in Zen and Zen in Art This course explores how the art of Zen (Chan) developed in China and was transmitted to Korea and Japan. It will also examine how ideas of Zen informed Western Modern art in both Europe and North America, and how these artistic ideas in turn influenced postwar abstract art in many parts of the world. Full details for ARTH 6820 - Art in Zen and Zen in Art	Fall.
ARTH6830	Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment. Full details for ARTH 6830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema	Fall.
ARTH6852	Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Full details for ARTH 6852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance	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.
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.
VISST2701	Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights ('Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or "interracial" sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space. Full details for VISST 2701 - Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights	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 Asian Art: Material Worlds 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 Asian Art: Material Worlds	Fall.
VISST3001	Documentary Art How do we define reality with pictures? In this transhistorical course we focus on the theory and practice of depicting real objects and spaces—on works that could be called "documentary." These works are made not necessarily to inspire feelings of beauty or sublimity, express inner worlds, or to parody the real, but rather to crystalize attitudes and knowledge about the everyday. Techniques of landscape and view painting, mapmaking, descriptive printmaking, documentary photography and film with varying "pragmatic" purposes, including scientific illustration, patent illustration, advertisement, and political rhetoric, will be given special attention. Works and readings will range from the early modern to the contemporary era. Full details for VISST 3001 - Documentary Art	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.
VISST3443	Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael transformed the art of their time. Leonardo was an extraordinary thinker, scientist, and engineer as well as artist. Michelangelo invented grandiose projects for ambitious patrons and created a novel visual language with parallels to his poetry, and in his later years, profoundly spiritual images. Raphael, the consummate court artist, antiquarian, and archaeologist, produced a new classical style. Leonardo and Michelangelo pioneered new approaches to the study and representation of the human body. They deployed wit and humor and reinvented the grotesque from ancient art, and all influenced the proliferation of erotic art. Biographies presented them as geniuses, leading the Florentine sculptor Cellini to model himself in his autobiography on a larger-than-life Michelangelo. Florentine painters and sculptors grappled with Michelangelo's enormous inventiveness. We will also examine prints in the Johnson Museum after Michelangelo and Raphael, and consider recent attributions of new discoveries to them. Full details for VISST 3443 - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World	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.
VISST3830	Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment. Full details for VISST 3830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema	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.
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.
VISST4525	Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Artists This course will explore a concern shared by contemporary women writers and artists. In their works, bodily visibility raises questions about sexuality, race, and mother-daughter relations. They also use fiction and visual culture to show ingestion and forced incorporation. For example, many works emphasize scenes of eating and, contrarily, refusing to eat. Texts may include novels by Dorothy Allison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edwidge Danticat, Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Artists examined may include Renee Cox, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, Jolene Rickard, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Bernie Searle, and Kara Walker. Full details for VISST 4525 - Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Artists
VISST4793	Advanced Film and Video Projects A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester. Full details for VISST 4793 - Advanced Film and Video Projects	Fall, spring.
VISST4852	Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Full details for VISST 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance	Fall.

ARTH1100

Art Histories: An Introduction

This lecture course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Team-taught by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with members of the staff and faculty of the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2019 is "Ornament," departing from a broad understanding of just what constitutes a work of art (in addition to painting, sculpture, and architecture, we will consider a range of objects of material culture, from ceramics to metalwork to the human body itself), paying particular attention to intersections of aesthetics and utility, and the attitudes of various cultures, from antiquity to the present, toward adornment and its interpretation.

Full details for ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

Fall.

ARTH1132

FWS: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra

This course is centered on Granada's Alhambra, built, for the most part, during the middle decades of the 14th century A.D. Both the most complete surviving medieval Islamic palace and the most popular tourist destination in Spain, throughout the more-than-six centuries of its existence, the Alhambra has inspired admiration and interpretation, this latter being influenced by intellectual trends and cultural currents as varied as Romanticism, positivism, Orientalism, post-structuralism, post-colonial theory and literature for tourists it was even the setting for Washington Irvving's famed Tales of the Alhambra. In this class students will learn to view and to write about the Alhambra through the lenses offered by these various movements and currents, as well as through the eyes of its contemporary audience, the 14th-century poets, courtiers, kings, mystics and the occasional Christian ally who frequented its beautifully ornamented halls and patios.

Full details for ARTH 1132 - FWS: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra

Fall.

ARTH1168

FWS: Traveling Pictures and Objects in Islam

What is the position of art in Islam? What do objects and pictures tell us about the imagination of Islam and the circulation of Islamic ideals and thoughts across space and time? This course takes as its focus the lives and travels of pictures and objects that were implicated in Islamic imperial conquests and the Indian Ocean maritime trade. By looking at Islam through materialities in the context of cross-border relationships made possible by both conquest and trade, this course locates Islam in areas as far as Africa, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Using art historical methods for writing about objects and images, this class encourages students to think about the various (re)interpretations and imaginations of Islam and its manifestations in pictures and objects.

Full details for ARTH 1168 - FWS: Traveling Pictures and Objects in Islam

Fall.

ARTH1169

FWS: Intersections of Art and Law

Full details for ARTH 1169 - FWS: Intersections of Art and Law

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.

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 Asian Art: Material Worlds

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 Asian Art: Material Worlds

Fall.

ARTH3001

Documentary Art

How do we define reality with pictures? In this transhistorical course we focus on the theory and practice of depicting real objects and spaces—on works that could be called "documentary." These works are made not necessarily to inspire feelings of beauty or sublimity, express inner worlds, or to parody the real, but rather to crystalize attitudes and knowledge about the everyday. Techniques of landscape and view painting, mapmaking, descriptive printmaking, documentary photography and film with varying "pragmatic" purposes, including scientific illustration, patent illustration, advertisement, and political rhetoric, will be given special attention. Works and readings will range from the early modern to the contemporary era.

Full details for ARTH 3001 - Documentary Art

Fall.

ARTH3250

Introduction to Dendrochronology

Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State.

Full details for ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

Fall.

ARTH3440

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael transformed the art of their time. Leonardo was an extraordinary thinker, scientist, and engineer as well as artist. Michelangelo invented grandiose projects for ambitious patrons and created a novel visual language with parallels to his poetry, and in his later years, profoundly spiritual images. Raphael, the consummate court artist, antiquarian, and archaeologist, produced a new classical style. Leonardo and Michelangelo pioneered new approaches to the study and representation of the human body. They deployed wit and humor and reinvented the grotesque from ancient art, and all influenced the proliferation of erotic art. Biographies presented them as geniuses, leading the Florentine sculptor Cellini to model himself in his autobiography on a larger-than-life Michelangelo. Florentine painters and sculptors grappled with Michelangelo's enormous inventiveness. We will also examine prints in the Johnson Museum after Michelangelo and Raphael, and consider recent attributions of new discoveries to them.

Full details for ARTH 3440 - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World

Fall.

ARTH3830

Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment.

Full details for ARTH 3830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

Fall.

ARTH4040

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 4040 - 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.

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.

ARTH4354

Byzantine Archaeology

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Full details for ARTH 4354 - Byzantine Archaeology

Fall.

ARTH4820

Art in Zen and Zen in Art

This course explores how the art of Zen (Chan) developed in China and was transmitted to Korea and Japan. It will also examine how ideas of Zen informed Western Modern art in both Europe and North America, and how these artistic ideas in turn influenced postwar abstract art in many parts of the world.

Full details for ARTH 4820 - Art in Zen and Zen in Art

Fall.

ARTH4852

Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art.

Full details for ARTH 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

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.

ARTH6060

Visual Ideology

Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.

Full details for ARTH 6060 - Visual Ideology

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.

ARTH6354

Byzantine Archaeology

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Full details for ARTH 6354 - Byzantine Archaeology

Fall.

ARTH6736

Aesthetics of the Sacred in Classical Antiquity

This course will explore archaeological and literary evidence for the production, display, ritual treatment, and cultural reception of sacred images in ancient Greece. We will focus on some of the most fertile and problematic themes relating to the representation of divine beings in material form, such as the potential and limitations of anthropomorphism; the use of alternative modes of material manifestation such as aniconism and theriomorphism (the representation of gods as animals); the relationship between "cult" and "votive" images; the replication and adaptation of cult statues to new contexts of display; and shifting attitudes to image-worship within polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Students in Classics, Art History, Religious Studies and Anthropology should find this course of particular interest.

Full details for ARTH 6736 - Aesthetics of the Sacred in Classical Antiquity

Fall.

ARTH6820

Art in Zen and Zen in Art

This course explores how the art of Zen (Chan) developed in China and was transmitted to Korea and Japan. It will also examine how ideas of Zen informed Western Modern art in both Europe and North America, and how these artistic ideas in turn influenced postwar abstract art in many parts of the world.

Full details for ARTH 6820 - Art in Zen and Zen in Art

Fall.

ARTH6830

Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment.

Full details for ARTH 6830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

Fall.

ARTH6852

Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art.

Full details for ARTH 6852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

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.

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.

VISST2701

Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights

What does the representation of sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights ('Alf layla-wa layla) have to do with a politics of race and gender? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic text across literature, film, and popular culture, in the Middle East and in Europe. We will pay attention to the transmission of phobic tropes about female sexuality and miscegenation, or "interracial" sex as they manifest in various versions of 1001 Nights across time and space.

Full details for VISST 2701 - Forbidden Sex: Arabian Nights

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 Asian Art: Material Worlds

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 Asian Art: Material Worlds

Fall.

VISST3001

Documentary Art

How do we define reality with pictures? In this transhistorical course we focus on the theory and practice of depicting real objects and spaces—on works that could be called "documentary." These works are made not necessarily to inspire feelings of beauty or sublimity, express inner worlds, or to parody the real, but rather to crystalize attitudes and knowledge about the everyday. Techniques of landscape and view painting, mapmaking, descriptive printmaking, documentary photography and film with varying "pragmatic" purposes, including scientific illustration, patent illustration, advertisement, and political rhetoric, will be given special attention. Works and readings will range from the early modern to the contemporary era.

Full details for VISST 3001 - Documentary Art

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.

VISST3443

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael transformed the art of their time. Leonardo was an extraordinary thinker, scientist, and engineer as well as artist. Michelangelo invented grandiose projects for ambitious patrons and created a novel visual language with parallels to his poetry, and in his later years, profoundly spiritual images. Raphael, the consummate court artist, antiquarian, and archaeologist, produced a new classical style. Leonardo and Michelangelo pioneered new approaches to the study and representation of the human body. They deployed wit and humor and reinvented the grotesque from ancient art, and all influenced the proliferation of erotic art. Biographies presented them as geniuses, leading the Florentine sculptor Cellini to model himself in his autobiography on a larger-than-life Michelangelo. Florentine painters and sculptors grappled with Michelangelo's enormous inventiveness. We will also examine prints in the Johnson Museum after Michelangelo and Raphael, and consider recent attributions of new discoveries to them.

Full details for VISST 3443 - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and their World

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.

VISST3830

Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

This course provides an introduction to selected key themes in cinema and the moving image from South Asia. The course investigates documentary, artistic, and commercial cinemas, focusing on concepts and frameworks for understanding their development and their meaning. These include questions of form and narrative, the place of cinema during social and cultural transformation, and the relationship of the moving image in South Asia to developments in global cinema. Structured as a tutorial, this is a reading and discussion intensive course with limited enrolment.

Full details for VISST 3830 - Bollywood and Beyond: South Asian Cinema

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.

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.

VISST4525

Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Artists

This course will explore a concern shared by contemporary women writers and artists. In their works, bodily visibility raises questions about sexuality, race, and mother-daughter relations. They also use fiction and visual culture to show ingestion and forced incorporation. For example, many works emphasize scenes of eating and, contrarily, refusing to eat. Texts may include novels by Dorothy Allison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edwidge Danticat, Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Artists examined may include Renee Cox, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, Jolene Rickard, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Bernie Searle, and Kara Walker.

Full details for VISST 4525 - Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Artists

VISST4793

Advanced Film and Video Projects

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for VISST 4793 - Advanced Film and Video Projects

Fall, spring.

VISST4852

Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art.

Full details for VISST 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

Fall.

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