Courses

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 2020 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

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

Full details for ARTH 1172 - FWS: Writing About Art

Recent events in the USA and across the globe have drawn attention to the dynamic and highly political role that statues play within public life. But why do so many societies create statues, and why do they set them up in prominent spaces? How do statues work? And why do they loom so large in the public imagination? Looking both to Ancient Greece and Rome and the modern West, this course examines the social, political, religious, and erotic power attributed to statues across diverse periods and contexts, paying special attention to current events in the USA. We will explore topics including the foundational role of statues for political states (from the Athenian Tyrannicides to the Statue of Liberty), the commemorative function of statues (such as victory monuments and war memorials), the destruction of statues (from Christian iconoclasm to Confederate monuments), creative "statue-hacks" (from Rome's Pasquino to Wall Street's "Fearless Girl") and objects of cult (from Olympian Zeus to weeping Madonnas). The course will encourage students to consider statues relevant to themselves and their communities, including the Cornell cast collection, statues on campus, and those in your own home town.

Full details for ARTH 1704 - Statues and Public Life

This course offers a broad introduction to some of the artistic practices that have come to be known as "modern" in Europe and the United States. Beginning with the upheavals of the French Revolution and carrying through to the turmoil of two world wars, we will survey the role of both fine art and visual culture in a period of great political, social, and technological change. The very definition of art was revolutionized in this moment, as an emphasis on materials and experiments with new media like photography and cinema took precedence over the production of highly-skilled masterpieces. Particular attention will be given to exchanges between western representation and that of other cultures. Topics covered include revolutionary propaganda; romantic unreason; caricature and political critique; the changing pace of the modern city; architecture in the machine age; the place of women in modernity; and the impact of new technology on spectatorship. Students should leave the course with increased familiarity with key art movements in the modern era and the skills to analyze and appreciate art and visual culture from any period. 

Full details for ARTH 2600 - Introduction to Modern Western Art: Materials, Media, and the End of Masterpieces

With megacities, long-distance trade, and fluid identities, the Roman empire can seem uncannily close to our modern world. This course adopts a thematic approach to explore whether this is a valid parallel, based on archaeological evidence ranging from temples to farms, from wine containers to statues.

Full details for ARTH 2711 - Archaeology of the Roman World: Italy and the West

This course offers a survey of the art and culture of China from the Neolithic period to the twenty-first century to students who have no previous background in Chinese studies. The course begins with an inquiry into the meaning of national boundaries and the controversial definition of the Han Chinese people, which will help us understand and define the scope of Chinese culture. Pre-dynastic (or prehistoric) Chinese culture will be presented based both on legends about the origins of the Chinese and on scientifically excavated artifacts. Art of the dynastic periods will be presented in light of contemporaneous social, political, geographical, philosophical and religious contexts. This course emphasizes hands-on experience using the Chinese art collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art for teaching and assignments. In addition to regular sections conducted in the museum, students are strongly encouraged to visit the museum often to appreciate and study artworks directly.

Full details for ARTH 2800 - Introduction to the Arts of China

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

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

In this course students will examine the role of mechanical, electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with kinetic art and the cybernetically inspired work of the late 1960s, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net.art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms including interactive installations, robotics, generative art, artificial life art, responsive environments, bio art and video games will be a central theme. Students will be encouraged critically to evaluate a variety of theoretical discourses concerning modern technologies.

Full details for ARTH 3650 - History and Theory of Digital Art

This class focuses on individual collections of Greco-Roman material culture (originals and reproductions) held at Cornell. Students learn to identify, classify and interpret objects. Simultaneously they explore how objects and methods constitute each other from an epistemic and historical point of view. Theme for FA 2020: Cornell's Plaster Cast Collection - Built in the in the late 19th century, Cornell's cast collection simultaneously served as an art museum, art academy, and as "laboratory" for academic teaching and research. Casts operate on several levels: as replicas of (eventually lost or damaged) prototypes; as multiples with the power to establish a canon; and as originals in themselves. In this tutorial, students learn to identify and interpret these layers looking at individual casts from our collection. They will complete and update the already existing database. But they will also explore how this academic "tool" worked as an instrument of colonialism and racial prejudice. The findings will result in an online exhibition.

Full details for ARTH 4035 - Greco-Roman Art at Cornell

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

This course will explore visual and literary material surrounding women's engagement in U. S. politics over the past two centuries. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies. Drawing from the Johnson Museum's holdings and material at the Cornell University Library, students will be encouraged to explore the politics of display, museum interventions and institutional critique. Students will curate a small exhibition at the Johnson museum or online.

Full details for ARTH 4110 - Curatorial Practicum

Topic - 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, plants, body organs, imaged 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 depicted 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, social and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore the history of biological art as well as relevant literature 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 working on fields 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

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

Topic: The Art Super Star and the Global Art Economy.

Full details for ARTH 4507 - Topics in Contemporary Art

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 4545 - The Photobook

Topic: Art of the Arab World, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey.

Full details for ARTH 4695 - Studies in Global Modern 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

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for ARTH 4855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

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

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

The student under faculty direction prepares a senior thesis.

Full details for ARTH 4999 - Honors Work II

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

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

This course will explore visual and literary material surrounding women's engagement in U.S. politics over the past two centuries. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies. Drawing from the Johnson Museum's holdings and material at the Cornell University Library, students will be encouraged to explore the politics of display, museum interventions and institutional critique. Students will curate a small exhibition at the Johnson museum or online.

Full details for ARTH 6010 - Curatorial Practicum

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

Topic - 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 6151 - Topics in Media Arts

Topic: The Art Super Star and the Global Art Economy.

Full details for ARTH 6507 - Topics in Contemporary Art

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 6545 - The Photobook

Topic: Art of the Arab World, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey.

Full details for ARTH 6695 - Studies in Global Modern 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

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for ARTH 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

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

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Full details for VISST 2160 - Television

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

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

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 - Race and Sex: Arabian Nights

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

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

This course maintains a critical focus on the role of the moving body in the history of dance offering comparisons in theatre, film and other forms of media and live performance. Moving from the 16th century to present day, particular attention will be directed to the use of abstraction versus narrative and the role of process in the creation of body-centered works. Working both chronologically and conceptually, topics such as utopia, narrative impulse, technology, comparative modernities, political and social theory will enter the discussion. Attendance to live performance, film screenings, music concerts, museum visits and architectural and urban site visits will be required.

Full details for VISST 3227 - Global Dance II

This course explores the rich and diverse history of African American filmmaking.  Focusing on films written and/or directed by African Americans, this seminar traces the history of filmmaking from the silent era to the present day.  In exploring Black cultural production and creative expression, students will consider the ways in which film is used as a medium of protest, resistance, and cultural affirmation.  We will look at films through the critical lenses of race and representation in American cinema while locating our analysis within larger frameworks of Hollywood's representation of African Americans and various cultural and social movements within local and global contexts.

Full details for VISST 3461 - Introduction to African American Cinema

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

In this course students will examine the role of mechanical, electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with kinetic art and the cybernetically inspired work of the late 1960s, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net.art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms including interactive installations, robotics, generative art, artificial life art, responsive environments, bio art and video games will be a central theme. Students will be encouraged critically to evaluate a variety of theoretical discourses concerning modern technologies.

Full details for VISST 3650 - History and Theory of Digital Art

In 1968, amongst cultural and political turmoil, the American film industry adopted the ratings system, which helped usher in the kinds of cinema we know today. This course focuses on developments in U.S. cinema since then: its politics, technological and economic transformations, relationship to other media, and changing ways in which people consume it. A main focus will be the aesthetic developments of films themselves: new and changing genres, new visual styles, new ways of storytelling, and ways in which new voices and visions have emerged. Weekly screenings will include mainstream, independent, and documentary films. The course can be taken as a complement to "American Cinema" (AMST 2760) or independently.

Full details for VISST 3760 - American Cinema since 1968

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

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

Topic - 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, plants, body organs, imaged 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 depicted 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, social and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore the history of biological art as well as relevant literature 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 working on fields 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

Although the syllabus changes from year to year—emphasizing different themes—all films are discussed in relation to the conventions of mainstream Bollywood cinema and their social and cultural significance at different moments of Indian modernity. Topics that regularly recur include gender issues, religious differences, contrasts between the urban and the rural, and the ways in which class and caste issues are portrayed or elided.   Each week a film must be viewed outside class and several readings studied to prepare for class discussion; each student, moreover, will also be required to give an in-class presentation on a specific film that complements the main film for the week. Weekly response papers are required as well as some longer written work.

Full details for VISST 4436 - Topics in Indian Film

Topic: The Art Super Star and the Global Art Economy.

Full details for VISST 4507 - Topics in Contemporary Art

Curated fashion exhibitions are fabricated sites where research practice, creative design, storytelling, and aesthetics converge in order to convey visual and material narratives for public consumption. In this course, students will learn about curatorial practice more broadly and the display of fashion artifacts more specifically through theory and practice. Students will work collaboratively to curate a fashion exhibition using the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.  

Full details for VISST 4651 - Curating Fashion Exhibitions

This experimental seminar examines religious artisans and designers as central contributors to the religious worlds they help create. Reading across religious traditions and time periods, we will learn how devout people forming things with their hands simultaneously informs ethical systems, aesthetic regimes, and ways of accessing the divine. Members of this seminar will also explore artmaking as a mode of academic inquiry though a series of integrated artmaking workshops on the fundamentals of drawing and composition. Developing new hand-based skills while learning about religious makers will provide new insights into the world of material religion as lived phenomenon. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 4652 - Building Religion

The seminar investigates the historical force exerted by projection technologies on the definition of the world as an image. It explores a spectrum of projection theories, histories of projective mechanisms, and artistic deployments of projected images. Readings will traverse a broad theoretical and disciplinary terrain from histories of cartography, cinema, and climate modelling to linear perspective and psychoanalysis. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 4653 - The World as Image: Projection Technology, Media, Representation

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for VISST 4855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

Topic - 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 6151 - Topics in Media Arts

Intensive consideration of the ways films generate meaning and of the ways we attribute meaning and value to films. Discussion ranges over commercial narrative, documentary, and personal film modes. Graduate students who intend to teach film at the undergraduate level are especially welcome. In addition to full participation in the work of PMA 2540, graduate students read and discuss primary sources in film theory in weekly group tutorials.

Full details for VISST 6174 - Introduction to Film Analysis: Meaning and Value

Curated fashion exhibitions are fabricated sites where research practice, creative design, storytelling, and aesthetics converge in order to convey visual and material narratives for public consumption. In this course, students will learn about curatorial practice more broadly and the display of fashion artifacts more specifically through theory and practice. Students will work collaboratively to curate a fashion exhibition using the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. For longer description and instructor bio visit http://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 6651 - Curating Fashion Exhibitions

This experimental seminar examines religious artisans and designers as central contributors to the religious worlds they help create. Reading across religious traditions and time periods, we will learn how devout people forming things with their hands simultaneously informs ethical systems, aesthetic regimes, and ways of accessing the divine. Members of this seminar will also explore artmaking as a mode of academic inquiry though a series of integrated artmaking workshops on the fundamentals of drawing and composition. Developing new hand-based skills while learning about religious makers will provide new insights into the world of material religion as lived phenomenon. For additional information visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 6652 - Building Religion

The seminar investigates the historical force exerted by projection technologies on the definition of the world as an image. It explores a spectrum of projection theories, histories of projective mechanisms, and artistic deployments of projected images. Readings will traverse a broad theoretical and disciplinary terrain from histories of cartography, cinema, and climate modelling to linear perspective and psychoanalysis. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 6653 - The World as Image: Projection Technology, Media, Representation

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for VISST 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia