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 2023 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

How does one capture the likeness of an individual? What purposes do portraits serve, and by which criteria may they be judged? Are there aspects of a person that elude representation? We will pose these questions of both artistic and literary portraits, and seek answers by writing about portraits here at Cornell: in our museums, libraries, and around campus.

Full details for ARTH 1173 - FWS: Portraiture

Provides a lecture survey of the history of photography over a course of two centuries. Starting with its invention in the 1830s, covers the subject topically and chronologically. During the nineteenth century, focus is on technical developments and on the complex relations that situate photography in relation to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology and ethnology, exploration and travel, and science and industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography is enriched by new developments: its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion. In recent decades, photography has assumed a centrality in the practice of conceptual postmodern art, and is currently undergoing a major transformation in the age of digital media.

Full details for ARTH 2500 - Introduction to the History of Photography

This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present.  It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora.  Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts.  This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created.  Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.

Full details for ARTH 2550 - Introduction to Latin American Art

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

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

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. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. 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 and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for ARTH 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

This Curatorial Practicum evolved out of a Johnson Museum of Art's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative in 2014. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies.

Full details for ARTH 4110 - Curatorial Practicum

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for ARTH 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Full details for ARTH 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for ARTH 4310 - Methods in Medieval

This seminar charts the rise of fashion consumption and its links to artistic and material culture in early modern Europe. This seminar brings dress and bodily adornment into conversation with notions of technological advancement, global encounters and trade, emergent colonialism, and cultural cross-fertilization. Students will examine extant garments and textiles in relation to painting, drawing, sculpture, print, and literary imaginings of dress to assess the impact of different artistic media on the rendition of dress.  Students will consider the historiographical question of artistic mediation and its impact on contemporary understandings of historical clothing. Operating across the intersections of race, gender, class, and religious identities in early modern Europe, this seminar investigates how clothing and artistic production functioned in tandem to materialize markers of diverse identifications.

Full details for ARTH 4460 - Fashion in Early Modern Europe

Topic for Fall 2023: Tutorial. 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

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for ARTH 4684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?

Full details for ARTH 4822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea

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

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 Curatorial Practicum evolved out of a Johnson Museum of Art's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative in 2014. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies.

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. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. 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 and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for ARTH 6101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for ARTH 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for ARTH 6310 - Methods in Medieval

Topic 2023: Tutorial. 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

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for ARTH 6684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

The title alludes to an essay by Leo Strauss, now modified and expanded beyond political philosophy to include literary and audio-visual media (past and present) and psychoanalysis. Persecution (via censorship or heterodoxy) is both externally imposed and internalized. Texts include selections from: Plato (Epistles and Republic); Dante (Inferno, Canto X, as read by Gramsci); Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed); Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy); Machiavelli (as read by Strauss, by Gramsci, and by Althusser); Spinoza (Theological-Political Treatise); Hegel (as read by Marx); Lessing (Ernst and Falk on Freemasonry); also short selections from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Emily Dickinson. Titles indicate related topics: Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (A.M. Melzer); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (R. Girard); The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (M. Detienne); The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (F. Kermode); The Marrano of Reason (Y. Yovel); Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet (E.E. Lowinsky); Gulliver's Travels (J. Swift); Paranoiac-Critical Method (S. Dali); The Third Policeman (F. O'Brien); Subliminal Psycho—  (A. Hitchcock); Awaiting Oblivion (M. Blanchot); and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (G. Marcus).

Full details for ARTH 6780 - Persecution and the Art of Writing

Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?

Full details for ARTH 6822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea

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

This colloquium presents students with diverse approaches at the art-science interface used to interest, educate and motivate people to consider, address and solve environmental and sustainability challenges. It consists of a series of lectures given by experts, people with different expertise and perspectives who are addressing a variety of environmental and sustainability problems with regard to humanistic concern.

Full details for VISST 2002 - Environment and Sustainability Colloquium

This colloquium presents students with diverse approaches at the art-science interface used to interest, educate and motivate people to consider, address and solve environmental and sustainability challenges. It consists of a series of lectures by experts with different perspectives addressing a variety of environmental and sustainability problems with regard to humanistic concern. The small group discussion session allows in-depth engagement with the art-science interface. Building on the possibilities shared by our expert visitors, students in the discussion section will develop their own approach to addressing environmental issues. We will analyze how the ways in which information is shared is as significant as the information itself, and consider "artistic" and "scientific" perspectives as mutually beneficial tools for exploring and communicating our relationship to the environment.

Full details for VISST 2012 - Discussions of Environment and Sustainability

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

Provides a lecture survey of the history of photography over a course of two centuries. Starting with its invention in the 1830s, covers the subject topically and chronologically. During the nineteenth century, focus is on technical developments and on the complex relations that situate photography in relation to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology and ethnology, exploration and travel, and science and industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography is enriched by new developments: its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion. In recent decades, photography has assumed a centrality in the practice of conceptual postmodern art, and is currently undergoing a major transformation in the age of digital media.

Full details for VISST 2500 - Introduction to the History of Photography

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. Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography.

Full details for VISST 2511 - Beginning Dance Composition

This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present.  It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora.  Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts.  This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created.  Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.

Full details for VISST 2550 - Introduction to Latin American Art

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.

Full details for VISST 3175 - Global Cinema 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

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. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. 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 and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for VISST 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for VISST 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for VISST 4684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for VISST 6684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures