This course will allow first-years to answer the question: from where, and how, did the idea evolve that one might catch a picture in a net, as one might catch not only a butterfly but the piece of sky in which it flew? By discovering how photography evolved, students will learn how many forces—artistic, scientific, technological, political, phenomenological, and structural—are responsible for the appearance of a single invention and idea. Episodes from the history of optics, perspective drawing, mapmaking, landscape, chemistry, view painting, will be glimpsed (1300-1800) as well as the race to capture the image in the camera obscura (1800-1839) and an introduction to early photographic processes (1839-1870).

Full details for ARTH 1163 - FWS: Origins of Photography

We think that photographs show us a perfect re-creation of the world around us, but photographs are imperfect slices of reality. Historically, what kinds of people, places, and phenomena were photographs unable to capture? What lurks just outside of or beyond the edge of the frame? This course will ask students to consider the politics of making photographs and rendering certain subjects visible (or invisible). Throughout the course, we will examine photographs from the nineteenth century to the present and read texts by art historians, cultural critics, and creative writers that present different ways of seeing and interpreting photographs. Students will develop two kinds of writing in this course—formal analyses of photographs through close-looking and persuasive, well-researched essays based on analyses of scholarly texts.

Full details for ARTH 1164 - FWS: Looking through Smoke: Photography and Visibility

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies-photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Full details for ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

The art of Ancient Greece and Rome has a complex legacy within western culture that is inseparable from ideas about power, beauty, identity, and knowledge. As such, 'Classical' art has been appropriated for all kinds of ends, many of them deeply problematic. But what did ancient statues, paintings, vessels, or buildings mean for the cultures that originally created, viewed, and lived alongside them? How were they embedded within political and social structures, religious practices, and public or domestic spaces? What can they tell us about practices of representation and story-telling? How might they help us access ancient attitudes to gender, ethnicity, or social status? And why is any of this still relevant today? This course on Greek and Roman art and archaeology will address all these questions. Covering the time span from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE) to the late Roman Empire (4th century CE), we will focus on one object or monument each lecture, considering how it can be considered exemplary for its time. Where possible, we will engage with artefacts in our collections at Cornell, including the plaster-casts, as we develop skills in viewing, analyzing, and contextualizing material evidence.

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

Why did the ancient Egyptians build pyramids, and why did they stop building them? Why did they depict things in ways that seem stiff and unnatural? Is ancient Egyptian art “art”? These are some of the questions explored in this course, which spans late prehistory (c. 3500 BCE) to the Roman period (early centuries CE). We will take a thematic approach, progressing chronologically and introducing key genres where appropriate. First, we will explore central issues of symbolism, landscape, and materials through the architecture and furnishings of temples and royal tombs. Next come the social worlds of art. Can we speak of artists? How were gender, class, and ethnicity represented? Finally, we will survey the legacies of Egyptian visual culture in antiquity and the modern West.

Full details for ARTH 2240 - The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

This course focuses on African American and African Diaspora visual art from the 1800s to the present. It introduces significant artists and artworks as well as key movements, social, political, and economic issues, and critical discourse that mark this body of work. We will begin with an overview of African art and experiences of the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism that inform global blackness and our definition of diaspora. Then, we will address a range of topics central to African diasporic artmaking including representational struggle and visual capture, commodification, institutional and political critique, queered black gender and sexuality, spatial instability and reclamation. The core of the course is centered in the 20th century with a focus on painting, sculpture, installation art, performance, photography, film, and new media.

Full details for ARTH 2700 - Introduction to African American and African Diaspora Art

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ARTH 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

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. (SC)

Full details for ARTH 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

Grounded entirely in the collection of our on-campus museum, this course will introduce students to a broad chronological and geographical selection of examples of ‘Islamic’ visual culture via close encounters between students and objects. In addition to the scholarly essays and articles through which students habitually learn to analyze visual culture, we will employ fiction (some of which the students themselves will generate), poetry from all relevant periods, including contemporary, current events, travel literature, and more. All written work will be, as will all class sessions, grounded in the physical objects that will form our principal focus.

Full details for ARTH 3315 - Experiencing Islamic Art: The Johnson Museum’s Collection

This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the rediscovery of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European monstrous bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.

Full details for ARTH 3400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

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

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship-critiquing them and engaging their ideas-we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

Full details for ARTH 3755 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City-a center of the Chinese diaspora-we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

Full details for ARTH 3803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

The Curatorial Practicum is a semester-long course offered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies. This Spring 2026 the seminar theme, “Performing Indonesia,” will be co-taught by Kaja McGowan, Associate Professor of Art History, and Ellen Avril, Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the museum. Library and museum collections of the performing arts of Indonesia will provide a wealth of possible stories that span almost eight decades. Students will be encouraged to explore the politics of display and shifting attitudes toward performance and rituals of spectatorship. They will also be invited to examine questions of heritage tourism, small-scale artisanal activity, provenance, repatriation, and community engagement. As an integral part of the course, curatorial interventions within the museum’s galleries will be staged.

Full details for ARTH 4110 - Curatorial Practicum

From the 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 biology 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 multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. These interdisciplinary investigations will prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.

Full details for ARTH 4151 - Topics in Media Arts

Topics Rotate: Spring 2026 topic: Olympia. Few sites of Greek antiquity enjoy a global resonance as large as that of Olympia, origin of the Olympic games. And yet, with its monumental archaeological traces reaching from the Bronze Age to late Antiquity, Olympia was more than a venue for athletic competitions. Besides those, the seminar focuses on the development of the site from an early hero cult to panhellenic sanctuary, its embeddedness in the landscape, its various political affiliations and mediterranean networks, its artistic productions, but also on Olympia as tourist destination in antiquity and today. Moreover, the site has been a laboratory of archaeological methods and negotiations of cultural heritage which we will revisit, beginning with the French and German excavations in the 19th century and continuing to this day with the involvement of a larger international community. Nazi Germany (Berlin 1936), Western Germany (Munich 1972), Greece (Athens 2004), and Cornell (Temple of Zeus Café) will serve as case studies on the modern reception of Olympia.

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

A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.

Full details for ARTH 4305 - Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100-1400 AD

This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe’s artistic and scientific landscapes through the lens of light and vision. This class will explore how early modern artists conceptualized the nature of light and vision and engaged with optical theories in painting, architecture, and material culture. Each week students will investigate a key art theoretical and/or scientific text alongside relevant artworks and objects. Topics covered will include the impact of scientific devices like microscopes and the camera obscura on painting; the aesthetic functioning of chiaroscuro; the development of linear perspective and trompe-l’oeil; the politics of shine; and luminous materialities. Students will probe techniques of artmaking and ways of seeing and will gain a nuanced understanding of the broader epistemological, social, and environmental factors that shaped European aesthetics and intellectual cultures.

Full details for ARTH 4462 - Early Modern Illuminations: Light, Sight, and the Visual World in Europe, 1400-1700

This seminar brings together work in critical black studies and psychoanalysis with recent black art histories to examine black abstraction and conceptualism. Blackness can be understood as a concept made material through the violence of racialization. This concept is endlessly mutable and variously signifies a wide range of psychoaffective phenomena associated with difference, Otherness, abjection, dependency, and much more. We will track the permutations of black conceptualism through conceptual art and visual abstraction, investigating the pressure blackness places on the assumptive logics of conceptual art as well as the potential the genre holds for understanding black being differently. Artists and thinkers will include: Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, W.E.B. DuBois, Huey Copeland, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Senga Nengudi, Steve McQueen, Cameron Rowland, Robert Morris, Clement Greenberg.

Full details for ARTH 4515 - Black Abstraction and Conceptual Art

This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists. The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques. The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art. German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 4540 - Film History for Art Historians

Topic: Art of the Arab World, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey.This seminar focuses on the art and visual culture of West Asia and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine methodologies informed by art history, media studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. We will also study periods and genres. These include colonial era photography, painting, and architecture; nationalist oriental painting from the early twentieth century; the consolidation of modernism during the mid-twentieth century; and contemporary artistic practice in the era of globalization.

Full details for ARTH 4695 - Studies in Global Modern Art

During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the supply chain for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Full details for ARTH 4720 - Curating the British Empire

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ARTH 4754 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

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? (SC)

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

An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts. (SC)

Full details for ARTH 4844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art

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 4992 - Independent Study

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 5992 - 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 5994 - Supervised Study

The Curatorial Practicum is a semester-long course offered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies. This Spring 2026 the seminar theme, “Performing Indonesia,” will be co-taught by Kaja McGowan, Associate Professor of Art History, and Ellen Avril, Judith H. Stoikov Curator of Asian Art at the museum. Library and museum collections of the performing arts of Indonesia will provide a wealth of possible stories that span almost eight decades. Students will be encouraged to explore the politics of display and shifting attitudes toward performance and rituals of spectatorship. They will also be invited to examine questions of heritage tourism, small-scale artisanal activity, provenance, repatriation, and community engagement. As an integral part of the course, curatorial interventions within the museum’s galleries will be staged.

Full details for ARTH 6010 - 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, 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

Topics Rotate: Spring 2026 topic: Olympia.

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

A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.

Full details for ARTH 6305 - Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100-1400 AD

Grounded entirely in the collection of our on-campus museum, this course will introduce students to a broad chronological and geographical selection of examples of ‘Islamic’ visual culture via close encounters between students and objects. In addition to the scholarly essays and articles through which students habitually learn to analyze visual culture, we will employ fiction (some of which the students themselves will generate), poetry from all relevant periods, including contemporary, current events, travel literature, and more. All written work will be, as will all class sessions, grounded in the physical objects that will form our principal focus.

Full details for ARTH 6315 - Experiencing Islamic Art: The Johnson Museum’s Collection

This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the rediscovery of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European monstrous bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.

Full details for ARTH 6400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe

This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe’s artistic and scientific landscapes through the lens of light and vision. This class will explore how early modern artists conceptualized the nature of light and vision and engaged with optical theories in painting, architecture, and material culture. Each week students will investigate a key art theoretical and/or scientific text alongside relevant artworks and objects. Topics covered will include the impact of scientific devices like microscopes and the camera obscura on painting; the aesthetic functioning of chiaroscuro; the development of linear perspective and trompe-l’oeil; the politics of shine; and luminous materialities. Students will probe techniques of artmaking and ways of seeing and will gain a nuanced understanding of the broader epistemological, social, and environmental factors that shaped European aesthetics and intellectual cultures.

Full details for ARTH 6462 - Early Modern Illuminations: Light, Sight, and the Visual World in Europe, 1400-1700

This seminar brings together work in critical black studies and psychoanalysis with recent black art histories to examine black abstraction and conceptualism. Blackness can be understood as a concept made material through the violence of racialization. This concept is endlessly mutable and variously signifies a wide range of psychoaffective phenomena associated with difference, Otherness, abjection, dependency, and much more. We will track the permutations of black conceptualism through conceptual art and visual abstraction, investigating the pressure blackness places on the assumptive logics of conceptual art as well as the potential the genre holds for understanding black being differently. Artists and thinkers will include: Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, W.E.B. DuBois, Huey Copeland, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Senga Nengudi, Steve McQueen, Cameron Rowland, Robert Morris, Clement Greenberg.

Full details for ARTH 6515 - Black Abstraction and Conceptual Art

This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists. The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques. The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art. German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 6540 - Film History for Art Historians

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

Full details for ARTH 6653 - History and Theory of Digital Art

Topic: Art of the Arab World, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey.This seminar focuses on the art and visual culture of West Asia and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine methodologies informed by art history, media studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. We will also study periods and genres. These include colonial era photography, painting, and architecture; nationalist oriental painting from the early twentieth century; the consolidation of modernism during the mid-twentieth century; and contemporary artistic practice in the era of globalization.

Full details for ARTH 6695 - Studies in Global Modern Art

During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the supply chain for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Full details for ARTH 6720 - Curating the British Empire

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ARTH 6754 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City-a center of the Chinese diaspora-we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

Full details for ARTH 6803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

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? (SC)

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

An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts. (SC)

Full details for ARTH 6844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies-photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Full details for VISST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

What does it mean to call a film is Jewish? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews-actors, directors, screenwriters, composers-play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class-an average of one per week-and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Full details for VISST 2790 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

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. (SC)

Full details for VISST 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of writing and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of oral vs. written and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

Full details for VISST 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media 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 and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

Full details for VISST 3175 - Global Cinema and Media

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

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

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

This course will trace ideas about photography, its technical processes, as well as the presence of photographic images in literary expression, museum exhibitions, institutional practices, and popular media from the nineteenth century to the present. From the album to the archive and from the printed page to the touchscreen, we will examine the ways in which the interrelationship between photography and literature alters our understanding of temporality, knowledge, memory, mimesis, history, affect, identity, power, and desire. Reading and viewing widely across genre, medium, and format will motivate our own expressive practices: crafting interpretive essays, penning arts reviews, designing exhibitions, and taking photographs.

Full details for VISST 3706 - Photo-Text

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

From the 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 biology 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 multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. These interdisciplinary investigations will prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.

Full details for VISST 4151 - Topics in Media Arts

The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration(s) -- images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories. Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, artistic inventors. Work we explore this year includes the inspiration of Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, R A Walden, William Kentridge, Coco Fusco, Toni Morrison Jenny Holzer, Beatriz Cortez, Laurie Anderson, the exploration of generative AI interventions and immersive performance techniques. This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. Working collaboratively—in workshop format—students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources.

Full details for VISST 4260 - Adaptation: Visceral Text and Performance

Sunset, polar night, Times Square, satellites in space—these are just four lightscapes. Light is essential to humanity in multifaceted ways. It both reflects and shapes human interactions with the environment. Yet light is also complex, multiple, and contested. This seminar explores diverse lightscapes in varied contexts. How do we know light? How does light define and shape landscapes and nightscapes? How have people managed, transformed, and valued different lightscapes over time? This course draws primarily from the history of science and technology, STS, and environmental history with forays into anthropology, environmental humanities, geography, media studies, and more. We will examine texts and images, and engage with lightscapes at Cornell and in Ithaca. The seminar culminates in a class project centered on student-selected lightscapes.

Full details for VISST 4460 - Lightscapes

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (SC)

Full details for VISST 4706 - Labor On and Off Screen

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 - Film and Video Production II

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

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations. (SC)

Full details for VISST 6706 - Labor On and Off Screen