The aim of this course is two-fold: First, to develop an understanding of the extraordinary variety of ways meaning is produced in visual culture; secondly, to enable students to analyze and describe the social, political and cultural effects of these meanings. By studying examples drawn from contemporary art, film, television, digital culture, and advertising we will learn techniques of analysis developed in response to specific media and also how to cross-pollinate techniques of analysis in order to gain greater understanding of the complexity of our visual world. Grades are based on response papers, class attendance and participation, and a midterm and a final paper. Occasional film screenings will be scheduled as necessary in the course of the semester.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of media studies. We will look at a range of both media and historical tendencies related to the media, including manuscript culture, print, and the rise of the newspaper, novel, and modern nation-state; photography, film, television and their respective differences as visual mediums; important shifts in attitudes towards painting; the place of sound in the media of modernity; and the computerization of culture brought about by the computer, social networks, video games, and cell phones. In looking at these, we will consider both the approaches that key scholars in the field of media studies use, and the concepts that are central to the field itself (media/medium; medium-specificity; remediation; the culture industry; reification and utopia; cultural politics). By the end of the class, students will have developed a toolkit for understanding, analyzing, and even using the media that shape their lives in late modernity.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 202

This course introduces the student to the field of archaeology through three units of study: 1) The history of excavation from ancient to modern times, 2) The techniques of excavation and the analysis of material remains, 3) Modern theories of cultural interpretation of archaeological sites. We will discuss the value of archaeological approaches to the fields of anthropology, history, architectural and art history, religious and classical studies. Much of the instruction will be illustrated by case studies of sites; although the view will be global, there will be a concentration in Old World material from prehistory to the early modern period. Students will be required to write three essays, with subjects selected from each of the three course units.

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This course introduces the arts of China, Japan, and Korea from around the year 1000 to the present. It provides a general understanding of premodern and modern cultures and civilizations of East Asia through artworks of diverse mediums as well as monuments across regions. It aims to narrate histories and map geographies by considering the roles of the arts. We will look at both regional resources and the mobility of materials and artifacts in transregional and transcultural contexts. Highlighted issues include the development of the Chan/Zen culture over the second millennium, ink art, print culture, East-West encounter, war art, and political art. This course succeeds Arts of East Asia (I): ca. 10,000 BCE – 1000 CE, but there is no prerequisite for taking the first part of the survey. The sessions will accordingly recapitulate the deeper past in order to give a purview of what had come down to this segment of the history. No prerequisite of language other than English.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course seeks to improve students' writing and analytical skills through analysis and experimentation with different styles of writing about contemporary and historical arts. Students analyze prose by artists, historians, cultural critics, poets, and others who have written on the visual arts, with an eye towards how writing on art can be a tool for improving expression in many areas. Slide lectures, discussions, and writing projects on objects of diverse media and historical eras will be augmented by visiting speakers and field trips to museums and galleries. This course fulfills one-half of the upper level writing requirement for both studio and art history majors. Permission of instructor required.

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Part historical, part theoretical and part practical, this class will explore recent currents in museum practice and exhibition-making, including Institutional Critique, New Institutionalism, Relational Aesthetics, Visitor-Centered Curating, and Object-Based Learning, all of which intend to transform the museum into an active environment for cultural participation, experimentation and learning. Students will use these concepts and case studies as departure points for a variety of projects related to the Memorial Art Gallery. These include reimagining areas within the museum’s display of its collection, and working on the interpretive plan for a section of the upcoming exhibition, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process. Classes will be held at River Campus and the MAG.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

The history of Russian art and architecture from the Christianization of Russia through the twentieth century. Students learn how to read icons, discern the major features of Russian churches, and follow the development of Russian painting from the age of realism to modern times. In English.

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The course will examine the nature and culture of the African Diaspora as found on the African continent, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. Among key issues on which the course will focus are variability, continuity and change in the cultures of different groups of Diasporan Africans, and relationships that are found between major environmental challenges as well as historical events such as the Islamic Jihads, Trans-Saharan Trade, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, colonialism, and Plantation Slavery in West Africa and the relocation and redistribution of African populations in Africa. A critical component of this class examines the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological research done in Africa, Europe, and the Americas to inform the student about theories and interpretations concerning the African Diaspora.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 413

What is a copy? The question may seem trivial and the answer obvious, yet just what do we mean when we say a work is a copy? Is a copy the same thing as a reproduction, replication, repetition, imitation, duplicate, or facsimile? And what of related terms such as fake, forgery or counterfeit? Throughout history artists have addressed the work of others, and sometimes their own work, from the point of view of imitating it, appropriating it, and refashioning it. As a practice copying in its many forms has underpinned the production of art since earliest times. As a theory imitation precedes notions of authenticity and originality, and may be said to bring these latter concepts into being. This course will examine copying across the full range visual media – painting, sculpture, architecture, printmaking photography, film and new media.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 163

Environment is the unification of space, time, and value. What does art have to do with it? This seminar examines the possibilities of art by considering its engagement with or alienation from the living worlds and beyond. It challenges the dualist views of culture and nature by instead examining the interdependence and interconnection among human bodies and other living organisms or non-living things. It will consider current pressing issues of Anthropocene, climate change, eco-aesthetics and the dark sides of the ecosystems, as well as the economy and politics of scales relative to the views of the local, global, and planetary spaces. Besides reading a set of interdisciplinary literature on relevant topics, we will focus on examples and case studies of Chinese landscape paintings throughout history.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course will examine African art in its cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. We will discuss artists living on and off the continent, working in various modes and media, and grappling with a broad range of concepts and themes. We will trouble the terms “traditional” and “contemporary,” asking how these words translate into the current landscape of African artistic practice. We will also consider what it means to be an “African” artist in the context of colonial legacies, shifting political systems, and ongoing migration. We will explore these topics through readings, images, films, group activities, individual assignments, and in-class discussions.

BUILDING: WEGMN | ROOM: 1009

Studies the history of “aesthetic” thought—namely the philosophical reflection on the concepts of beauty, taste, and sublimity, on our affective response to art and nature, and on the role of art and the artist in society—from Plato to the present, with particular emphasis on how it relates to questions of epistemology, anthropology, ethics, ontology, and politics. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dubos, Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Derrida, Rancière. Conducted in English.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

Shakespeare tells us that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." But what kind of stage is our world? And what sort of players are we? This class will take up such questions through the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. We will examine topics ranging from self expression and gender performance to forms of ritual and collective action. This course will be taught in English.

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 315

The course will examine the environmental, social and cultural dynamics that led to urbanism and other aspects of cultural transformation in Africa before the advent of European colonialism. Topics include concepts of civilization, civilization of Africa, including those of the Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa, the Western Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Inland Niger Delta and the West African Rainforest. The role of the peripheries in the development of these centres will be looked at.

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 315

From the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to the rise of the Soviet Union in 1925, Russia was the scene of political and cultural upheaval. The literature of this period is especially rich, with great poetic talents (Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky) and blockbuster novels (Sologub’s Petty Demon and Bely’s Petersburg), but all the arts participated. In addition to literature, this course will examine developments in music (Stravinsky, Scriabin), drama (the Moscow Art Theatre), painting (Vrubel, Roerich, Goncharova, Malevich), and dance (the Ballet Russe). No longer simply adapting foreign forms, Russian culture was at the forefront of the European avant-garde. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 began to bring this cultural renaissance to an end, and rising Soviet Power sent its remaining creative spirits underground or abroad, but its influence and memory in Russian and world culture has lasted till this day.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

From the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to the rise of the Soviet Union in 1925, Russia was the scene of political and cultural upheaval. The literature of this period is especially rich, with great poetic talents (Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky) and blockbuster novels (Sologub’s Petty Demon and Bely’s Petersburg), but all the arts participated. In addition to literature, this course will examine developments in music (Stravinsky, Scriabin), drama (the Moscow Art Theatre), painting (Vrubel, Roerich, Goncharova, Malevich), and dance (the Ballet Russe). No longer simply adapting foreign forms, Russian culture was at the forefront of the European avant-garde. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 began to bring this cultural renaissance to an end, and rising Soviet Power sent its remaining creative spirits underground or abroad, but its influence and memory in Russian and world culture has lasted till this day.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 401

The course will enable the student to understand the inception of present-day complex societies of West Africa and how they evolved, and their vicissitudes in the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 1950. Themes include general characteristics of West African societies in the Iron Age, origins of copper and iron technology and their effects on local societies, megalith and tumuli sites of the Western Sudan, urbanism, and trade networks and contacts in West Africa.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 181

The task of any discussion of frames and framing in the visual arts whether in painting, sculpture, film, performance, architecture, graphic novels and cartoon strips, or digital media - is first and foremost to counter the tendency of framing devices to invisibility with respect to the artwork they supposedly contain. We see the work, but we do not see the frame. It is against this tendency to ignore the frame that this seminar is directed. At first glance the frame may seem to be as unproblematic. Starting from a consideration of the foundational texts of frame theory in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, we will examine the discursive limits of the material and non-material border in the writings of, among others, Mayer Schapiro, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Louis Marin, Craig Owens, and Jacques Derrida.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

What does it mean to destroy an image? What ideas are behind such "iconoclastic" acts throughout history? This seminar explores various episodes in the ongoing war of, and against, images, when critics called for the destruction of works of art deemed too offensive or sacrilegious, and when individuals committed actual violence against representations. Beginning with an analysis of state-sanctioned iconoclasm in 8th- and 9th-century Byzantium, the course picks up again in the modern era, exploring the ways in which the public desecration of images expose complex political issues, whether such acts are conducted in the service of oppression or as forms of protest. Each week, we will explore an iconoclastic event, from the desecration of Christian art by French Revolutionaries in the 1790s, to the telecast of the dynamiting of the Bamiyan statues by the Taliban in 2001. In addition, we will ask how iconoclasm evidences an eternally renewed faith in the power and terror of images.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course will explore the many ways in which cinema operates as a time machine. Through close analysis of works by Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard we will consider varieties of cinematic temporality in relation to questions of history and memory (collective and subjective). Readings will include: Gilles Deleuze, Kaja Silverman, David Rodowick, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

PREREQUISITES: SHOULD HAVE ALREADY TAKEN TWO FILM CLASSES

Where do technological rationalism and aesthetic beauty converge? The course will address this question through an examination of things and places produced from the advent of the Industrial Revolution to the present, with a specific emphasis on the built environment as well as global contexts of industrial production. Theoretical and primary texts, including works by Marx, Benjamin, Loos, Le Corbusier, Kracauer, Banham and Appadurai, will contextualize a series of thematic concerns including the rise of an industrial vernacular, the “machine aesthetic”, the interrelationship of form and function, international transmutations of technology, Taylorism and Fordism, mass production and the industrial ruin. Subjects considered will include factories and plants, mass housing systems, objects of industrial design as well as artistic representations thereof. The course will be rooted in discussion but may be supplemented by formal presentations as appropriate.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

PREREQUISITES: Field trips in the Rochester area will be a critical aspect of the class. Students will be encouraged to develop a digital component to a term research project in consultation with the instructor.

Independent study under faculty guidance of a limited field of art history or individual study on a single topic at an advanced level under the guidance of a member of the art history faculty.

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Independent study under faculty guidance of a limited field of art history or individual study on a single topic at an advanced level under the guidance of a member of the art history faculty.

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Each student will intern in an institution arranged or approved by the Art and Art History faculty. The purpose of this internship is to give students an insiders' view of the workings of the art world. Students will be expected to document their internship experiences as a means of evaluation at the end of the semester. This program is limited to second, third, fourth and fifth year undergraduate students interested in learning about all aspects of contemporary art, about how art gets made, how it reaches its public, and the processes of its interpretation. Internships will consist of 20 hours per week, for which students will receive eight credits. Permission of instructor required.

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See "Requirements for Honors in Art History."

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Internships in London and the United States.

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