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.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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 judging the media that shape their lives in late modernity.

Location

Meliora Room 203 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Buildings are among the most public, visible, and long lived artifacts that a culture creates.  The built environment serves as both a repository of cultural information and exerts an influence that extends beyond the society that created it.  Architecture is art in a physical, three dimensional reality; it responds to the limitations of technology, design, and space while materializing ideals of aesthetics and beauty.  Famous designers, trained architects, anonymous craftspeople, and laypeople alike create architectural forms. 

This studio art course will introduce the ways in which we design, create, study, and convey architecture.  We will investigate practices of architectural design, history, building craft, and engineering in this class through lectures, research, in-class exercises, and thematic assignments.  The course will culminate with a fully realized design for a small building of your own invention.  This course will challenge you to recognize precedent forms and to create designs of your own, from sketch to 3D model making, that explore basic design elements.  Skills explored in this course can be used to gain a better understanding of the built world around us and pursue further studies in architecture.

This course is open to all majors, and prior architecture study is not required. If the course fills and you would like to be added to the waitlist, fill out the form found at this link: https://www.sageart.center/resources.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 103 (MW 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course will introduce students to the art, architecture, and archeology of ancient Egypt, from the Predynastic Period until the country’s inclusion into the Roman Empire. This course will highlight the wide range of materials encountered in Egyptian archaeology—architectural remains in secular, sacred, and funerary contexts; material culture (pottery, stone and wooden artifacts, artistic creations); human and faunal remains; written documents; iconographic material—and will evaluate how they reflect the cultural, social, and political organization of each major period of Egyptian history. Special attention will be given to both Egypt’s interconnections with its neighbors—Nubians, Libyans, and inhabitants of Syria-Palestine—and the impact of religion on the artistic production. Material will be presented to the students in the form of lectures, student-led discussions on specific readings and topics, and guest lectures.

Location

Hylan Building Room 101 (MW 4:50PM - 6:05PM)

This course introduces students to art made from the late 19th century to the present. We examine the various movements in their historical contexts, from Impressionism and post-Impressionism through Cubism, Abstraction Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, as well as contemporary developments like installation and performance art. We consider how issues of gender, technological developments, and wars and social movements have affected art. The course is taught through a combination of lecture and discussion, and we will be constantly looking at images to understand how ideas, social change, and history are refracted in works of modern art.

Location

Hylan Building Room 102 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

The primary visual, aural, and narrative structures and conventions by which motion pictures create and comment upon significant human experience.

Location

Dewey Room 2110D (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

How did archaeology come to be the way it is now? This course will survey some of the major theoretical trends that have shaped anthropological archaeology. More specifically, students will learn how anthropological theory has influenced the interpretive frameworks and epistemologies of archaeological inference. We will spend half of the semester focusing on early archaeological theory, and the second half on topics and theories that are now central in archaeology. By the end of this course, students should be able to define and identify the major theories in archaeology that include culture-history, processualism, post-processualism, middle-range theory, Marxism, agency, identity, feminist, community, and indigenous archaeology.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 442 (F 10:00AM - 12:45PM)

Is television a gendered medium? Given the prevalence of cop shows and male anti-heroes that characterize “peak” or quality TV (both past and present), many would assume that television is a “masculine” medium, made up of “masculine” genres. However, the history of television says otherwise. This course traces the numerous ways that television—as an institution, an industry, a narrative form, and a social space—becomes aligned with various notions of gender, in the form of femininity, domesticity, feminism, “women’s culture,” and the female consumer, all at different historical moments. What these different historical moments do share, however, is the assumption that the female television viewer is always coded as white, middle class, cisgender, and able-bodied. To examine how representations of gender have taken shape on television, we will study television chronologically, spanning television sitcoms and soap operas of the 1950s and 1960s, to the rise of feminist television (Julia, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) in the 1970s, to images of “working women” in the 1980s and 90s. In the final weeks of the seminar, we will discuss the rise of streaming television, “narrowcasting,” and contemporary attempts of intersectionality on television—and how new forms of television have created new ways of thinking about gender.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Despite its rich historical lineages and ever-evolving significance as a cultural practice, popular and scholarly perceptions of graffiti and street art remain firmly grounded in a narrow set of endlessly over-rehearsed debates (art vs. vandalism), origin stories (graffiti is from New York), and fetishized figures (Banksy). This course departs from such sedimented notions, offering a critical introduction to the study of street art and graffiti, understood broadly as self-authorized interventions into public space. Building an interdisciplinary framework grounded in urban studies, anthropology, sociology, art history, and cultural studies, we will deploy a dialectical approach that considers street art and graffiti as site-specific visual artifacts and as performative practices with the potential to actively transform public space and reimagine everyday life. Visual objects such as photographic archives, zines, documentaries, and digital collections will form an integral part of the course. Through field trips and guest speakers, students will be prompted to engage themes and methods discussed in the class within their immediate local context of Rochester.  

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course examines the phenomenon of urbanism in the ancient Mediterranean world. After a brief consideration of the rise of cities in western Asia and Egypt, the course focuses on the cities and colonies of ancient Greece and of the Roman Empire, with special attention devoted to Athens and Rome. Topics covered include town planning, public and private spaces and building types, urban life, and colonization, as seen through the archaeological remains of cities located around the Mediterranean basin and beyond.  There are no prerequisites for this course.

Location

Lechase Room 160 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Cities of the World explores the histories of a selected group of global cities during notable moments in their social, economic, and political lives. It spans roughly 40 centuries from ancient Mesopotamia to post-world war South America to investigate how cities have been made by, and have made, humans. This course will focus on one or two cities based on a theme each week and discuss the urban built environment and monumental architecture in their historical context. In this course, students will learn about the history of major cities such as Rome, Cairo, Tenochtitlan, Angkor, Paris, Beijing, Isfahan, New York, and Brasília. More importantly, they will comprehend critical social, economic, and political themes from the “Agricultural Revolution” to Capitalism. Finally, they practice how to “read” urban spaces by developing their spatial analytical skills in historical contexts.

Location

Morey Room 525 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course looks at how artists as well as museums themselves have been "critiquing" the
museum for generations, and at how museums are reinventing themselves under present day
pressures. Battles rage over who art belongs to––from indigenous peoples to the artists
themselves––and over how to conserve and display it. And on the flip side, museums have to
adapt to a world in which artworks are visible on our tiny screens. What do we make of the
many distinctions—between art and non-art, between ownership and stewardship, between
present and past, between performance and object—that museums are built on, and are
continually redefining? Through readings and potentially a visit to NYC's museums and
galleries, this seminar will examine these issues.

Location

Morey Room 504 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores key topics related to the social, cultural, and political contexts of art museums in the 21st century. A broad overview of the academic and professional field of museum studies will be presented alongside an in-depth examination of specific topics of concern to museum professionals. These topics include: the roles of the museum in society; the relationship between the museum and the artist; the ways in which museums engage communities; and how museums are reckoning with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. The Memorial Art Gallery (where much of this course will be taught) will serve as a case study for many contemporary issues in museum studies. 

Location

Morey Room 524 (F 12:35PM - 3:25PM)

This course examines the physical remains of ancient Greek civilization, with an emphasis on architecture, sculpture, painting, and other visual arts, in order to understand Greek culture and society. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Location

Harkness Room 210 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This class will consider the relationship of art exhibition and production in contemporary art practices as part of a gallery practicum. This course is an introduction to art exhibition practices including research, curation, planning, art handling, installation, and hands-on experience in galleries. Students will install exhibitions in the teaching galleries and spaces on campus, including (but not limited to) Hartnett Gallery and Frontispace Gallery. Students will visit galleries and museums and attend exhibition openings, studio visits, and artist lectures.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 102 (W 9:00AM - 11:40AM)

What do we know about the contemporary and past cultures and societies of West Africa? How has the nature and role of art and visual cultures of West Africa changed over time? And how has our knowledge about West Africa’s past and contemporary societies and cultures been produced and disseminated? This course is made up of two parts.  The first explores historic and contemporary societies and cultures of West Africa, focusing on the inception and development of complex societies of the sub-region between 2500 B.C. to the present. The second part of the course explores the character and meaning of contemporary and historic art works and artifacts of West Africa.

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course will offer a survey of African American film and filmmakers from the early 20th century to the 21st.  Directors we will study include: Oscar Micheaux, Ivan Dixon, Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, Charles Burnett, Carl Franklin, Dee Rees, Cheryl Dunye, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele.  We will also explore the incisive critical and theoretical work African American critics have produced in response to these films and the contexts in which they emerge.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

When we look at works of art in museums, galleries, and churches we are, in most cases, looking at them out of context. Furthermore, when we look at early Renaissance paintings we do not see them through the eyes of the people who produced them or for whom they were produced. We have to learn to see them as they might have been seen. We can begin to do this by learning how to read and to interpret the complex elements at play beneath the immediate surface by setting the artist, his work, and his public in their social and religious historical contexts, and by exploring the universal unspoken language of signs and symbols used by artists. The course content is based on painted forms, i.e., panels, canvases, and frescos from the Trecento and Quattrocento with an emphasis on Tuscan painting. The selection, as far as possible, takes advantage of the availability of works in churches, museums, and galleries within easy visiting distance of Arezzo.

This course explores textiles as vital objects in human lives for millennia. It explores a selection of these luxurious textiles and their intersection with social, economic, and political lives in the Islamic world between the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. At the end of the semester, students will have an overall picture of Islamic dynastic history, its broad geographical expansion from Spain to India, and its cultural themes such as political system, social structure, economic sectors, religious rituals, cross-cultural exchanges, diplomatic gifting, royal leisure, and funerary practices. This course invites students to see artifacts as not merely passive objects but active agents in history as well as their everyday lives. It also discusses a few technical aspects of weaving textiles and looks at textiles as three-dimensional objects. Finally, this course will assist students with developing their critical thinking, research, and writing as crucial skills to succeed in their future careers through weekly readings, visual analysis, in-class discussions, and research projects.

Location

Morey Room 502 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

Focused on but not limited to the first half of the 20th century, this course explores representations of Japan in a wide range of visual and material culture: e.g., ephemera generated by tourism, education and entertainment; advertisements and souvenirs; and wartime propaganda traveling similar routes of exchange. Travel brochures, guidebooks, photographs, postcards, films and other objects reflect changing concepts of urban space, rural culture, industry, geography, and military and political authority. Recurrent iconography and coded images link tourism and educational objects and images with evolving concepts of and questions regarding modernity, nationalism and cultural identity: e.g., how is the meaning of “modernity” in Japan useful to a study of the continuous transformation of culture in specific contexts, as in the transition from ukiyo-e culture to photography and animated films? This lecture/discussion course has a digital component: students work hands-on with the Re-Envisioning Japan Collection and digital archive, learning both critical analysis and digital curation skills. The course includes weekly film assignments and one field trip each to the Memorial Art Gallery and George Eastman Museum. No audits. 

Location

Hylan Building Room 305 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This seminar attends to the vast proliferation of printed material in Europe between 1450-1700, to print’s reception, critical history, materiality and use. Participants will focus on the conceptual, social, and economic facets of print through weekly discussions of engravings, etchings, woodcuts, and books. While our attention will be directed towards specific material techniques and technologies (e.g. hand-coloring, reproductive engraving) chiefly in Northern Europe, we will concern ourselves also with the many modalities of print’s reception throughout the world, with mechanical reproductions’ role in shaping (or defying) early modern habits of mind, with the way print inflected notions of authorship, with the manner in which print’s historical agency has been understood, and more urgently, with the new politics of "replicative" media today   Topics to be discussed include: intaglio processes, the collecting, copyright, sale, and marketing of devotional engravings; Protestant-Catholic propaganda and broadsheets; print and identity formation in the Renaissance workshop; natural history, science, cartography, and astrononomy's use of reproduceable images; documentation of the New World; demarcations of high/low culture; the idea of pictures as evidence. We will spend time in the Memorial Art Gallery with works by Dürer, Raimondi, Schedel, Bruegel, Altdorfer, Ortelius, Cock, van Leyden, Ghisi, Callot, Breydenbach, and Rembrandt, as well as with treatises and essays on the early collecting of prints. Readings will include selections from Chartier, Benjamin, Ong, Grafton, McLuhan, Koerner, Latour, de Piles, Warburg, Deleuze, and others.

Location

Morey Room 524 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course provides students with knowledge and understanding of the places, people, events; historical and cultural factors; and technological innovations that have influenced the development of graphic design into the practice that it is today. This course examines both the dominant cultural ideas embodied by Graphic Design, as well as the counter-narratives it generates to express diverse cultural identities. Students in this course will question the meaning and form of graphic artifacts.

Location

Morey Room 502 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course explores how climate change is causing the loss and damage of cultural heritage sites across Africa. It examines the continent’s cultural landscape heritage and assesses threats and impacts of rising temperatures, wetter climates, rising sea levels, and human migration on the survival and futures of Africa’s past. Africa’s long history of humankind and the peoples encounters with other cultures of the world, have created and shaped a rich and diverse cultural heritage that needs safeguarding.

Location

Lattimore Room 210 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

The Art New York Field Studio course will utilize the resources of New York City as a starting point for creative production. The course will be conducted primarily online, with face-to-face meetings with the professor spread throughout the semester. Projects will take students outside into the city to make art with a rotating variety of media, including photography, video, sound, and installation, with an emphasis on collaboration.

As an integral part of the internship program, all students participating in ANY will meet weekly with the program's resident director. The class will visit museums, art galleries, film & media screenings, & learn from these visits through readings, papers, presentations & discussions. The colloquium will also serve to provide an intellectual framework for understanding the operations of the NY art world & to allow students to discuss with one another their experiences at the various institutions where they intern. Each student will be expected to make a presentation about their internship to the ANY group. There will be an entrepreneurial component which will introduce the students to a wide variety of entrepreneurial activity & innovative practices within arts and culture. Through guest speakers, seminars & field trips the students will learn how entrepreneurial endeavors develop. By the end of the semester, the students will create their own proposal for an entrepreneurial project.

When Spanish and Portuguese explorers stumbled upon a sunny "America" that was new to them, they encountered balmy wonders – armadillos, cities, and gold. By contrast, when the English crashed into their own unseen continent a century later, they landed in the arctic, and found, to some extent, nothing. Icy, unpopulated, commodity- poor, visually and temporally “abstract,” the Far North - a different kind of terra incognita for the early modern imagination than the sun-drenched Indies, offered no clear stuff to be seen or exploited. With this, this seminar contends, the Arctic quietly yet powerfully challenged older narratives of world- and picture-making. Neither a continent, nor an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced explorers, writers, and early artists from England, the Netherlands, and Germany to grapple with a different kind of “ecology.” Here, there were virtually no exotic animals, teeming forests, or enchanting civilizations to study, exploit, or exterminate - yet. In the frigid North, that is, the idea of description as a kind of accumulative endeavor of “representation” - of exoticism as synonymous with abundance - was thrown into question; the North was unsettling not because of dazzling difference, but because of monotonous sameness. Rather than an Eden, to Renaissance travelers the arctic was something like the moon.

Location

Morey Room 524 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

See 'Requirements for Honors in Art History.'

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

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