INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY I
The first half of the Introduction to Art History explores premodern art and architecture around the world, from cave paintings to Song dynasty landscapes and Renaissance sculpture. Lectures and discussion sections are organized around themes, including nature and naturalism, death and the afterlife, ornament and abstraction, gender and sexuality, colonialism and conversion, and ritual and divinity. Visits to museums across New York are also an integral component to the course.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Gregory Bryda
CULPA: 7
h-index: 1
Info
- 4 points
DRAWING STUDIO
This course will explore drawing as an open-ended way of working and thinking that serves as a foundation for all other forms of visual art. The class is primarily a workshop, augmented by slides lectures and videos, homework assignments and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will discuss their work individually with the instructor and as a group. Starting with figure drawing and moving on to process work and mapping and diagrams, we will investigate drawing as a practice involving diverse forms of visual culture.
- R 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- 3 points
PAINTING I
This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production.
- W 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Joan Snitzer
CULPA: 4 Info - 3 points
PAINTING III
This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production.
- W 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Joan Snitzer
CULPA: 4 Info - 3 points
ARTS OF JAPAN
Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Jonathan Reynolds
CULPA: 10
Info
- 3 points
Arts of North America
This class provides an introduction to the visual and material cultures of North America, primarily the United States, from the Colonial Period until World War II, produced by artists with a variety of cultural and social identities. Through the close visual analysis of images and objects, the careful reading of primary sources, and the strategic engagement with recent scholarship, we will study how what and who is “American” have been defined and redefined over the past three centuries. In 2024, the course will be organized into four large thematic units focusing on the relationships between visual culture and a) materials and material practices, b) a) social and political identities, c) nature and the environment, and d) cultural institutions and public spaces. Each of these themes is keyed primarily to a different historical moment, but will reach beyond those boundaries. Painters, craftspeople, sculptors and photographers discussed will include (but not be limited to) Miguel Cabrera, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Lilly Martin Spencer, Harriet Powers, Rafael Aragon, Robert Duncanson, Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Francisco Oller, Thomas Eakins, Timothy O’Sullivan, James MacNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Lange. Readings draw heavily on primary sources to give students a feel for how artists and audiences described their own historical situations.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth Hutchinson
CULPA: 9 Info - 4 points
SUPERVISED PROJ PHOTOGRAPHY
In this course, you will conduct independent projects in photography in a structured setting under faculty supervision. You are responsible for arranging for your photographic equipment in consultation with the instructor.
This course will afford you a framework in which to intensively develop a coherent body of photographs, critique this work with your classmates, and correlate your goals with recent issues in contemporary photography.
Students are required to enroll in an additional fifteen contact hours of instruction at the International Center for Photography. Courses range from one-day workshops to full-semester courses.
Permission of instructor only. The class will be limited to 20 students.
- M 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
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Instructor:
John Miller
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
The Making of Global Contemporary Art:
This lecture class introduces the notion of global contemporary art through the history of exhibitions, chiefly biennials and other large-scale endeavors, and principal agents behind them. On the one hand, the course considers exhibitions as a crucial tool of cultural diplomacy, which seek to position and/or reposition cities, regions, and even entire nations or “peoples” on the international scene. Thus, we will explore how the artistic interests vested in exhibition-making intersect with other—political, economic, ideological, and cultural—interests. We will consider those intersections paying special attention to the shifts in political relations and tensions during and after the Cold War, including the moment of decolonization in Africa; the moment commonly understood as “globalization” and associated with the expansion of the neoliberal capitalism after 1989; and, finally, the current moment of the planetary crisis. This expansive view of the “global contemporary art” will allow us to distinguish different impetuses behind internationalism and globalism that not only seek to establish hegemony, artistic or otherwise, but also look for the means to forge transnational dialogues and solidarities. On the other hand, this class seeks to illuminate how certain artistic idioms and approaches developed after World War II achieved primacy that influences artistic production to this day. To this end, we will examine the rise of a “visionary curator” as a theorist and tastemaker. We will also explore how more recent exhibitions have sought to expand the geography of the “canonized” post-WWII art movements and valorize artistic production conceived outside of the so-called “West.”
In addition to weekly brief writing assignments (150–300 words each), both in and outside of class, the students in the course will reconceive the installation of one of MoMA’s permanent collection galleries (1940s-70s or 1970s-present) and produce a podcast that provides the rationale for the reinstallation in form of dialogue.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Dorota Biczel
Info - 4 points
ADVANCED SENIOR STUDIO I
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings. For further info visit:
https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors
- M 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Joan Snitzer
CULPA: 4 Info - 4 points
Gender & Sexuality Contemp Art of Americ
sex gen contempt art amer
This seminar examines the changing conceptualizations and theorizations of gender and sex in the contemporary artistic practices of the Americas. Crucial to the constitution of both individual and collective identity, for contemporary artists gender and sexuality have become primary sites to rethink and reinvent the paradigms of self-expression, creativity, and artmaking, and to challenge and contest the (social) body politics at large. We will explore these practices through the prism of the evolution of the notions of gender and sex in a broad range of disciplines during the key historical moments such as the emergence of second-wave feminism and gay rights’ movement, critique of “mainstream” feminism by the feminists of color, AIDS crisis, and rise of postmodernist and queer theories, among others. We will pay special attention to the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class, particularly germane in context of the ideologies of progress and development, and the shifts in capitalism during the last fifty years. Finally, we will probe how the notions of gender and sex have been deployed to reconsider and problematize the established art historical canons.
Weekly reading responses and leading class discussion on the readings will guide you in crafting a research paper proposal and its development (in consultation with the instructor). Artists participating in the seminar are invited to contextualize their own practice through a similar project and an accompanying research-based statement.
- W 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
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Instructor:
Dorota Biczel
Info - 4 points
SENIOR RESEARCH SEMINAR
Prerequisites: Course open to Barnard Art History majors only. Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in art history and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year.
- T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- 3 points
ART CRITICISM
This course is a seminar on contemporary art criticism written by artists in the post war period. Such criticism differs from academic criticism because it construes art production less as a discrete object of study than as a point of engagement. It also differs from journalistic criticism because it is less obliged to report art market activity and more concerned with polemics. Art /Criticism I will trace the course of these developments by examining the art and writing of one artist each week. These will include Brian ODoherty/Patrick Ireland, Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Smithson, Art - Language, Dan Graham, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Judith Barry and Andrea Fraser. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artists oeuvre.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
John Miller
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
METHODS & THEORIES OF ART HIST
Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jonathan Reynolds
CULPA: 10
Info
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Instructor:
Elizabeth Hutchinson
CULPA: 9 Info - 4 points
CURATORIAL POSTNS 1969-PRES
Contemporary exhibitions studied through a selection of great shows from roughly 1969 to the present that defined a generation. This course will not offer practical training in curating; rather it will concentrate on the historical context of exhibitions, the theoretical basis for their argument, the criteria for the choice in artists and their work, and exhibitions internal/external reception.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Valerie Smith
Info - 4 points