INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY II

The second part of the Introduction to Art History goes from about 1400 to 2015, circles the world, and includes all media. It is organized around one theme for each lecture, and approximately 100 works of art. Visits to New York museums and discussions sections are crucial parts of the course.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia 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.

• W 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Irena Haiduk
  Info
• 3 points

Pedagogy of Play

Pedagogy of Play is a course that explores the art of teaching and learning through play. This course draws inspiration from surrealist games, Dadaist wordplay, Fluxus movement prompts, radical and progressive education experiments, exhibitions like the 1970 Jewish Museum show,
SOFTWARE Information Technology: its new meaning for art
, the teaching practice of Sister Corita Kent, Audre Lorde and bell hooks’ discussion of the erotic, Elvia Wilk’s exploration of live-action role-playing, and C. Thi Nguyen's
Games: Agency As Art
(2020). 

In this course, students will have the opportunity to design and facilitate playful invitations, prompts, scores, and/or happenings for their classmates. Additionally, students will design and present a playful art object as a workbook publication or portable FLUXUS-like kit. We will focus on questions of trust, care, and intuition in the teaching and learning process. More than anything, we will explore teaching and learning as a relational art, or what Octavia Estelle Butler calls “primitive hypertext.” We will consider how the playful invitations we design and facilitate can actively build relationships between people, places, ideas, materials, time, etc Play is an invitation for collaboration, risk, and learning. This class is organized around creating art objects that can be touched, manipulated, transformed, and destroyed in the process of learning and play. This course is interested in creating art objects for public engagement, not exhibition.

• W 10:10 a.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Kameelah Rasheed
  Info
• 3 points

American Monument Cultures

AMERICAN MONUMENT CULTURE

Cities, institutions, and impassioned individuals are pulling down statues of people implicated in the histories of slavery, colonization and violence.  This class explores why monuments are important, how they have been used historically to assert political and social power and different points of view on where to go from here. 

The nation is caught up in a vital debate about how historical figures and events should be recorded in the public square.  Spurred by protests in Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017 and moved forward during the uprisings against police brutality in the summer of 2020, cities, institutions and impassioned individuals are pulling down and removing statues of Confederate leaders and other individuals implicated in the histories of slavery, colonization and violence even as objections are raised to these actions from both the left and the right.  This activism led to the formation of a commission to study New York City’s built environment in fall 2017 and its resolution advocating both taking down and putting up monuments here.

Why are Monuments so important?  How have they been used historically to assert political and social power?  This course introduces the history of monument culture in the United States, focusing on monuments related to three controversial subjects:  the Vietnam War, the Confederacy, and the “discovery” of America.  We will study when, by whom, and in what form these monuments were erected and how artists and audiences of the past and present have responded to them.  In addition to gaining historical background, students will create a podcast exploring the history and impact of a public monument in New York City.  Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion and will include several guest speakers.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Elizabeth Hutchinson
  CULPA: 9 Info
• 4 points

Sculpting in Time

This is an introductory course in time-based arts: video, sound, and performance, understood through the language of both short and long cinematic forms. We'll start with an in-depth study of the life and work of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), whose art has a unique sense of time, driven by the unknown, the immaterial, and the spiritual.

This class is for artists who want to construct their own sense of time, punctuation, and duration, as well as those looking to discover the visual and audio aesthetics of their generation. How does a feeling become an image, and what sound does it make? What are our media aesthetics and skins? Is there a way to address the optical beyond the eye and engage what we currently consider secondary senses, take our bodies back? Our collective task is to construct a camera (both a room and an apparatus) that captures both aural and visual images, creating a sonorous space where we can encounter ourselves in our own time. No prior knowledge of any medium is required. Not for the faint of heart.

• T 2:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• Instructor: Irena Haiduk
  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 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: John Miller
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

IMAGERY AND FORM IN THE ARTS

Operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theater, visual arts and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Joan Snitzer
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Instructor: Joan Snitzer
  CULPA: 4 Info
• Instructor: Gregory Bryda
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 1 Info
• Instructor: Jonathan Reynolds
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 1-4 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 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Dorota Biczel
  Info
• 4 points

ADVANCED SENIOR STUDIO II

Advanced Senior Studio II is a critique class that serves as a forum for senior Visual Arts majors to develop and complete one-semester studio theses.  The priorities are producing a coherent body of studio work and understanding this work in terms of critical discourse.  The class will comprise group critiques and small group meetings with the instructor. Field trips and visiting artist lectures will augment our critiques. Please visit: 
https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

• T 2:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: John Miller
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Museums of New York City

New York City is home to one of the world’s best museum ecologies.  This seminar studies that ecology by museum type, against the backdrop of the city’s cultural, economic, and social history.  How can theories of collecting explain different museum types?  How do museums anchor municipal identity?  Class sessions will alternate between discussion sessions at Barnard, and field trips to museums.

• W 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Photo as Material: A Studio Lab in Inter

Contemporary practitioners of photography often treat photos as not just images to look at but materials to manipulate. They create objects that echo the basic elements of the medium—light and lens—and use altered or expired photo paper. They assemble physical albums, fictional archives, and sculptural installations. They play with the circulation of images online, or share virtual experiences of spaces via printed images.

In this course, we will look projects from recent decades that examine and expand the parameters of photography, including works by Liz Deschenes, David Horvitz, Zoe Leonard, Allison Rossiter, Stephanie Syjuco, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Via writing exercises, material experiments, and generative prompts, students will create their own research-informed projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.

• R 10:10 a.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Mira Dayal
  Info
• 3 points

Tokyo

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan Reynolds
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Earth, Water, and the Anti-/Post- and De

Earth, Water, Anti/Post C

This theory-driven seminar

focuses on the artistic practices that engage two primordial elements, earth and water, developed in the wake of land and environmental art of the late 1960s–early70s. It centers the projects concerned with the politics of land and water in the aftermath of colonialism in the Americas, paying special attention to the work of those dispossessed by colonial projects—that is, Indigenous, Black, mestizo, and other racialized, diasporic, and/or migrant-descendant artists (i.e. Latinxs in the United States). For one, these practices are contextualized within the larger history of land/water representations and their attendant, often explicitly nationalist, ideologies as the attempts to remediate their effects and aftereffects. Two, these practices are analyzed vis-à-vis a wide range of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theories developed in the Americas and beyond in order to facilitate their historicization and theorization. It is the historical development of these theories that serves as a structuring tool for the course. In that vein, we consider the methodological question of how and when “theory” can be useful to art historical analysis, and how the concepts operative in the present can be applied and useful to the past, on the one hand. On the other, the seminar posits our current moment as a discrete era within a long history of struggles for self-determination variegated by distinct understandings of what the “Americas” are and how they were “made,” both of matter, peoples, and ideas. Simultaneously, it investigates concepts of time and temporality in order to illuminate and consider distinct understandings of human and other-than-human relations fundamental to the making and inhabiting of a “place.” Some of the authors discussed include Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Rita Segato, Juan López Intzin, Glen Coulthard, Sheryl Lightfoot, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dorota Biczel
  Info
• 4 points

British Portraits: Identity, Empire, and

Brit Portraits Id Empire

This course explores the making, cultural significance, and display of British portraiture from the end of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It explores how portraits engaged with questions of class, race, gender, and empire during an era of rapid historical and cultural transformation, as well as the subsequent collecting and exhibition of British portraits within the post-colonial context of American museums. Taught through a combination of seminar discussions and excursions to New York museums, this course is also designed to give students an introduction to various aspects of curatorial practice and to professional writing within a museum setting.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Adam S Eaker
  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.
• Instructor: Rosalyn Deutsche
  CULPA: 11 Info
• 3 points

ART CRITICISM II

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. Artists will include Ad Reinhart, Daniel Buren, Helio Oiticica, Juan Downey, Hollis Frampton, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, Mike Kelley, Coco Fusco, Maria Eichhorn, Jutta Koether, Melanie Gilligan.

• T 11 a.m.-12:50 p.m.
• Instructor: Janina P Marshall
  Info
• 4 points