Â鶹AV

Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2021-2022

Fall 2021

ARTH 202 (CRN 2190) (3 credits)
Introduction to Contemporary Art
Prof. Erandy Vergara-Vargas
Wed, Fri, 2:35PM - 3:55PM
ARTS W - 215

Description not available.

ARTH 205 (CRN 2191) (3 credits)
Introduction to Modern Art
Dr. Julia Skelly
Tues, Thurs, 1:05 PM - 2:25 PM
ARTS W - 120

Description not available.

ARTH 207 (CRN 2192) (3 credits)
Introduction Early Modern Art 1400-1700 Arts of the Transcultural Encounter and Exchange 1300-1600
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Wed, Fri, 11:35 AM - 12:55 PM
ARTS W 215

Description not available.

ARTH 315 (CRN 2194) / CANS 315 (CRN 17971) (3 credits)
Indigenous Art and Culture Indigenous Contemporary Art, 1960 to present
Course Lecturer: Christopher Gismondi
Tues, Thurs, 2:35 PM-3:55 PM
ARTS W - 215

This course will explore the rich and diverse contemporary cultural production from Turtle Island or “Canadian” artistic scenes. This course is designed around themes and mediums to show a broad diversity of contemporary art practices, cultural conversations, touch on canonical figures, and feature bright up and coming artists. The second portion of this course will continue with lectures but will also feature virtual Guest Lectures/QnA’s with artists, curators, and makers. This course will expose you to conversations as they have evolved and been informed by artists and artist-activist practices. I am also complimenting the “Canadian” course content with a few artists and artworks from Indigenous circumpolar and Oceanic artists to situate the work coming from Turtle Island into a global movement of contemporary Indigenous art, politics, and criticism.

We will explore everything from Inuit sculpture, Woodlands school painting, graffiti street art, autobiographical drawing, performance art, virtual reality, film, and video game design. Our exploration in looking and discussing these works will be accompanied with theory and history for a rich understanding of Indigenous cultural production, themes, tropes, and the previous expectations and practices those artists contend with. Throughout the course we will exercise your critical research, academic writing, looking and visual analysis, as well as how you can identify and relate works in terms of theme, medium, or commentary. Learning outcomes for this course include understanding the history of Indigenous contemporary art, the broad swath of current practices like circumpolar and digital practices, and finally sharing first-person perspectives of thinkers and makers in the field through guest discussions that will complement the main course content.

If you show up each day to class curious, prepared, and ready to work, by the end you will:
1. Understand the broad swath of Indigenous contemporary art and the social, political, and historic commentary they are embedded with.
2. Be able to read art and artefacts as objects of Indigenous cultural expression as modes of insider communication or critiques of ongoing settler-colonialism.
3. Understand complex historical and contemporary relationships between settlers and Indigenous populations as colonization and slavery brought groups in contact for capital, assimilation, acculturation, and appropriation.
Leave class with an elevated sense of cultural conversations happening in Canada and other colonized sites, how identities are constructed or manages, and how worldview impacts how we relate to others from a structural and historical viewpoint.

*This course is a blended teaching style, September 9th to October 29th will be taught in person (pending University and Gov. guidelines) and the remainder will be delivered virtually.

ARTH 323 (CRN 7727) (3 credits)
Realism and Impressionism
Dr. Julia Skelly
Tues, Thurs, 11:35 AM-12:55 PM
ARTS W - 215

Description not available.

ARTH 339 (CRN 2195) (3 credits)
Critical Issues - Contemporary Art: Contemporary Architecture and Design
Dr. Evgeniya Makarova
Wed, Fri, 10:05 AM-11:25 AM
ARTS W - 215

This course surveys key movements, monuments and ideas of the 20th and 21st century architecture, urban planning and design. We will begin by discussing the development of modernism in architecture, its competing definitions and relation to politics. We will continue to examine contemporary architecture by looking at the emergence of new trends such as postmodernism, deconstructivism, parametricism, sustainability, and smart city. Special attention will be given to architecture’s exchange with other media such as painting, sculpture, film, fashion, and the decorative arts. Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with discipline-specific terminologies to talk about form, function, space and context in architecture.

ARTH 353 (CRN 2196) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art History 1: Totalitarian Art and Architecture
Dr. Evgeniya Makarova
Wed, Fri, 8:35 AM-9:55 AM
ARTS W - 215

This course explores the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics in twentieth-century dictatorships: National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union. We will see how painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film were mobilized by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin both to terrorize and infatuate the crowds into compliance. Throughout the course, we will discuss cultural politics of these regimes in relation to larger topics such as race, gender, sexuality and artistic agency. Towards the end of the semester, we will also be tapping into the postwar debates on the cultural significance of “difficult” heritage and representations of totalitarian regimes in contemporary art and popular culture.

ARTH 400 (CRN 2198) / ARTH 401 (CRN 2199) (3 credits)
Selected Methods in Art History
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Tues, 8:35 AM-11:25 AM
FERR 230

Advisor Approval Required.

ARTH 420 (CRN 2200) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1: The Renaissance Portrait
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Thurs, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-220

What can a portrait, the purported record of a person’s physical appearance, tell us about an individual long lost to history? What can we learn from a visual image about a person’s life, values, character, and motivations? In the Renaissance, almost every European artist created vivid portrait likenesses of their contemporaries to mark crucial moments in the life of the portrayed: the moment they were betrothed or married, came of adult age or entered a profession, rose to office or title, won a battle, or when they died. Essentially, whenever the cycle of life entered a new stage, the artist was called upon. But portraits are also enigmatic: do they represent individuals or ideas, real appearances or aspirational ideals? This seminar explores multiple aspects of Renaissance portraiture (ca. 1400–1600) with attention to theories of individuality and self-fashioning; concepts of life-likeness and the power of art; poetic tropes of desire, loss, and captured presence; and paradigms of authority, moral character, and physical appearance (as expressed in treatises, dialogues, and poetry as well as painting). More broadly, the seminar addresses the various social, political, and devotional functions of portraiture, which includes visual constructions of gender, race, age, and class.

ARTH 421 (CRN 2201)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 2: Contemporary Art’s Response to the Migration Crises of the 21st Century
Prof. Christine Ross
Tues, 2:35 AM-5:25 PM
STBIO S2/2

Description not available.

ARTH 425 (CRN 7729)
Arts of Medieval Spain
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Tues, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-220

Description not available.

ARTH 490 (CRN 7464) (3 credits)
Museum Internship

Department approval required.

ARTH 502 (CRN 7728) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History
Risk, Value, Accident: Art and the Actuarial Imagination
Prof. Matthew Hunter
Fri, 08:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-220

“Art insurance is huge business,” so one recent art-market commentator observes, “and not least now that artworks move around the world in far greater volume and frequency than ever before.” Insurance indeed exerts pervasive influence upon contemporary art. It is a requirement for art’s circulation, a judge of monetary value, an arbiter of the conditions of display. But, how has insurance come to occupy such a central position in the arts? Where, when and why have artists and architects made technologies of risk key to their enterprises? Art history possesses few working narratives of how insurance has ramified through the visual arts and architecture on its way to literally underwriting their conditions of contemporary possibility. This seminar aims to advance such a critical history. Introducing the general problematic, we will work through a sequence of cases as we aim to build a provisional genealogy of insurance’s crossings with art, architecture, the market, and the museum. Along the way, we will examine where and how insurance has penetrated into the texture of modernity, shaping the nature of subjectivity, the role of the state, the value of human life (both enslaved and “free”), among other considerations.

Winter 2022

ARTH 204 (CRN 1707) (3 credits)
Introduction to Medieval Art and Architecture
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Tues, Thurs, 1:05 PM-2:25 PM
Arts W-215

This course offers an introduction to the diverse visual cultures of the medieval Mediterranean world from the fourth to the fifteenth century. It surveys a wide range of Late Antique, Byzantine, Islamic, and European works of art and architecture, positioning them within their original social, political, and spiritual contexts and also tracing the ways in which these monuments were defined and perceived over time. In addition to becoming familiar with the central tenets of medieval art and architecture, students will also develop skills in visual literacy and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.

ARTH 205 (CRN 1708) (3 credits)
Introduction to Modern Art
Sarah Carter
Wed, Fri, 10:05 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-120

Bruno Latour famously asked: “What does it mean to be modern?” This course considers this question and its implications for art, art criticism and arts institutions in Europe, Russia and North America spanning 1750 to 1950. Students will encounter a broad range of works including painting, sculpture, architecture, print and the decorative arts. We will consider engagements with the art and culture of antiquity (classical and non-European), relationships between art, politics and imperialism, the emergence of art institutions (academies, museums), and the ways in which the arts constituted and challenged ideas surrounding class, gender and race. The course likewise endeavors to introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge making techniques.

ARTH 305 (CRN 1709) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History
Dr. Julia Skelly
Tues, Thurs, 11:35 AM-12:55 PM
Arts W-215

There are two primary objectives of this course. The first objective is to provide an overview of the methods employed in the discipline of art history since the eighteenth century. The second objective is to provide students with an opportunity to determine which methods resonate with them for future coursework. We will begin with discussions of formalism and iconography; subsequently we will discuss critical methodologies including feminist interventions into (masculine) art history, writing queer art histories, attending to intersectionality and the black female subject, as well as Marxism, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.

ARTH 315 (CRN 1710) (3 credits)
Indigenous Art and Culture
Chris Gismondi
Wed, Fri, 2:35 PM-3:55 PM
Arts 150

This course will explore the rich and diverse contemporary cultural production from Turtle Island or “Canadian” artistic scenes. This course is designed around themes and mediums to show a broad diversity of contemporary art practices, cultural conversations, touch on canonical figures, and feature bright up and coming artists. The course will feature virtual Guest Lectures/QnA’s with artists, curators, and makers. This course will expose you to conversations as they have evolved and been informed by artists and artist-activist practices. I am also complimenting the “Canadian” course content with a few artists and artworks from Indigenous circumpolar and Oceanic artists to situate the work coming from Turtle Island into a global movement of contemporary Indigenous art, politics, and criticism.

We will explore everything from Inuit sculpture, Woodlands school painting, graffiti street art, autobiographical drawing, performance art, virtual reality, film, and video game design. Our exploration in looking and discussing these works will be accompanied with theory and history for a rich understanding of Indigenous cultural production, themes, tropes, and the previous expectations and practices those artists contend with. Throughout the course we will exercise your critical research, academic writing, looking and visual analysis, as well as how you can identify and relate works in terms of theme, medium, or commentary. Learning outcomes for this course include understanding the history of Indigenous contemporary art, the broad swath of current practices like circumpolar and digital practices, and finally sharing first-person perspectives of thinkers and makers in the field through guest discussions that will complement the main course content.

ARTH 357 (CRN 1713) / EAST 357 (3 credits)
Art, Ancestors, and Gods: Ritual Art of Traditional China
Yi-bang Li
Tues, Thurs, 2:35 PM-3:55 PM
Arts W-220

In classical East Asia, ancestors and deities were a vital component of art-making. Many of the most innovative and impressive works that exist to us today were created for ritual activities in their honor. Focusing on China, which gave a foundation for the long-lasting tradition while in conversation with its neighboring cultures, this seminar examines major sets of images, objects, and spaces constructed around the worshiping of ancestors and deities from around the first millennium B.C.E, to the eighteenth century.

Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with the basic concepts and historical developments of the art of worship in two main religious arenas: funerary and Buddhist. While maintaining the formal boundary between the two categories, students will also investigate their significant overlap by identifying and analyzing their shared cultural logic of ritual and visual practices. Key questions to be considered include: How did artists translate religious ideology into visual forms? How do static objects connote movement and animation? What are the connections between ritual objects and the visual culture of the everyday world?

ARTH 360 (CRN 6604) (3 credits)
Studies in the Photographic
Dr. Anton Lee
Wed, Fri, 8:35 AM-9:55 AM
Arts W-215

This lecture course closely follows the technological, scientific, and artistic developments in the photographic medium and its socio-political dimensions up until the 1970s. The major issues for discussion include: the nationalistic implications of photography’s arrival in the 1830s; the pseudo-scientific applications of photography for the purpose of classification; the boom of social documentary and propaganda during the first half of the 20th century and onwards; the identity crisis of photography confronted by the categories of technology and art; the emergence of a new relationship between self and self-image via photography; and the influx of postmodernism and critical theory in the field of photography and its discourse.

Over the thirteen-week period, it will become clear that, unlike what has been purported by official narratives, the history of photography is neither singular, nor linear. In fact, it is one of the main objectives of the course to understand the ontological instability inherent in photography. The course approaches photography through a vast array of theoretical lenses, introduced through terminologies, conceptual debates, and the close reading of seminal texts. Weekly lectures expose ruptures and contradictions in the global histories of photography, so as to recast the past into a fecund territory for contested knowledge. Focusing on the production and circulation of photographs, our discussions will shed light on various dimensions of visual culture, be it epistemological, aesthetic, economic, political, technological, and institutional.

ARTH 368 (CRN 1714) (3 credits)
Studies in Northern Renaissance Art
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Wed, Fri, 11:35 AM-12:55 PM
Arts W-215

This thematic survey of Northern European art explores the development of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and the luxury arts in the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England from about 1400 to 1570. Through historical and visual interpretation, we will consider the social, political, and religious functions of artworks in public and private life, exploring the needs and interests of patrons, artists, and beholders. Topics to be addressed include the multiple forms of art produced for religious devotion; the significance of artistic materials and techniques including the revolution of the print medium; the changing conception of the artist; the role of gender in art making and viewing; the explosion of secular imagery in art; alterity and otherness; and the dramatic cultural transformation brought about by Renaissance humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and the discovery of “new” worlds in the Age of Exploration. The course will include required independent visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Rare Books and Special Collections at the Â鶹AV Library (public health regulations permitting).

ARTH 411 (CRN 1715) (3 credits)
Canadian Art and Race: New Directions in Contemporary Photographic Theory
Dr. Anton Lee
Thurs, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-220

The 1970s were a period of conflicts and upheavals, including anti-war, feminist, and human rights movements, folded in the emergence of a new economic order on a global scale. It was also in the 1970s that the camera image’s representational transparency was deconstructed by postmodern artists and thinkers who closely engaged with the medium. Soon, photography became one of the newest and hottest subjects of critical thinking, as witnessed in On Photography (1977) by Susan Sontag, La chambre claire (1980; 1981 in English as Camera Lucida) by Roland Barthes, and Thinking Photography (1982) edited by Victor Burgin, not to forget a new translation of “Little History of Photography” by Walter Benjamin in Artforum (1977). This periodization marks the late 1970s and the early 1980s as the earnest beginning for the critical discourse of photography.

What have happened to the fervor of an engaged scholarship and practice in photography since then? In 2016, photography historian John Tagg raised provocative questions: “The question still has bite, not least at a moment when the neoliberal consensus installed in the late 1970s is faltering badly on both sides of the Atlantic in the face of popular anger and pervasive contempt for the architects of the age of inequality.... will this present period of disjunction and conflict generate its own inventive forms of practice and theory, its own new modes of intervention in the codes, institutions, and relations of power that have sustained an increasingly insecure globalized economy of museum art and academic knowledge?” [John Tagg, “Exit Theory: Thinking Photography and Thinking History from One Crisis to Another,” British Art Studies 4 (Autumn 2016). conversation.]

This seminar attempts to answer this question by revisiting various tendencies and topics presented by photography historians and critics since 2000. If what is now called photography studies has its roots in the critical literature of the 1970s and 1980s, how the agendas of those decades have been amplified, altered, or revoked in the hands of following generations up until now? Weekly discussions facilitate a close and rigorous look at photography’s relationships with such diverse themes as: phenomenology, anthropocentrism/the posthuman, emotion/affect, queer/trans, race, violence, archive/typology, signification/narrative, collectivity/citizenship, and posthumanism/ecology. The assigned readings introduce the views of artist, photographers, thinkers, historians, and philosophers. Their writings, together with additionally recommended readings, would give prominence to the experiences and values of the marginalized, including women, immigrants, persons of color, indigenous peoples, queer and trans individuals.

ARTH 420 (CRN 1716) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1
The Louvre and Versailles: Palaces Repurposed, Museums Reconsidered
David Mitchell
Thurs, 8:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-220

This seminar investigates issues in art’s collection and display through focus on the fluctuating curatorial histories of two iconic French museums: the Louvre and Versailles. Our focus will be on these buildings as settings for varieties of cultural power, extending out from the early modern period. We will examine their initial purposes as royal palaces, their process of conversion to museums, and their ongoing status as significant cultural institutions. Despite discontinuities of function, we will consider the lingering significance of their origins as centres of royal magnificence in early modernity for their reconfigured roles as institutions of the French republican state (and then beyond that as international icons of artistic supremacy).

Despite being long-established bastions of high art, these sites continue to generate new scholarship. Critical perspectives on art’s display and the hierarchies of cultural politics, in particular, have enriched our understandings of exhibition in such spaces. Drawing on such recent interventions, this course addresses complications of negotiating heritage through collection, display, preservation, and restoration. In its focus on two inter-related sites over centuries, this seminar also questions the model of long-form case study as a mode of inquiry.

ARTH 421 (CRN 1717) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 2
Modern Italian Art, Architecture, and Design
Dr. Evgeniya Makarova
Mon. 8:35 AM-11:25 AM
FERR 230

This seminar is a study of the ever-elusive and ever-changing notion of *modernism* in Italian architecture and design. In the first part of this course, we will examine the ways in which twentieth-century Italian architects negotiated the tension between the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the pressures of the machine civilization. We will consider how Italian architects participated in the international trend of Art Nouveau, applied the tenets of Futurism to the design of buildings, and found their place within Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

The second part of this course is dedicated to Italy’s postwar reconstruction and economic revival, the rejection of the Modernist project in architecture, and the explosion of Radical Design. Throughout this course, students will be invited to discuss buildings, city plans, handcrafted and manufactured objects in relation to parallel developments in Italian art and film, theories of time and space, national and global politics, as well as the social construction of race and gender. Student presentations at the end of the semester will offer insights into the development of Italian architecture since the 1990s. Prior knowledge of Italian may be beneficial but is not required.

ARTH 422 (CRN 1718) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 3
Transcultural Things: Medieval Objects and Exchange
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Wed, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM Arts W-220

This seminar centers on the status of the art object as a portable thing capable of—and often designed for—movement across cultural and confessional lines. Focusing on things that move across cultures offers an important challenge to art history’s traditional taxonomies, which commonly anchor different artistic traditions to specific places of production. Organized by a series of case studies of medieval objects, materials, and imageries that crossed cultures, this seminar considers how portable objects arbitrate difference. There is a decidedly accretive quality to many objects in medieval church treasuries, which, for example, often combine Fatimid or Sassanian rock crystal with Roman cameos or Byzantine enamels, all set within a Gothic filigree frame.

How do such objects navigate the porous and ever shifting frontiers? How “French” is a Parisian Gothic ivory carving when we take into consideration the itineraries of tusks from south-east Africa on Genoese fleets? How do such things negotiate a sense of difference that was at times geographic, cultural, confessional, political, and even chronological?

Informed by sociologists and literary scholars who have studied the social lives of things and thing theory, this seminar focuses on those medieval objects that travelled far from their place of origin. It further questions their reception and transformation in those different subsequent contexts, thus assessing the temporal dimension of objects as they changed hands over time and across cultures. We will explore, that is, the cultural biographies of medieval things in transcultural contexts.

This intensive upper-level seminar is intended for students with a strong foundation in Art History preferably with a background in medieval or early modern art and architecture.

ARTH 474 (CRN 6605) (3 credits)
Studies in Later 18th and 19th Century Art 03: Drawing for Art Historians
Prof. Matthew C. Hunter
Fri, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-220

“Embodied knowing”; “artisanal epistemology”; “maker’s knowledge”: terms like these (along with some lavish funding) have recently drawn many historical researchers toward forms of practice-based investigation. By recreating production techniques used in the past, so historians of art, science and neighboring fields have argued, we can pose questions and gain insights about artworks and the cultures from which they emerged in ways inaccessible to conventional academic methods, which remain focused on texts.

This seminar seeks neither to critique nor to historicize recent scholarly efforts to mobilize material making, although we will engage with some critiques and historicization. Nor does “Drawing for Art Historians” aim to teach drawing skills in the manner of an art-school class. Instead, this course uses the foundational practice of drawing at a moment of its rich, variegated spread in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century for methodological purposes. Offering what is hoped to be a break from the academic routine of screens, readings and writing that have reached a crescendo in the COVID era, we will put graphic practices to some gentle tests to pose the following question: what can the art historian learn by doing?

“Drawing for Art Historians” is an experiment on several levels. We will be joined by several guests; some in person, other virtually. Further, reading and writing—cornerstones of assessment in a seminar—will command complementary status in our case. Privileged instead will be acts of making and demonstrations (in exercises, writings and contributions to class-time discussion) of ability to reconcile material techniques into the domain of art-historical knowledge.

To stress: our brief isn’t just experimentation with drawing materials. Rather, our aim is to consider how, where and why trials of material techniques might or might not enrich the steps and procedures of art-historical knowledge-production. You will succeed in this class to the extent you are willing and able to reflect upon how making can/cannot advance art-historical method.

Image: Edouart Augustin-Amant-Constant-Fidèle, “Hunting Scene,” A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses (London: Longman and Co., etc, 1835), Plate 18

ARTH 501 (CRN 1719) /EAST 501 (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture: Matters of Making in Classical Chinese Art
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Tues, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-5

One of the most persistent challenges in approaching the classical art of China derives from the modern viewer’s tendency to divorce the image from its material components and their workings in the creation process. Reduced as the static aesthetic field of form, style, and/or motif, the image's material roots are often taken for granted as if they simply existed, awaiting and ready to be used by the image-maker. The artist's creating hand, however, is always commanded by the materiality of matters, be it bronze, jade, wood, stone, gold, lacquer, clay, paper, silk, ink, or water. This seminar surveys some of the most fundamental matters and substances recognized, adopted, and maneuvered by image-makers in traditional China. We will pay close attention to each material's specific ways to respond to technical and ecological conditions, as well social contexts in specific moments of history. By encouraging organic relations between the matter, the maker's hand, and the materialization of their workings, the seminar provides a venue for exploring dynamic roles of the matter as active participants in the image-making that goes beyond the stylistic or iconographical dimensions.

Back to top