| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ART HIS MedHum3 | MED HUM 3: ART AND MEDICINE | MASSEY, L | This course explores image-making as an integral part of medical, scientific practice. Throughout the quarter we will examine how notions of truth and authority in medical research became invested in certain ways of seeing and representing in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and we will look at the ideological, political and gendered aspects of medical image-making practices. Medicine was never, and is not now, a set of value-free applications and practices. Attention to images and image-making provides a purchase on how medicine is often based on assumptions and biases that govern what kinds of questions are asked and solutions given. Thus, in this class we will look at the way in which medicine has represented and constructed views of the female body, the racialized body, and the social body through various imaging technologies. Throughout the quarter, although we will mainly focus on Western medicine, there will be examples from other world medical traditions brought in for comparison. |
| ART HIS 40C | MODERN ART EUR&AMER | NISBET, J. | This course is an exploration of visual modernity in Europe and America. It will examine the conditions of modern life that have fundamentally transformed the visual arts from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. We will consider the themes of labor, the market, political revolution, the natural environment, and image technologies as they inform topics such as Rembrandt, the invention of photography, Impressionism, Picasso, abstraction, the environmental movement, and Andy Warhol. This visual art registers the dramatic changes that have shaped the globalized, multimediated world in which we now live. Satisfies GE IV and VIII. |
| ART HIS 42D | ARTS OF ISLAM | PATEL, A. | This course examines the past and present of Islam through its art and architecture, spanning 1500 years and encompassing the Americas through Indonesia. The course emphasizes that, since its emergence on the Arabian peninsula in the early 7th century, Islam has been a force for connecting different world regions and their people in commercial, ideological, artistic and religious dialogues – globalization, in the modern sense. At the same time that we examine what is “Islamic” about objects labeled as such, we will also address their regional specificities, confronting and redefining the very idea of what is “Islamic” in the process. |
| ART HIS 107 | ANCIENT POMPEII | MILES, M. | When Mt. Vesuvius suddenly erupted in AD 79, Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried in molten lava and ash. The result of that ancient tragedy for us is a wealth of information about how ancient Romans actually lived their lives. In this class we study the archaeology, art and architecture of ancient Pompeii, with reference also to Herculaneum and luxurious villas on the Bay of Naples. While our primary focus will be on the ancient art and artifacts within their social, civic and religious contexts, we will also study the impact of the rediscovery and excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum on modern culture, from the 18th century to the present, including film. Emphasis will be on the various ways material culture provides evidence for Roman social history. |
| ART HIS 121 | MEDICI AND FLORENCE | MASSEY, L. | In this course we will explore the art of Renaissance Florence during the two-hundred year period in which the city's political, economic and cultural fortunes were either guided by or controlled by one family, the Medici. Reminiscent of some political families we see today, the Medici were experts in the arts of revenge and public displays of prestige and power. At different points in time they were exiled, subject to assassination conspiracies, pious, amoral, extravagant, and above all, active patrons of the arts. Beginning with Cosimo de Medici in the early 1400s, moving through Lorenzo il Magnifico in the late 1400s, and ending with the installation of Cosimo I de Medici as Grand Duke of Florence in the 16th century, we will examine how this powerful banking family developed and exercised the faculties of taste and judgment, thus helping to inaugurate the new artistic styles that became associated with Renaissance Florence. |
| ART HIS 145C | CALIFORNIA MODERN | DIMENDBERG, E. | This class will consider the development of California modernism and explore the myriad influences of its landscape, climate, cultural syncretism, and geographic and psychic distance from Europe on architecture, urbanism, and design from the late nineteenth century to the present. Topics to be treated include the invention of the Spanish ranch style, the Craftsman aesthetic of Greene and Greene, the influx of European modernists such as Neutra and Schindler, the California projects of Wright, the legacy of the Case Study House program, the architecture and design work of Charles and Ray Eames, the landscape aesthetics of Eckbo and Halprin, the development of California suburbs and Los Angeles as a metropolis, and the exchange between architecture and the film industry. The status of California as a locus of design for products exported the world over will be studied through case studies of automobiles, surfboards, clothing, and furniture. The course will conclude by investigating the critiques of modernism evident in the work of Gehry, Moore, Jerde, Graves, Mayne, recent projects by Maltzan and O'Herlihy, and developments in transportation infrastructure and urban infill associated with increasing densification in the Los Angeles region. Several field trips will present opportunities to visit the buildings studied in class. Take-home midterm and final research paper. |
| ART HIS 155C | MODERN INDIA | PATEL, A. | This course will examine the visual history of the region defined as ‘India’ today, but necessarily encompassing parts of modern Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and eastern Afghanistan. After an introduction to the Indus Valley Civilization (2700-1500 BCE), we will explore the legacies of Alexander the Great's campaigns to the edges of India and their impact on the Buddhist art and architecture of the Indian subcontinent. We will also examine the inverse dispersal of Buddhist and Hindu iconographies both eastward and westward in Asia. The course will culminate with the supposed Golden Age of the Gupta empire and its far-reaching legacies from Iran to China. No prerequisite. |
| ART HIS 164A | MODERN AFAM ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. | Investigates the history of African American art with a focus on the politics of representation. Begins with the arrival of Africans to the British colonies and ends with the modern New Negro Movement. Material culture and fine art are explored. |
| ART HIS 298 | THE PARTHENON | MILES, M. |