This course examines how different cultures construct narratives about global catastrophe and climate change. It deconstructs common concepts related to natural and anthropogenic disaster to understand how conceptual affordances and constraints affect mitigation efforts, shape preparation, and guide response to disaster across global contexts. This course emphasizes a comparative approach including perspectives on both past and present societies. It interrogates how contemporary society incorporates tropes of archaeological “collapse” into catastrophic imaginaries. This course aims to foster a more critical, nuanced understanding of the courses of action available to global society in the face of a changing climate.
This course examines how different cultures construct narratives about global catastrophe and climate change. It deconstructs common concepts related to natural and anthropogenic disaster to understand how conceptual affordances and constraints affect mitigation efforts, shape preparation, and guide response to disaster across global contexts. This course emphasizes a comparative approach including perspectives on both past and present societies. It interrogates how contemporary society incorporates tropes of archaeological “collapse” into catastrophic imaginaries. This course aims to foster a more critical, nuanced understanding of the courses of action available to global society in the face of a changing climate.
This course examines how different cultures construct narratives about global catastrophe and climate change. It deconstructs common concepts related to natural and anthropogenic disaster to understand how conceptual affordances and constraints affect mitigation efforts, shape preparation, and guide response to disaster across global contexts. This course emphasizes a comparative approach including perspectives on both past and present societies. It interrogates how contemporary society incorporates tropes of archaeological “collapse” into catastrophic imaginaries. This course aims to foster a more critical, nuanced understanding of the courses of action available to global society in the face of a changing climate.
Art
An introduction to processes dependent on the lens as an imaging device, including wet-lab photography, digital photography, video editing and installation-based sequencing. The course incorporates the fundamental theoretical, technical and aesthetic principles of working with photography as an expressive medium. Assignments include darkroom laboratory work, studio projects, discussions, written analyses, and class presentations.
An introduction to media involving spatial and temporal dimensions, including sculpture, video, sound, installation, computer-aided design, and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) fabrication. The course incorporates the fundamental theoretical, technical and aesthetic principles of composition in space and time. Assignments involve design of sound; video production; computer modeling; traditional and non-traditional sculpture techniques.
An introduction to two-dimensional media that explores mark making as the basis for visualization and ideation. The course incorporates the fundamental theoretical, technical and aesthetic principles of composition in two-dimensions. Students use wet and dry media to solve problems and investigate concepts of representation, abstraction and expression using traditional and non-traditional techniques.
Though its content will vary from semester to semester, this class always focuses on an intermediate-level topic in Digital Arts, Drawing, Painting, Photography, Sculpture or Video, not fully covered in existing courses. Examples might include courses on artistic movements, disciplines or traditions, a genre, or a theme. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic differs.
This course studies the human, ecological, and environmental histories of the region through the lens and practice of documentary production. In collaboration with historians, archaeologists, and biologists, students develop individual and group projects to create short documentaries about a diverse range of topics focused on the past and present environmental conditions of the Domain and its surroundings.
Using both traditional and non-traditional painting media, this course investigates painting and its role in the contemporary world. Students explore the relation between perception and conception, reinforcing basic skills and increasing their sophistication in the organization of space, surface, material, composition, and design. Thorough exploration of contemporary artists working across media with a variety of themes is an essential part of the learning experience. Projects and student-led discussions revolve around themes such as Space, the Figure, Narrative, Identity, or Abstraction. Emphasis is placed on challenging the notions of traditional painting as it relates contextually to an ever-changing world.
This investigation of the creative process requires advanced studio skills and is based on discussion of works-in-progress. Selected readings, participation in critiques, and a semester-long studio project help establish a disciplined and systematic approach to creative practice.
Art History
A survey of the architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts of the West from prehistory to the end of the Middle Ages.
A survey of the visual arts of India, China, Japan, and neighboring countries from prehistory to the present. The major monuments consisting of architecture, sculpture, and painting are discussed. Both indigenous and cross-cultural aspects of each art work are examined in the light of style, iconography, and historical context.
Explores the breadth of Japanese print culture, focusing on eighteenth to twentieth century artworks. Examines prints in light of economic and socio-cultural contexts, with special emphasis on topics such as the masculine culture of eighteenth century urban Japan, and globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Genres covered include: early modern landscapes, “beautiful women” and actor prints, nineteenth-century political prints, and twentieth-century creative and revival prints from wartime and postwar Japan. Incorporates the study of museum print collections.
This course explores art and architecture produced on the Italian peninsula between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, considering monuments in relation to specific, local circumstances of production and fertile cross-cultural and international exchange. This course will also consider the new kinds of discourse brought to bear on art and artmaking in the period, and its continuing implications. The conventional story of the Italian Renaissance, centered on Florence and featuring star artists, has exerted a powerful hold. How ought more expansive, inclusive, and critical stories about the artwork produced on the Italian peninsula in this period be told?
A survey of British art from the late 17th to the close of the 19th century. Emphasis will be on painting; sculpture, architecture, and landscape design will be considered as well.
This course examines how people of different races and ethnicities in Latin America were represented in art during the period of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule (approximately 1500-1820). The course focuses primarily on how Europeans used both religious and secular art to maintain a vision of a complex and diverse set of indigenous ethnic groups (Nahua, Taino, Aztec, Maya, Inca, etc.), as well as people of Asian and African descent as simply the colonial “other.” We will explore how these images were informed by broader social, political, and religious motivations, while also examining if and how some representations confronted and challenged hegemonic identity norms.
This course examines the art of Latin America produced during the early modern period beginning with the Spanish conquest and concluding with the independence period (approximately 1500-1820). While considering several important art movements, this course also explores objects as they speak to questions of race and identity and reflect political, religious, social, and economic contexts. This course will also introduce students to the major theoretical issues regarding the interpretation of art of the Spanish Americas.
This course charts the development of Pop Art in the Americas and Europe between 1958 and 1973, investigating why art made by a diverse group of artists, using a variety of aesthetic techniques, is labeled "Pop." The famous subject matter of Pop art-- soup cans, comic books, and movie stars--will be studied as simultaneous celebrations and critiques of consumer culture. Lectures and discussions will also examine how Pop artists addressed the social and political struggles of the 1960s by dealing directly with racial inequality, the struggle for identity, and the Vietnam war through a series of experimental practices including the use of readymade imagery, photography, text, music, and performance.
A seminar designed to introduce students to the research methods and interpretive approaches of art history. Written as well as oral assignments develop students' research and communication skills. Each year the seminar focuses on a specific historical, cultural, or thematic topic chosen by the instructor.
Asian Studies
A survey of the visual arts of India, China, Japan, and neighboring countries from prehistory to the present. The major monuments consisting of architecture, sculpture, and painting are discussed. Both indigenous and cross-cultural aspects of each art work are examined in the light of style, iconography, and historical context.