This is a required course for all first year students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division. Continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates may be preregistered by the Division on request, or should register for an evening section.

The course is not required for incoming transfer students but is open to and recommended for any who have not previously taken a course on the history of modern art or who wish to develop a deeper understanding of the field.

Major Requirement | BFA

This is a required course for all first year students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division. Continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates may be preregistered by the Division on request, or should register for an evening section.

The course is not required for incoming transfer students but is open to and recommended for any who have not previously taken a course on the history of modern art or who wish to develop a deeper understanding of the field.

Major Requirement | BFA

From international film festivals to university campuses, from museums of modern art to neighborhood theaters, Iranian cinema has now emerged as the staple of a cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization. Hamid Dabashi writes this in the introduction to his landmark study of Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (Verso, 2001). This course introduces you to the history of Iranian cinema, from the Iranian New Wave (1960s) to the present. It examines the ways in it occupies an important place on the scene of global cinema while it defies the logic of nativism. We will watch some of the most prominent movies by acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Nasser Taghvai, Amir Naderi, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Forough Farrokhzad, Jafar Panahi, Masoud Kimiai, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Marzieh Meshkini, Asghar Farhadi, Tahmineh Milani, Ebrahim Hatamikia, and Kamran Shirdel. We will also look at the works of diasporic artists, including Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Ramin Bahrani, Mitra Farahani, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Granaz Moussavi.

Elective

The arts have always played a central role in social protest. This course examines the arts in five key socio-political revolutions in the modern and contemporary Muslim world. We will focus on arts practices that have emerged from and contributed to political movements, including religious movements, struggles for national liberation from colonial and imperialist domination, and movements for social equality and against state oppression. Students will learn about the cultural politics of revolutionary movements in the Muslim world and will gain skills in analyzing the role of a wide array of art forms, including traditional arts, cinema, poetry, visual and performance arts, zines and protest graphics, and comics journalism. The course will also introduce crucial theories and debates about relationships between aesthetics and politics, the role of artists and other intellectuals in political struggle, and the way governments attempt to control what artists make and who it reaches. Comparative works will be drawn from global social revolutions about disarmament, race and gender equality, indigenous rights, climate action, and more. In addition to regular assignments and biweekly quizzes, students will develop and present their own final project using historical visual strategies to support a social cause of choice. 

Elective

This course is designed to be a deep-dive into the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(s) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers that resist the epistemic regimes of antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students have the opportunity to engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of "Man" and modern ideas of "human." This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere. Students will examine research from multiple scholars that troubles the assumption that becoming assimilated and included as "human" and "citizen" in the eyes of the State is progress for Black and Native communities. Using the Black Digital Humanities, students will demonstrate their comprehension and command of the thematic foundations of the course by creating their own narratives of memory and resistance via spatial visualization and/or auditory digital software.

Elective

Japanese brands retain global reputations and Japanese products remain objects of desire. Japanese artistry and design can give even a commonplace utensil immediate cachet. This course will begin by asking what counts as a Japanese object, then use the things we find as a repository with which to question what art, architecture, and design has done -- and can do -- in the world. We will explore how people living in the Japanese islands have used materials, objects, and ideas, often from elsewhere, to address their needs, and how the things they have made have changed over time and migrated overseas. The needs may range from food, shelter, and clothing to status, story, and speed; the objects from Buddhist mandalas to anime celluloids, prehistoric pots to elder care robots, and wooden farmhouses to recycling systems. We will end by asking how we might adopt, adapt, and use Japanese objects, together with the principles and practice of art and design they reveal, in our own lives.

Elective

This course offers an introduction to the history and practice of artists as collaborators, critics, and creators in art museums from the 1960s to the present. Exploring questions concerning the purpose, possibilities, and problems of art museums, students will be invited to consider how artists have responded to museum collections, histories, and spaces. We will discuss different strategies artists have used to offer alternate ways of experiencing, examining or critiquing historic and contemporary art and design and other issues. Students will use a wide variety of interpretive lenses to analyze the interventions of a diverse range of artists, including Andy Warhol, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lee Mingwei, Simone Leigh, and artists of RISD’s own Dorner Prize, among others. Students will also be invited to consider training in studio art as preparation for different ways of working with museum collections—from conservation and curation to education and exhibition design. Through case studies, readings, guest lectures, and field trips, students will explore key issues, debates, and concerns of artists as collaborators and museums as sites of critical and creative production. Coursework includes writing, research, and creative projects inspired by students' own artwork and contemporary and historic objects from the collection of the RISD Museum.

Elective

While definitions of “performance art” remain vague and contested, this introductory class examines the practice as it emerges in the early 20th century as a tool to explore shifting understandings and experiences of embodiment. We will return to the open questions of how artists engaged the locus of 'the body' to evaluate and reevaluate the rapid changes of the 20th and 21st centuries, in all of their ethical unclarity. We will consider recurrent themes of ephemerality, time, technology, documentation, and the shifting roles of artists, cultural institutions, and audiences. Students will develop the skills to describe languages of the body, both in stillness and in movement, interrogate theoretical texts and frameworks of performativity, and develop a sense of historical narrative to contextualize the thematic questions broached by “performance art.” We will keep a journal to ground interpretations of key works and readings in close analysis, attend a performance artwork and write a critical response, and craft a final project with the option for a research paper or performance work.

Elective

This course discusses developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture in Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Western Asia, in the Hellenic sphere of influence between 900 BCE and CE 400. Topics include Greek and Hellenistic Art, Etruscan and Roman Art, and the archaeological methods used to investigate these civilizations. Emphases will include the importance of cultural exchange in the development of what would become Greek culture and the immense plurality seen in those regions during that period.

Elective

This writing-intensive course helps students consider the relationship between writing and design, examining language and writing as an active component of a dynamic studio practice. We will explore contemporary culture and issues that affect designers through reading, writing, and discussion, and will examine several different types of design writing in the process. Exercises train students in essential tasks such as conducting formal analyses, writing catalogue entries, and making visual presentations, and we will discuss methods for idea generation, research and writing about our work and our selves, as well as engaging with professional design writing practices like reviews and interviews. We will hone strategies for gathering, organizing, and archiving research material, and will discuss the ways in which writing, as well as self reflection, researching texts, reading arts publications and reviews, and studying like-minded artists can contribute to a critical, engaged, and continually evolving body of work.

Elective

The critical framework of intersectional feminism was first theorized Black scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s to highlight the ways in which social identities, such as race, class, and gender, and systems of inequality and discrimination can “intersect” to create complex dynamics and impacts. It has its roots in longer histories of women-of-color feminisms and continues to be a productive research—and activist—framework to the present. Grounded in the words and actions of Black, Indigenous, queer, disability, and other thinkers, in this class we will practice using such theories as critical frameworks to engage diverse craft artists and traditions.

We will consider questions such as how “craft” —a term unbounded by media which presses against the historically constructed limits of “art”—has been deployed historically to create racialized, gendered, ethnic, regional, colonial, nationalist, and other hierarchies which marginalize some artistic practices; how craft has historically sustained communities; and how contemporary artists are reclaiming craft in powerful ways. bell hooks wrote of theory as “liberatory practice”; this class asks, “Can craft, too, be a liberatory practice?” Students are encouraged to bring their own practices, interests, and experiences into class discussions and projects, and we will routinely visit with RISD Museum collections to practice applying theory to artworks.

Elective

With widespread emphasis on the written word in a globalized Western society, it becomes easy to forget that writing is a relatively anomalous human practice. In Art Before Time, our focus will be on the visual, tactile, and kinetic practices of the deep past, and the epistemological methods (and their limitations) that we Moderns use to decipher and interpret the ancient traces left long before there were written records to document them. We will employ and scrutinize ethnographic analogy as a method for understanding the lifeways of our distant ancestors in the Pleistocene, while using experimental archaeology to form shared experiences that engage in the most persistent artistic traditions of our species. In so doing, we explore the changing place of human activity in ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere, the origins and varieties of symbolic thought and the fluctuating roles of art and architecture in spiritual ecologies throughout a vast span of time.

Elective

As a stimulus to the imagination, method of investigation, or as a basic means of communication, drawing is a fundamental process of human thought. This class will examine various kinds of drawings from the history of art and visual culture moving chronologically from the medieval to the post-modern. Our studies will have a hands-on approach, meeting behind the scenes in the collections of the RISD Museum. Working from objects directly will be supplemented by readings and writing assignments as well as active classroom discussion. This seminar is recommended for THAD concentrators and students especially interested in drawing.

Elective

This course focuses on contemporary art in and out of Africa, with specific reference to Nigeria. Our objective is to situate Contemporary Nigerian Art within the dialectics of modernism and postmodernism beginning first with the colonial implantation of the modernist trend in Africa. We examine the impact on the artistic vision and direction of the major artists in Africa, while highlighting the careers of their counterparts operating outside the continent within the postmodernist currents of Paris, New York, London, Berlin, etc.

Elective

The Bronze Age saw the development of several advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean basin. Perhaps the best-known among these is the civilization of Pharaonic Egypt. This course will focus on the art and architecture of Egypt and their neighbors to the north: the Aegean civilizations known as Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean. While art historical study of these cultures will be emphasized, evidence for trade and other cultural interchange between them will also be discussed. The course will cover such topics as the Pyramids of Giza, the Tomb of Tutankhamun, and the Palace of Knossos.

Elective

This course explores the diversity of form, style, and narrative content of works created by African American artists from the antebellum period to the present. Specific attention will be devoted to several underlining issues including but not limited to identity, race, class, ethnicity, representation, sexuality and aesthetic sensibilities.

Elective

This course will introduce the arts of China through the lens of native and imported religious and philosophical traditions, exploring different approaches to representation and belief. After an introduction to the anthropological study of religion, we will cover four main periods: the pre-historic (Paleolithic - Neolithic), the early dynastic (ca. 2000 - 221 BCE), the imperial (221 BCE - 1911), and the modern-contemporary (post 1911). We will focus on elite and folk approaches to representation and belief with an emphasis on mythology and symbolism. Topics to be explored include: the dragon and the phoenix as symbols, the Han search for immortality, Buddhist cave temples, Taoist landscape painting, the Confucian scholar tradition, ritual garments, the influence of European culture and Christianity, and Communist personality cult.

Elective

Registration by application only. Application is restricted to concentrators in the Theory & History of Art & Design. A call for applications will be sent to all THAD concentrators.

Please contact the instructor for permission to register. 

Elective

This course will explore the architectural traditions of the Indigenous cultures of North America, Mesoamerica, and South America in historic perspective. Examinations will focus on the critical cultural and environmental circumstances which led to the development of distinctive architectural styles throughout the Americas. Approached from an anthropological/archaeological perspective, specific topics of discussion will include the following: construction methods and material choices, spatial arrangements and use areas, the relationship between physical and social community structure, and architectural manifestation of cultural belief systems. Emphasis will also be placed on manipulations of the landscape in response to social and climatic needs. Architectural culture discussed in this course will range widely in scale, dispersal and geography - from the igloo of a small Inuit hunting party to the entire Mayan city of Chichen Itza, to the terrace and irrigation systems of the Inca.

Elective

This course provides an art historical survey and thematic exploration of 9 centuries of Yoruba Art and Aesthetics and its intercession with history (including but not limited to colonialism and postcolonial impact, interventions, and discourses), religion, philosophy, and the socio-political beliefs of one of Africa's most ancient civilizations, and a visible presence in the African Diaspora.

Elective