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 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 will critically examine how global architectural exchange shapes cultural identities and historical narratives, and engages with dominant power systems—understanding architecture as a symptom of larger political, social, and cultural forces. Covering the period from The Enlightenment to the early 20th Century, it is structured as a dialogue between cases of Chinoiserie, Japonisme, and Indo-Saracenic architecture and decolonial, race, and gender studies. This course will lead students to ask questions: What kinds of inventions result from crosscultural exchange? How do these modes of representation reinforce or subvert established cultural beliefs? How can we characterize the process of architectural circulation across regions? Students are encouraged to bring cases of Chinoiserie, Japonisme, and Indo-Saracenic influences connected to their personal backgrounds to develop a unique understanding of global architectural exchanges between Asia and the world.   

Elective

With the publication of Society of the Spectacle in 1967, Situationist theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord famously declared that images had entirely replaced lived existence. In the decades since, spectacle's domination of everyday life seems only to have intensified. Yet how exactly might we understand spectacle today? How has its role been affected or redefined by radical changes in media, technology, labor, and politics? In this class, we will consider these questions in broad critical perspective. Foregrounding contemporary art but looking as well at film, architecture, design, and new media, we will trace the development of spectacle from the postwar period to our present moment, emphasizing in turn the ways that politics, violence, sexuality, racial difference, and everyday cultural life have all been increasingly mediated and spectacularized. Against this background, we will examine the diverse aesthetic and political counter-practices that have arisen to confront, challenge, or otherwise disrupt spectacle in its varied forms. In so doing, we will attempt not only to rethink the effects and function of spectacle today but also to understand how --in response to the growing spectacularization of culture --visual artists, filmmakers, theorists, and others have attempted to reimagine and remake contemporary life itself.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

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

How has the image been understood, theorized, and practiced in the Iranian world across millennia? What distinguishes a painterly image from other regimes of representation? And how do historical shifts—religious, imperial, technological, colonial, and global—transform the very ontology of the image? This lecture-based survey traces the longue durée of visual arts in Iran from antiquity to the present.

Anchored in Ruyin Pakbaz’s Pictorial Arts in Iran (Tehran: Fenjan Books, 2023) and supplemented by focused readings on Persian painting, photography, and visual theory, the course approaches Iranian art not simply as a stylistic succession, but as a series of evolving responses to the problem of representation itself. We begin with antiquity, examining early visual formations and the conceptual foundations of figuration, monumentality, and symbolic image-making in the Iranian world. The course then turns to the efflorescence of Persian manuscript painting between the 12th and 18th centuries, attending to its complex dialogues—particularly with Chinese painting—as well as to the aesthetic and intellectual achievements of the Herat and Tabriz schools. The Safavid period becomes a crucial site for examining the entry of European pictorial systems and the reconfiguration of local visual epistemologies. The nineteenth century introduces another decisive transformation: the rise of court portraiture and the arrival of photography. We ask how photography recalibrates painterly practice, reshapes notions of subjecthood, and repositions Iran within emergent global visual modernities. The final segment of the course follows developments from the 1920s onward, investigating how modern and contemporary artists negotiate inherited traditions while articulating new relations between image, history, and artistic identity.

Throughout the semester, students develop visual literacy through close analysis of artworks and sustained engagement with historiographical debates. Weekly readings average approximately thirty pages. Students are expected to conclude the semester with a research paper (3500–4000 words) that synthesizes visual analysis with scholarly argumentation.

Elective

As a field of study, material culture explores how we make things and how things, in turn, make us. This class examines the material culture of late consumer capitalism, focusing on how objects organize experience in everyday life. We will investigate the practices through which things-from food and clothing to smart phones-become meaningful, as we tackle political and ethical questions related to the design, manufacture, use and disposal of material goods. The class will introduce students to a range of scholarship on material culture from several disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, sociology, art and architectural history, and cultural studies.

Elective

Collaborations among and between Asian and Asian American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have sought to redefine kinship by exploring the politics of belonging, generational disconnections, and the legacy of the Cold War, and to reimagine what reparation means for the Asian Americas. Through examining artworks and performances by artists and filmmakers who engage with the questions of memory, belonging, militarism, and the formation of reparative kinship -- including An-My Lê, siren eun young jung, Ishiuchi Miyako, Jerome Reyes, Kang Seung Lee, Hồng-Ân Trương, Grace Lee, Apichatpong Weerasetakul, and Patty Chang -- this seminar expands on the discourses of transnational Asia and trans-Pacific Asia, where the history of anti-Asian racism and lingering Cold War geopolitics have become ever more palpable since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students will also critically engage with what “Asian Americas” means when settler colonialism and anti-Black racism continue to fracture our work on ecological decoloniality and make alliances against white supremacy fragile. Initial class sessions establish a theoretical framework, introducing students to interdisciplinary vocabularies and methodologies for addressing the politics and ethics of reparation and representation in art and visual culture. We move on to interrogating specific topical issues in collaborative and individual artworks. Each week centers on a critical topic, drawing together relevant texts and art practices from art history, area studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies to cross-fertilize different approaches and encourage creative and critical thinking.

Students will complete reading and writing assignments and participate actively in class discussion. Students will design and develop their individual curatorial/research project under the guidance of the instructor and write a curatorial proposal based on their research. The course acts as an introduction to the discourse of Asian diasporic art, representation, and artistic collaboration through up-to-date scholarly debates and discourses. It aims to develop a political sensitivity and an analytical sophistication towards representational processes and products in the arts. Students will learn to conduct in-depth research in the interdisciplinary field of the arts and humanities. Students will synthesize interdisciplinary methodologies, develop theoretical frameworks, and apply them to their research and writing.

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

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

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 examines the artistic images of black women artists in the African Diaspora. We will investigate how race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity have shaped and continues to shape black female identity and artistic productions particularly in the USA, Europe, Britain, Brazil and the Caribbean.

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

How can we add to the future enrichment of our disciplines? How do we make future collegiate teaching a more meaningful practice? This semester-long professional practice course is designed for artists, designers, architects, and educators who are considering teaching in higher education after graduation and/or those who will be teaching during Wintersession as they complete their course of study at RISD. The goal is to introduce graduate students to a reflective teaching foundation and to provide an orientation to the collegiate teaching and learning experience. The first half of the course is composed of readings and discussions related to seven teaching portfolio assignments. The second half of the course entails Individual Teaching Practice Sessions in which students prepare a class that is observed, videotaped, and receives detailed feedback from faculty and peer observers. Major outcomes of the course are: a partial teaching portfolio including a teaching and inclusivity philosophy, course proposals and an extensive course syllabus.

This is the first course in the required sequence for the Certificate of Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design.

Elective

How can we add to the future enrichment of our disciplines? How do we make future collegiate teaching a more meaningful practice? This semester-long professional practice course is designed for artists, designers, architects, and educators who are considering teaching in higher education after graduation and/or those who will be teaching during Wintersession as they complete their course of study at RISD. The goal is to introduce graduate students to a reflective teaching foundation and to provide an orientation to the collegiate teaching and learning experience. The first half of the course is composed of readings and discussions related to seven teaching portfolio assignments. The second half of the course entails Individual Teaching Practice Sessions in which students prepare a class that is observed, videotaped, and receives detailed feedback from faculty and peer observers. Major outcomes of the course are: a partial teaching portfolio including a teaching and inclusivity philosophy, course proposals and an extensive course syllabus.

This is the first course in the required sequence for the Certificate of Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design.

Elective

This course invites creative practitioners from all disciplines to play and experiment with the notion of teaching as creative practice. What might happen if we consider the classroom our studio, instructional materials as form, and students as peers and collaborators? How do we push the boundaries of what a lecture, a workshop, a syllabus, a lesson plan, an instructional video, a how-to guide, can be? Whether in the context of higher education, community-based education, early childhood, alternative schools, artist residencies, or the inbetweens, we will take up pedagogy as our discipline and devise multidisciplinary, speculative experiments that redefine the space of pedagogy as one of endless creative potential. Studio work will be scaffolded with readings by thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Fred Moten, bell hooks, and la paperson, and we will consider the works of artists like Nina Katchadourian, Slavs and Tatars, Valie Export, and Walid Raad.

Elective

This is a field-based course that provides students with various kinds of clinical experiences related to their student teaching residency experiences in the Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design. MAT students are mentored by TLAD faculty and local teaching artists as a part of this course.

Major Requirement | MAT Teaching + Learning in Art + Design

This is a field-based course that provides students with various kinds of clinical experiences related to their student teaching residency experiences in the Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design. MAT students are mentored by TLAD faculty and local teaching artists as a part of this course.

Major Requirement | MAT Teaching + Learning in Art + Design