THAD Courses
THAD H173-01
CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1960
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will trace major developments in contemporary art from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the shift away from modernist abstraction in the late 1950s and proceeding chronologically, we will examine the diverse array of movements, practices, and events that have come to define the larger field of contemporary art: minimalism, conceptualism, and pop in the 1960s, site specific and performance art in the 1970s, the culture wars and postmodernist debates of the 1980s, and the various forms of "abject," project-based, and "relational" art that followed. Foregrounding problems that have remained central for artists throughout this period - the status of the body, the institutional conditions of artistic production and reception, the politics of representation and difference - we will focus on putting the shifting terrain of contemporary art into broad social, historical, and theoretical perspective. In turn, we will attempt to develop a comprehensive critical framework for understanding the aesthetic and political stakes of contemporary art today.
Open to Sophomore, Junior or Senior Undergraduate Students.
Elective
THAD H180-01
INTRODUCTION TO IRANIAN CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H180-01
INTRODUCTION TO IRANIAN CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Please note that the evening sessions listed in the class timetable are exclusively reserved for film screenings and do not constitute regular class meetings. Attendance at these screenings will factor into students' final grades.
Open to Sophomore, Junior or Senior Undergraduate Students.
Elective
THAD H191-01
HUMANITY OR NAH?: BLACKNESS, GENDER, RESISTANCE, AND MEMORY IN MONUMENTS, MAPS, AND ARCHIVES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H217-01
NEO-VANGUARDS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The neo-avant-garde, neo-vanguardias, the expanded field, la escena de avanzada: the 1950s-70s saw the explosion of new theories and practices that challenged the boundaries of art and the relationship between art and society. This course takes a hemispheric approach to the major trends of this volatile period, in which artists across the Americas reckoned with the fallout of the Second World War by seeking to rebuild, reinvent, or reject the legacy of the pre-war or historical avant-gardes. Key movements that will be considered include various strains of geometric, gestural, and kinetic abstraction; assemblage, bricolage, and the legacy of the readymade; the ascendance of Pop; Minimalism and Post-Minimalist sculpture; and the turn to happenings, performance, and conceptual art. How did such a divergent array of tendencies erupt seemingly at once, and how did they seek to intervene in everyday life? We will consider the contested definition of the avant-garde, its legitimacy and limits in the postwar Americas, and whether there can still be an avant-garde today. Weekly readings will include artist writings and manifestos, contemporary criticism, and theories of the avant-garde. Students will be expected to engage in active and informed discussion, deliver weekly presentations, and write a final paper.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H219-01
SURREALISM IN FRANCE AND ELSEWHERE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will show how the ideas of the historical French avant-garde movement founded in Paris in 1924 have spread across borders and influenced artists of central Europe. It will also focus on the relationship between surrealist European artists of the 20th century and Mexican art. Our goal will be to see how certain ways of thinking and seeing the world can be shared by artists living in different places and under different political regimes.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H229-01
ART HISTORY, POSTCOLONIALISM, DECOLONIALITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In recent years, the idea of decolonizing museums, academic institutions of art, and the narrative and curricular spaces of art history has gained increased urgency. But the concept and practice of decolonization have a much longer history than their recent (re)emergence in the art world. As a response to colonial and imperial orders of the world, decolonization set new boundaries for thought, knowledge, and for “being” itself. This seminar asks whether these boundaries have been effectively translated into the recent challenges that are posed against institutional practices of art and art history. It also asks about the ways in which postcolonialism, with a genealogy different from decolonization, is situated vis-à-vis the historical origins of decolonization in the writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and its resurgence in art history and museology. We will read texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aníbal Quijano, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward W. Said, Geeta Kapur, and Walter Mignolo among others.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H246-01
GREEK & ROMAN ART & ARCHEOLOGY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H248-01
ICONOCLASM
SECTION DESCRIPTION
An Icon has been described as an image or work that has achieved such exceptional levels of widespread recognizability among people across time & cultures as to transgress or transcend the parameters of its initial making, function, context and meaning (Martin Kemp, 2012). Iconoclasm has been recently defined as a principled attack on specific objects, aimed primarily at the objects' referents or at their connection to the power or values they represent. (Anne McLanan, 2019) Iconoclastic acts, therefore, engage with both the materiality of the object and the power structures embedded within or attached to the object - the thing that is often most out of reach. In this seminar, we cast a wide net, historically and geographically, to ask: What and who defines an Icon? How has the destruction or defacement of Icons - Iconoclasm - come to be understood as something much more than a simple act of vandalism? What are the principles and politics of Iconoclasm? How is Iconoclasm very much in play today as a catalyst for social justice, political action and collective agency?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H251-01
DESIGN WRITING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H257-01
DECOLONIAL FEMALE VOICES IN POST-SOVIET ART
SECTION DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to be Post-Soviet? And what does it mean to be a Post-Soviet and (Post-)colonial? What does it mean to be a Post-Soviet and (Post-)Colonial woman? The course would attempt to talk about the variety of female voices from the Post-Soviet spaces of the Eurasian borders and will engage in theorizing the Post-Socialist (Post-)Colonialism through fiction, art and theory. We will look at the texts of Madina Tlostanova and explore how artists such as Taus Makhacheva, Aidan Salakhova, Almagul Menlibayeva, Umida Akhmetova and others resist and rethink their Soviet past. The course will include readings, a field trip and Zoom visits from artists/curators.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H259-01
THEORIES OF SPECTACLE AND CONTEMPORARY LIFE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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
THAD H281-01
AMERICAN PRINTS: ARTISTS AND MASTER PRINTERS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The 1960s saw the expansion of the art market in the US when printmaking workshops emerged on the coasts and in the heartland. Artists and master printers worked collaboratively at ULAE, Tamarind, Gemini GEL, Tyler Graphics and others, and such presses also editioned artists' prints for sale via the gallery system. Importantly such workshops also offered an opportunity to artists primarily committed to other media to explore various printmaking methods. Collaboration among artists and printmakers thus became a hallmark of the so-called American Printmaking Renaissance. The course will investigate the nature of collaboration between artists and master printers as we study prints by epoch-making artists including Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, as well as lesser-known artists who contributed significantly to the popularity of prints. Technical innovation continued in the era of Pop with the use of commercial techniques by Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein, and continues today with the use of digital media. We will draw upon the collection of the RISD museum to develop an intimate understanding of the role of innovation and collaboration in American printmaking ca.1960-1990.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H286-101
DESIGNING GENIUS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will examine the myth and cultural importance placed on spaces and objects occupied and used by the so-called "geniuses" of American history alongside our general romantic interest in "the genius" as a cultural phenomenon. We will examine the designed objects and spaces of famous American artists and heroes - places such as Graceland, Dollywood, and Marfa; objects like Thomas Jefferson's writing desk; and museums created out of the homes of Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, among others. In an attempt to unpack and understand the importance of objects in both memory- and identity-making, we will consider how visual and material objects both communicate personality and legacy and how they act as mediators between each "genius" and their audiences, allowing visitors to come into contact with the imaginative worlds of their heroes.
THAD H311-01
THE ROOTS OF OUR ECOLOGICAL CRISIS: ART, FAITH, AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Over 50 years ago, Lynn White Jr. delivered a resonant critique of industrial society which he traced to the values, ideas, artworks, and technologies of the Christian European Middle Ages. His foundational thesis established a historical narrative in which Western culture since the Middle Ages has been naturally at odds with nature. Fighting against this antagonism has been the core mission of environmental movements ever since. But in the past 50 years much has changed in our understanding of how medieval art, faith, and technology informed human relationships to the environment. Is it possible that potential routes to a more eco-harmonious future still lie in this rejected past? This course seeks to re-address the historical material—art, architecture, writing, technology, and belief—that underlies White’s thesis to question whether the hidden vitalism of medieval art, religious values, and ethics might instead hold potential solutions to our modern ecological crisis.
Elective
THAD H351-01
CARIBBEAN ONTOLOGIES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo famously qualified the Caribbean as a region defined by "chaos"—chaos as an historical, material, and ontological condition. Famously difficult to define, the Caribbean exists as an archipelago both literally, in its geographic composition of several chains of islands and a continental basin; and metaphorically, as distinct but complex ontology that has been shaped by histories of colonization, genocide, enslavement, hybridity, liberation, revolution, and ecological crisis. Taking chaos as a theoretical framework, this seminar examines Caribbean ontologies through the region's visual and material cultures, from before the Conquest to the present day. It will proceed thematically, engaging with a wide variety of artistic, literary, cinematic, musical, and historical material. Topics of discussion will include socioecological theories of transculturation and opacity, Black and Indigenous strategies of survival and resistance, the allure and the threat of tropicality, the contested history of Revolution, religious and spiritual syncretism, and the presence of water as both boundary and connective tissue. We will consider how chaos, transculturation, and opacity offer productive vocabularies and decolonial methodologies—and whether there even is a singular "Caribbean" at all.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H411-01
ART AND HISTORY OF EARLY WEST AFRICAN KINGDOMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course explores the artistic traditions of early West African kingdoms and cultures, notably Nok, Igbo Ikwu, Ife, Owo, Esie, Tsoede, Sokoto, Benin, Akan, Djenne, Mande, Nabdam and the Bamileke. We examine images in stone, bronze, terracotta and iron, and also explore the built environment. Based on archaeological, art historical and ethnographic data, we critically analyze the style elements, iconography, purposes and significance of the objects, both as viable tools and as expressions of the history, philosophy, and religious and cultural ethos of the peoples who created them.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H414-01
INTRODUCTION TO MATERIAL CULTURE: MAKERS, OBJECTS AND SOCIAL LIVES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H441-01
HISTORY OF DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H441-01
HISTORY OF DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective