This is a required course for all first year and transfer 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. 
 
Registration process: First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Transfer and sophomore and above students should register into the evening section offered in the fall. 
 
For schedule conflicts during lecture times, please contact the Academic Programs Coordinator in the Liberal Arts Division office. For issues with registration, contact the Registrar's office for assistance. 
 

Major Requirement | BFA

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

Continuing from critical frameworks established in H101: Global Modernisms, the second semester of the introduction to art history turns to designed, built, and crafted objects and environments. The course does not present a conventional history of the modern movement, but rather engages with a broad range of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods in the history of architecture and design. Global in scope, spanning from the ancient world to the present, and organized thematically, the lectures explicitly challenge Western-modernist hierarchies and question myths of race, gender, labor, technology, capitalism, and colonialism. The course is intended to provide students with critical tools for interrogating the past as well as imagining possible futures for architecture and design. 
Required for graduation for all undergraduates. 
 
First year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division. Transfer and sophomore and above students should register into the evening section offered in the spring.

For schedule conflicts during lecture times, please contact the Academic Programs Coordinator in the Liberal Arts Division office. For issues with registration, contact the Registrar's office for assistance.
 

Major Requirement | BFA

This lecture course offers a broad introduction to the architecture, pictorial arts, and visual and material culture of the Middle Ages in the Latin West, Greek-speaking East, and across the transcultural Mediterranean c. 300–1450 CE. It provides an overview of the concepts, developments, and vocabulary necessary for analyzing and understanding the arts of the medieval period in light of the historical, religious, social, cultural, conceptual, and esthetic contexts and of their production and reception. Topics to be examined include the creation of a vocabulary of medieval imagery and architectural forms; uses of and attitudes toward the classical tradition; art and its makers, patrons, and audiences; materials and techniques of medieval art-making; the arts of religious and devotional practice; the relationships of word and image; the imaginative, multisensory, and performative dimensions of medieval art and architecture; medieval cultural exchange and colonization; art and ideologies; the relationship between art and nature; and the functions of and controversies concerning images in the medieval world. Museum visits will provide the opportunity to discuss objects firsthand. 

Elective

One of the most influential art historians of the past decades, Hans Belting, argued that images made in Europe before the Renaissance constituted an “era before art.” Belting established an authoritative binary between the beautiful and aesthetic Artworks of the Renaissance (with their illusionary space and market value) and the functional cult images of the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Built into this binary is the perceived paucity of the pre-modern artist. This has, since the Renaissance, given rise to often wild and stubbornly-lodged views of pre-modern makers as servile, anonymous, theology-bound men who barely rose above artisanship. But was that really the case? As we find ourselves struggling with artistic identity today in the face of AI, NFTs, and pseudonymous celebrity artists, this seminar offers an opportunity to seek insight from ancient and medieval theories of art, creation, gender, and aesthetics. We will consider artists’ handbooks and contracts; literary and historical sources; and a range of depictions of artists at work, including self-portraits.