The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

The first semester of Theory and History of Art and Design introduces students to artistic traditions and ways of making, building, crafting, and thinking from across time and space. This course explores a diverse array of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods from the histories of art, architecture, and design, with attention to histories of race, gender, labor, technology, the environment, and colonialism. Lectures are organized roughly chronologically but change annually with the expertise of lecturing faculty.

Registration for first-year students is processed by the Division of Liberal Arts.

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.

Elective

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 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