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

This THAD lab course will challenge you to enact methodologies that entwine visual culture with the natural sciences and Indigenous values. As a contemporary art movement, sci-art has two objectives: 1) to increase the communicative capacity of science through artistic media, and 2) to explore new dimensions of the human capacity for learning and teaching about our shared world. This course’s active approach to sci-art history is Land-based, in which practitioners are guided by an awareness of the obligations we have to all things. To bridge sci-art methods and Land-based learning, we practice Two-Eyed Seeing, which engages locality, visuality, and textuality through observation, collection, ceremony, and craft. Register for this class if you are open to a paradigm shift that breaks from commonly learned assumptions about relationships between yourself and every other thing around you.

Elective

Public programs in art museums are designed to spark conversation, curiosity, and connection. What was once the limited realm of educational lectures from experts in the field has evolved into a dynamic, diverse practice spanning a range of modes of engagement. Programs amplify the perspectives of artists, writers, thinkers, community leaders and changemakers, and explore art, our lives, and the critical issues of our time. From quiet, intimate gatherings looking closely at a single work of art to listening parties, performances, readings, conversations, hands-on workshops and more, public programs can be designed to incite wonder, spark curiosity, deepen understanding, pose critique, share new perspectives or relax, unwind, and have fun. What makes a great program and why? How do you engage different audiences and develop an inclusive and equitable approach? How do you create meaningful experiences and lasting impressions?

In this course, students will be introduced to the art of engagement. Drawing on case studies, readings, and lectures by guest speakers in the field, students will be immersed in the methods, objectives, history, and theory of public engagement. Throughout the semester, students will develop their skills through workshops, exercises, and interactive discussions, examining questions of care, relevance, responsiveness, equity, access, innovation, imagination, and fun in public engagement—from the Brooklyn Museum’s community-centered First Saturdays, the Whitney Museum’s artist programs, the Met’s contemplative Observant Eye, MoMA’s Create Ability and Art inSight Access Programs, to the RISD Museum’s own signature Ways of Looking. Students will also be introduced to collaborative methods of co-creating programs with artists and communities, and strategies for designing mutually beneficial programs. This course is designed for students to think deeply about activating and sharing different aspects of their work with different audiences, exploring creative process, concepts, context, and inspiration. 

Students will also have the option of researching and working with contemporary and historic objects from the RISD Museum collection. This course will also introduce students to the history and theory of public programs in the art museum and areas of growth, innovation and new directions in the field. Students will learn about different audiences, and strategies and modes of engagement with opportunities to learn firsthand through field trips and workshops.

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

The Trojan War is one of the most influential stories in the history of Western culture. After a brief examination of the archaeological evidence for such an event, this course will focus on the art and literature inspired by the Trojan War from Ancient Greece through modern times. Readings will include selections from Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and take into account return stories such as the Odyssey. Art with Trojan iconography will be explored from ancient vase-paintings and sculptures through Renaissance and Baroque depictions, up to a contemporary graphic novelization and a brief discussion of films on the subject. Major themes include the interaction of art and literature, and the mutability of an established narrative at the hands of subsequent creators.

Elective

This experimental seminar is a space for students to explore any issues of interest to you in the field of modern and contemporary art. You may work, independent-study style, on any topic that specially interests you. Research will be done in dialogue with fellow students and a faculty facilitator. On the first day of class we will discuss topics of common interest, and develop a provisional semester plan and a list of readings. As the conversation develops over subsequent weeks, our plan may be adjusted or even completely revised. Coursework will be tailored to the needs of individual participants.

This class is recommended for Seniors in Fine Arts and for THAD Concentrators.

Elective

The course will examine how female painters, photographers, performance artists and film directors use their bodies and elements of their biographies to build their art upon. We will read interviews with them and analyses of their work, watch documentary films, study self-portraits in painting and photography. We will try to define the special attraction and therapeutic role autobiographic art has for women. Among the artists discussed will be: Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold, Marina Abramovic, Shirin Neshat, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Maya Deren, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Agnes Varda, and Francesca Woodman. Students will do weekly readings; write weekly papers, as well as a final paper about a chosen artist. Active participation in class discussions is required.

Elective

Chocolate started as a drink 5000 years ago in the Americas and took the form of edible bars sold in Western countries only from the 19th century. Chocolate was (and still is) about health, pleasure, socializing, and luxury, aspects that art and design have historically embraced. However, its dark side, poverty, racism, and patriarchy should not be silenced. In this course, we examine the bittersweet history of chocolate through the lens of iconography, tableware design, and primary sources. Methodologies include discussions of assigned readings, hand-written responses (no A.I.), teamwork in the classroom, and hands-on activities (such as making chocolate from scratch and creating meaningful packaging).

We decipher and deconstruct texts, images, and objects designed for consuming or promoting chocolate, mostly in the Western world, from the 16th to the 21st centuries. We reflect on historical circumstances, perspectives, and elisions while building skills in research methods. Writing with a personal voice, students will craft responses grounded in positionality; create labels for museum works and rare books; and write designers’ / artists’ statements. Active participation in class meetings and completing homework without the use of A.I. is expected to pass this course. The extra meeting hour for each class meeting will support teamwork and allow you to prepare much of your homework in the classroom

Elective

Few practices are more central to art school education than critique. Yet in recent years, critique itself has become the target of a growing critique. Critique, its detractors argue, seeks only to discredit, to reveal what others fail to see, to prove its adversaries wrong. Yet is this really what defines critique? Has critique, in Bruno Latour’s famous phrase, indeed run out of steam? Is our present moment “post-critical”? Foregrounding these questions, this course will examine both the changing landscape of twentieth-century critique (Frankfurt School critical theory, anticolonial critique, poststructuralism, feminist and queer theoretical critique) and twenty-first-century challenges to and reinventions of critique (post-critique, critical race theory, post-Autonomist Marxism). As we proceed, we will consider the debates that unfold in this context in relation to different aesthetic practices—visual art, film, new media, architecture—with the aim both of reconceptualizing critique and of understanding its role in contemporary culture. In turn, we will attempt to develop a theoretical and historical framework through which members of the class, whatever their distinct concerns or projects, can think through and reassess their own activities in relation to the question of critique and of what constitutes critical cultural production today.

Elective

This course has two primary goals: cultivating an in-depth, hands-on knowledge of a topic in Indigenous art history and developing a diverse set of writing tools for documenting lived experience. First, this course will explore the history, anthropology, and overall context of the development of traditional Indigenous American textile production methods. Our examination of these textiles will involve critical readings of key texts, lectures and discussions. However, above all, we will be employing a hands-on approach to reproduce the process involved in making these textiles. Focusing on the specific example of Navajo blanket and rug weaving, together we will create our own woven tapestries, replicating traditional methods from cleaning wool straight off the sheep, to dyeing with natural dyes, to building and weaving on our own traditional Navajo-style tapestry looms. The second goal of this course is to explore a variety of approaches toward documenting students' own experiences in the field - ranging from more creative and artistic approaches to more formal or technical descriptions. The intention is to expose students to a variety of writing methods that may come in handy in their professional careers, be they artists' statements or grant applications. To this end, students will be keeping a semester-long field journal detailing their hands-on experiences in this course, culminating in the production of a final presentation of their work.

Elective

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.

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

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 seminar focuses on the history, discourses and transformations of the black female body as contested site of sexuality, resistance, representation, agency and identity in American visual culture. Organized thematically, with examples drawn from painting, sculpture, photography, film, popular culture and mixed media installations, we examine how the deployment, manipulations and construction of the signification of the asexualized mammy complex is juxtaposed against the jezebel vixen in a shifting terrain from the antebellum era through the post-racial decade of the 21st century.

Elective

This course will examine scientific and technical applications developed by Western artists and visual theorists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Concentrating on pictorial traditions, the course will address what artists, authors and artist/engineers have referred to as scientific, technical, mechanical, and purely mental solutions to optical, proportional and quantitative visual problems. General themes will be perspective, form, color, and mechanical devices, and will include discussions on intellectual training, notebooks, treatises, and collecting. The course will examine artists such as Masaccio, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, D|rer, Serlio, Carlo Urbino, Cigoli, Rubens, Vel`zquez, Saenredam, Vermeer, Poussin, Andrea Pozzo, Canaletto, Phillip Otto Runge,Turner, Delacroix, Monet, and Seurat.

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