Art History/Visual Culture
Core courses in Art History / Visual Culture seek to offer a progression of skill-building projects and familiarity with a broad range of visual materials. The curriculum offers an emphasis upon Modern and Contemporary thinking and practice, together with a belief that art-writing is a creative practice which is informed by, but which also itself informs, work undertaken in the studio.
- Survey I & II
- Graphic Communications Survey
- Post-Modernism in Thinking & Practice
- Aesthetics & Art Criticism
Options offered by the department within the common curriculum seek to provide a variety of more specialized courses in which related thinking is expressed in relation to more specialized forms or periods. By combining courses from within the major with options chosen from the selection below or by undertaking independent study, students may earn a contract minor in Art History.
- Medieval Art
- Renaissance Art
- Images of Women in Art
- Architecture & Society; Utopia, Distopia, Heterotopia
- Film/Photo/Culture
- Art in Contemporary Culture
- Honors Art
Core Course Descriptions
- The introductory Survey I & II courses are required for all students in the department and are understood as part of the foundations program. Survey I introduced students to a broad range of visual materials dating from Ancient Greece to the 19thC. As students are familiarized with these materials, examples of how their conceptual and formal aspects persist in contemporary visual culture are also considered. In this first course, strong emphasis is also placed on developing visual literacy, good research practices, and the strong writing skills necessary to the discipline. Survey II discusses Modern art and Modernism as a cultural idea. Questions relating to methodology are developed in relation to the increasingly complex body of material under discussion.
- Graphic Design majors proceed to the Graphic Communications Survey which introduces the history of materials relating to their discipline.
- Studio majors (B.A. & B.F.A) proceed to the Post-Modernism in Thinking & Practice course, which considers how we might understand contemporary visual culture in the Aftermath of Modernism. This course is more analytical than Survey and ties together methodology and histories of recent practices to encourage students to think more freely and engage more personally with the materials under consideration. This course is designed to encourage students to think of the practice of art history as analogous to their own visual practices and seeks to demonstrate how the grouping, labeling and analysis of existing materials may be understood as a creative process in its own right; a practice which informs and is informed by the highly visual culture we live within.
- The Aesthetics & Art Criticism Seminar which follows for those in the B.F.A track examines the sources which form the intellectual and theoretical foundations for the practices witnessed in the previous course. Students are encouraged initially to relate the ideas under discussion to contemporary visual practices of their choice, developing their skills in the practice of theory; students are ultimately invited to consider how these ideas – inspired by thinkers from Plato to Derrida – may be used to best describe their own studio practices.
Optional Course Descriptions
- Medieval Art provides a period based specialization which examines the relationship between visual practices and church patronage.
- Renaissance Art, which sees the blossoming of cultural forms in this period as tied to the scientific achievements of the period, and considers how this might be understood to underpin ideas we usually associate with Modernity.
- Images of Women in Art offers a gendered history of representation and practice.
- Architecture & Society; Utopia, Distopia, Heterotopia provides a valuable parallel to Post-Modernism in Thinking & Practice, by looking at how the utopian visions which inspired Modernist Architecture failed in their concrete forms and how approaches which value more pluralist narratives have come to replace the dominance of grand narratives in the built environment.
- The Film/Photo/Culture course seeks to examine how these media have provided effective tools for the distribution of complex image fragments in contemporary culture.
- Art in Contemporary Culture provides a welcome opportunity for students unfamiliar with contemporary visual practices to examine this material first hand in the many local galleries and museums. We discuss how these institutions function in the distribution and marketing of visual work and consider how the institutions affect what it is we are able to see.
- Honors Art provides some of the opportunities mentioned above whilst also looking at examples of national and international artists also and discussing some of the theories which have been used to defend them.
