Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2021-2022

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This course will explore the rich and diverse contemporary cultural production from Turtle Island or “Canadian” artistic scenes. This course is designed around themes and mediums to show a broad diversity of contemporary art practices, cultural conversations, touch on canonical figures, and feature bright up and coming artists. The second portion of this course will continue with lectures but will also feature virtual Guest Lectures/QnA’s with artists, curators, and makers. This course will expose you to conversations as they have evolved and been informed by artists and artist-activist practices. I am also complimenting the “Canadian” course content with a few artists and artworks from Indigenous circumpolar and Oceanic artists to situate the work coming from Turtle Island into a global movement of contemporary Indigenous art, politics, and criticism.

We will explore everything from Inuit sculpture, Woodlands school painting, graffiti street art, autobiographical drawing, performance art, virtual reality, film, and video game design. Our exploration in looking and discussing these works will be accompanied with theory and history for a rich understanding of Indigenous cultural production, themes, tropes, and the previous expectations and practices those artists contend with. Throughout the course we will exercise your critical research, academic writing, looking and visual analysis, as well as how you can identify and relate works in terms of theme, medium, or commentary. Learning outcomes for this course include understanding the history of Indigenous contemporary art, the broad swath of current practices like circumpolar and digital practices, and finally sharing first-person perspectives of thinkers and makers in the field through guest discussions that will complement the main course content.

If you show up each day to class curious, prepared, and ready to work, by the end you will:
1. Understand the broad swath of Indigenous contemporary art and the social, political, and historic commentary they are embedded with.
2. Be able to read art and artefacts as objects of Indigenous cultural expression as modes of insider communication or critiques of ongoing settler-colonialism.
3. Understand complex historical and contemporary relationships between settlers and Indigenous populations as colonization and slavery brought groups in contact for capital, assimilation, acculturation, and appropriation.
Leave class with an elevated sense of cultural conversations happening in Canada and other colonized sites, how identities are constructed or manages, and how worldview impacts how we relate to others from a structural and historical viewpoint.

*This course is a blended teaching style, September 9^th to October 29^th will be taught in person (pending University and Gov. guidelines) and the remainder will be delivered virtually.

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This course surveys key movements, monuments and ideas of the 20th and 21st century architecture, urban planning and design. We will begin by discussing the development of modernism in architecture, its competing definitions and relation to politics. We will continue to examine contemporary architecture by looking at the emergence of new trends such as postmodernism, deconstructivism, parametricism, sustainability, and smart city. Special attention will be given to architecture’s exchange with other media such as painting, sculpture, film, fashion, and the decorative arts. Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with discipline-specific terminologies to talk about form, function, space and context in architecture.

This course explores the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics in twentieth-century dictatorships: National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union. We will see how painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film were mobilized by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin both to terrorize and infatuate the crowds into compliance. Throughout the course, we will discuss cultural politics of these regimes in relation to larger topics such as race, gender, sexuality and artistic agency. Towards the end of the semester, we will also be tapping into the postwar debates on the cultural significance of “difficult” heritage and representations of totalitarian regimes in contemporary art and popular culture.

Advisor Approval Required.

What can a portrait, the purported record of a person’s physical appearance, tell us about an individual long lost to history? What can we learn from a visual image about a person’s life, values, character, and motivations? In the Renaissance, almost every European artist created vivid portrait likenesses of their contemporaries to mark crucial moments in the life of the portrayed: the moment they were betrothed or married, came of adult age or entered a profession, rose to office or title, won a battle, or when they died. Essentially, whenever the cycle of life entered a new stage, the artist was called upon. But portraits are also enigmatic: do they represent individuals or ideas, real appearances or aspirational ideals? This seminar explores multiple aspects of Renaissance portraiture (ca. 1400–1600) with attention to theories of individuality and self-fashioning; concepts of life-likeness and the power of art; poetic tropes of desire, loss, and captured presence; and paradigms of authority, moral character, and physical appearance (as expressed in treatises, dialogues, and poetry as well as painting). More broadly, the seminar addresses the various social, political, and devotional functions of portraiture, which includes visual constructions of gender, race, age, and class.

Description not available.

Description not available.

Department approval required.

“Art insurance is huge business,” so one recent art-market commentator observes, “and not least now that artworks move around the world in far greater volume and frequency than ever before.” Insurance indeed exerts pervasive influence upon contemporary art. It is a requirement for art’s circulation, a judge of monetary value, an arbiter of the conditions of display. But, how has insurance come to occupy such a central position in the arts? Where, when and why have artists and architects made technologies of risk key to their enterprises? Art history possesses few working narratives of how insurance has ramified through the visual arts and architecture on its way to literally underwriting their conditions of contemporary possibility. This seminar aims to advance such a critical history. Introducing the general problematic, we will work through a sequence of cases as we aim to build a provisional genealogy of insurance’s crossings with art, architecture, the market, and the museum. Along the way, we will examine where and how insurance has penetrated into the texture of modernity, shaping the nature of subjectivity, the role of the state, the value of human life (both enslaved and “free”), among other considerations.

Bruno Latour famously asked: “What does it mean to be modern?” This course considers this question and its implications for art, art criticism and arts institutions in Europe, Russia and North America spanning 1750 to 1950. Students will encounter a broad range of works including painting, sculpture, architecture, print and the decorative arts. We will consider engagements with the art and culture of antiquity (classical and non-European), relationships between art, politics and imperialism, the emergence of art institutions (academies, museums), and the ways in which the arts constituted and challenged ideas surrounding class, gender and race. The course likewise endeavors to introduce students to the discipline of art history and its knowledge making techniques.

There are two primary objectives of this course. The first objective is to provide an overview of the methods employed in the discipline of art history since the eighteenth century. The second objective is to provide students with an opportunity to determine which methods resonate with them for future coursework. We will begin with discussions of formalism and iconography; subsequently we will discuss critical methodologies including feminist interventions into (masculine) art history, writing queer art histories, attending to intersectionality and the black female subject, as well as Marxism, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.

This course will explore the rich and diverse contemporary cultural production from Turtle Island or “Canadian” artistic scenes. This course is designed around themes and mediums to show a broad diversity of contemporary art practices, cultural conversations, touch on canonical figures, and feature bright up and coming artists. The course will feature virtual Guest Lectures/QnA’s with artists, curators, and makers. This course will expose you to conversations as they have evolved and been informed by artists and artist-activist practices. I am also complimenting the “Canadian” course content with a few artists and artworks from Indigenous circumpolar and Oceanic artists to situate the work coming from Turtle Island into a global movement of contemporary Indigenous art, politics, and criticism.

We will explore everything from Inuit sculpture, Woodlands school painting, graffiti street art, autobiographical drawing, performance art, virtual reality, film, and video game design. Our exploration in looking and discussing these works will be accompanied with theory and history for a rich understanding of Indigenous cultural production, themes, tropes, and the previous expectations and practices those artists contend with. Throughout the course we will exercise your critical research, academic writing, looking and visual analysis, as well as how you can identify and relate works in terms of theme, medium, or commentary. Learning outcomes for this course include understanding the history of Indigenous contemporary art, the broad swath of current practices like circumpolar and digital practices, and finally sharing first-person perspectives of thinkers and makers in the field through guest discussions that will complement the main course content.

In classical East Asia, ancestors and deities were a vital component of art-making. Many of the most innovative and impressive works that exist to us today were created for ritual activities in their honor. Focusing on China, which gave a foundation for the long-lasting tradition while in conversation with its neighboring cultures, this seminar examines major sets of images, objects, and spaces constructed around the worshiping of ancestors and deities from around the first millennium B.C.E, to the eighteenth century.

Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with the basic concepts and historical developments of the art of worship in two main religious arenas: funerary and Buddhist. While maintaining the formal boundary between the two categories, students will also investigate their significant overlap by identifying and analyzing their shared cultural logic of ritual and visual practices. Key questions to be considered include: How did artists translate religious ideology into visual forms? How do static objects connote movement and animation? What are the connections between ritual objects and the visual culture of the everyday world?

This thematic survey of Northern European art explores the development of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and the luxury arts in the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England from about 1400 to 1570. Through historical and visual interpretation, we will consider the social, political, and religious functions of artworks in public and private life, exploring the needs and interests of patrons, artists, and beholders. Topics to be addressed include the multiple forms of art produced for religious devotion; the significance of artistic materials and techniques including the revolution of the print medium; the changing conception of the artist; the role of gender in art making and viewing; the explosion of secular imagery in art; alterity and otherness; and the dramatic cultural transformation brought about by Renaissance humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and the discovery of “new” worlds in the Age of Exploration. The course will include required independent visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Rare Books and Special Collections at the McGill Library (public health regulations permitting).

“Embodied knowing”; “artisanal epistemology”; “maker’s knowledge”: terms like these (along with some lavish funding) have recently drawn many historical researchers toward forms of practice-based investigation. By recreating production techniques used in the past, so historians of art, science and neighboring fields have argued, we can pose questions and gain insights about artworks and the cultures from which they emerged in ways inaccessible to conventional academic methods, which remain focused on texts.

This seminar seeks neither to critique nor to historicize recent scholarly efforts to mobilize material making, although we will engage with some critiques and historicization. Nor does “Drawing for Art Historians” aim to teach drawing skills in the manner of an art-school class. Instead, this course uses the foundational practice of drawing at a moment of its rich, variegated spread in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century for methodological purposes. Offering what is hoped to be a break from the academic routine of screens, readings and writing that have reached a crescendo in the COVID era, we will put graphic practices to some gentle tests to pose the following question: what can the art historian learn by doing?

“Drawing for Art Historians” is an experiment on several levels. We will be joined by several guests; some in person, other virtually. Further, reading and writing—cornerstones of assessment in a seminar—will command complementary status in our case. Privileged instead will be acts of making and demonstrations (in exercises, writings and contributions to class-time discussion) of ability to reconcile material techniques into the domain of art-historical knowledge.

To stress: our brief isn’t just experimentation with drawing materials. Rather, our aim is to consider how, where and why trials of material techniques might or might not enrich the steps and procedures of art-historical knowledge-production. You will succeed in this class to the extent you are willing and able to reflect upon how making can/cannot advance art-historical method.

Image: Edouart Augustin-Amant-Constant-Fidèle, “Hunting Scene,” A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses (London: Longman and Co., etc, 1835), Plate 18

One of the most persistent challenges in approaching the classical art of China derives from the modern viewer’s tendency to divorce the image from its material components and their workings in the creation process. Reduced as the static aesthetic field of form, style, and/or motif, the image's material roots are often taken for granted as if they simply existed, awaiting and ready to be used by the image-maker. The artist's creating hand, however, is always commanded by the materiality of matters, be it bronze, jade, wood, stone, gold, lacquer, clay, paper, silk, ink, or water. This seminar surveys some of the most fundamental matters and substances recognized, adopted, and maneuvered by image-makers in traditional China. We will pay close attention to each material's specific ways to respond to technical and ecological conditions, as well social contexts in specific moments of history. By encouraging organic relations between the matter, the maker's hand, and the materialization of their workings, the seminar provides a venue for exploring dynamic roles of the matter as active participants in the image-making that goes beyond the stylistic or iconographical dimensions.