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THAD H219-01
SURREALISM IN FRANCE AND ELSEWHERE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will show how the ideas of the historical French avant-garde movement founded in Paris in 1924 have spread across borders and influenced artists of central Europe. It will also focus on the relationship between surrealist European artists of the 20th century and Mexican art. Our goal will be to see how certain ways of thinking and seeing the world can be shared by artists living in different places and under different political regimes.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H229-01
ART HISTORY, POSTCOLONIALISM, DECOLONIALITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In recent years, the idea of decolonizing museums, academic institutions of art, and the narrative and curricular spaces of art history has gained increased urgency. But the concept and practice of decolonization have a much longer history than their recent (re)emergence in the art world. As a response to colonial and imperial orders of the world, decolonization set new boundaries for thought, knowledge, and for “being” itself. This seminar asks whether these boundaries have been effectively translated into the recent challenges that are posed against institutional practices of art and art history. It also asks about the ways in which postcolonialism, with a genealogy different from decolonization, is situated vis-à-vis the historical origins of decolonization in the writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and its resurgence in art history and museology. We will read texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aníbal Quijano, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward W. Said, Geeta Kapur, and Walter Mignolo among others.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H246-01
GREEK & ROMAN ART & ARCHEOLOGY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course discusses developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture in Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Western Asia, in the Hellenic sphere of influence between 900 BCE and CE 400. Topics include Greek and Hellenistic Art, Etruscan and Roman Art, and the archaeological methods used to investigate these civilizations. Emphases will include the importance of cultural exchange in the development of what would become Greek culture and the immense plurality seen in those regions during that period.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H248-01
ICONOCLASM
SECTION DESCRIPTION
An Icon has been described as an image or work that has achieved such exceptional levels of widespread recognizability among people across time & cultures as to transgress or transcend the parameters of its initial making, function, context and meaning (Martin Kemp, 2012). Iconoclasm has been recently defined as a principled attack on specific objects, aimed primarily at the objects' referents or at their connection to the power or values they represent. (Anne McLanan, 2019) Iconoclastic acts, therefore, engage with both the materiality of the object and the power structures embedded within or attached to the object - the thing that is often most out of reach. In this seminar, we cast a wide net, historically and geographically, to ask: What and who defines an Icon? How has the destruction or defacement of Icons - Iconoclasm - come to be understood as something much more than a simple act of vandalism? What are the principles and politics of Iconoclasm? How is Iconoclasm very much in play today as a catalyst for social justice, political action and collective agency?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H251-01
DESIGN WRITING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This writing-intensive course helps students consider the relationship between writing and design, examining language and writing as an active component of a dynamic studio practice. We will explore contemporary culture and issues that affect designers through reading, writing, and discussion, and will examine several different types of design writing in the process. Exercises train students in essential tasks such as conducting formal analyses, writing catalogue entries, and making visual presentations, and we will discuss methods for idea generation, research and writing about our work and our selves, as well as engaging with professional design writing practices like reviews and interviews. We will hone strategies for gathering, organizing, and archiving research material, and will discuss the ways in which writing, as well as self reflection, researching texts, reading arts publications and reviews, and studying like-minded artists can contribute to a critical, engaged, and continually evolving body of work.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H257-01
DECOLONIAL FEMALE VOICES IN POST-SOVIET ART
SECTION DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to be Post-Soviet? And what does it mean to be a Post-Soviet and (Post-)colonial? What does it mean to be a Post-Soviet and (Post-)Colonial woman? The course would attempt to talk about the variety of female voices from the Post-Soviet spaces of the Eurasian borders and will engage in theorizing the Post-Socialist (Post-)Colonialism through fiction, art and theory. We will look at the texts of Madina Tlostanova and explore how artists such as Taus Makhacheva, Aidan Salakhova, Almagul Menlibayeva, Umida Akhmetova and others resist and rethink their Soviet past. The course will include readings, a field trip and Zoom visits from artists/curators.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H259-01
THEORIES OF SPECTACLE AND CONTEMPORARY LIFE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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
THAD H281-01
AMERICAN PRINTS: ARTISTS AND MASTER PRINTERS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The 1960s saw the expansion of the art market in the US when printmaking workshops emerged on the coasts and in the heartland. Artists and master printers worked collaboratively at ULAE, Tamarind, Gemini GEL, Tyler Graphics and others, and such presses also editioned artists' prints for sale via the gallery system. Importantly such workshops also offered an opportunity to artists primarily committed to other media to explore various printmaking methods. Collaboration among artists and printmakers thus became a hallmark of the so-called American Printmaking Renaissance. The course will investigate the nature of collaboration between artists and master printers as we study prints by epoch-making artists including Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, as well as lesser-known artists who contributed significantly to the popularity of prints. Technical innovation continued in the era of Pop with the use of commercial techniques by Warhol, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein, and continues today with the use of digital media. We will draw upon the collection of the RISD museum to develop an intimate understanding of the role of innovation and collaboration in American printmaking ca.1960-1990.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H286-101
DESIGNING GENIUS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will examine the myth and cultural importance placed on spaces and objects occupied and used by the so-called "geniuses" of American history alongside our general romantic interest in "the genius" as a cultural phenomenon. We will examine the designed objects and spaces of famous American artists and heroes - places such as Graceland, Dollywood, and Marfa; objects like Thomas Jefferson's writing desk; and museums created out of the homes of Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, among others. In an attempt to unpack and understand the importance of objects in both memory- and identity-making, we will consider how visual and material objects both communicate personality and legacy and how they act as mediators between each "genius" and their audiences, allowing visitors to come into contact with the imaginative worlds of their heroes.
THAD H311-01
THE ROOTS OF OUR ECOLOGICAL CRISIS: ART, FAITH, AND TECHNOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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
THAD H351-01
CARIBBEAN ONTOLOGIES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo famously qualified the Caribbean as a region defined by "chaos"—chaos as an historical, material, and ontological condition. Famously difficult to define, the Caribbean exists as an archipelago both literally, in its geographic composition of several chains of islands and a continental basin; and metaphorically, as distinct but complex ontology that has been shaped by histories of colonization, genocide, enslavement, hybridity, liberation, revolution, and ecological crisis. Taking chaos as a theoretical framework, this seminar examines Caribbean ontologies through the region's visual and material cultures, from before the Conquest to the present day. It will proceed thematically, engaging with a wide variety of artistic, literary, cinematic, musical, and historical material. Topics of discussion will include socioecological theories of transculturation and opacity, Black and Indigenous strategies of survival and resistance, the allure and the threat of tropicality, the contested history of Revolution, religious and spiritual syncretism, and the presence of water as both boundary and connective tissue. We will consider how chaos, transculturation, and opacity offer productive vocabularies and decolonial methodologies—and whether there even is a singular "Caribbean" at all.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H411-01
ART AND HISTORY OF EARLY WEST AFRICAN KINGDOMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H414-01
INTRODUCTION TO MATERIAL CULTURE: MAKERS, OBJECTS AND SOCIAL LIVES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H441-01
HISTORY OF DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H441-01
HISTORY OF DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H441-02
HISTORY OF DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H445-01
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON THE BLACK FEMALE BODY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H447-01
VISUAL CULTURE IN FREUD'S VIENNA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will examine the visual culture pertinent to Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries in turn-of-the-century Vienna. We shall look at the modernist art of Austrian painters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as the minor arts of illustration, photography, scientific imaging, and film in light of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas. Classes will be devoted to topics such as avant-garde postcard design, ethnographic photography, and scientific images including x-rays and surgical films. The silent erotic "Saturn" films that were screened in Vienna from 1904-1910 will also be considered. Requirements include mid-term and final exams, two essays, and interest in the subject (no past experience needed).
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H462-01
THE RENAISSANCE EMBODIED
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Renaissance depictions of the body range from muscular, idealized nudes to decaying, but ambulatory, corpses. In Europe, artists dissected human cadavers and, for the first time since antiquity, reflected the use of living models in their workshops and studios. In this course, we examine works that embodied early modern ideas about power and dependence, race and class, gender and sexuality, death and disease, the divine and demonic, the marginalized and the fantastic. Focusing on the artist's studio and early modern practice, we consider a diverse set of bodies as they were represented in paintings, sculpture, drawings, decorative arts, books and prints in relation to contemporary spiritual, political, and social concerns. We also consider the role of the artist in `documenting' travel, conquest, and empire from approximately 1450-1700.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
THAD H476-01
CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART: THE NIGERIAN EXPERIENCE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective