Courses

Fall Semester information

290A: Topics:The Halftime Show: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Popular Culture

This art history course uses the most watched telecast in recent American history--the NFL's annual Super Bowl Halftime Show--as a launching pad for critical conversations about popular representations of identity. What can we learn about race, gender, sexuality, and class by examining performances on the country's biggest cultural stage? How have artists amplified or challenged cultural hegemony through their performances? To answer these questions, the class will analyze Halftime Show performances of the modern era (since the early 1990s) and the social, political, and cultural themes they evoke. For instance, we will study the hype around Kendrick Lamar's much-anticipated 2025 Halftime Show in relation to the polarization of national politics, social media consumption, and the #MeToo movement. As a W course, the class challenges students to improve their understanding of writing as thinking. Another motivating goal is to provide students with the tools to critically engage with everyday culture.

290B: Topics:Mary: Virgin, Mother, Goddess

Spring Semester information

290A: Topics:Colonial Art and Visual Cultures in Latin America

290B: Topics:Contemporary Queer and Feminist Art

This course examines the work of queer and feminist artists working in the Americas since 1960. Rather than crafting a grand narrative of contemporary queer and feminist art, it theorizes from specific artistic practices. In this way, the course seeks to counter scholarly and curatorial imperatives imposed on artists to be legibly "queer" or properly "feminist." We will ask what these concepts mean in different contexts and how artists alternately have embraced and challenged them. Does the queer and feminist character of an artistic practice stem directly from an artist's identity? Is there anything tangibly queer or feminist about art outside of biography? Does queer and feminist art emerge in that practice's reception? This course takes race to be inextricable from sexuality and gender. Through an intersectional lens, we will consider themes such as cruising and fugitivity, drag and affect, closeting and censorship. There are no prerequisites for this course.

290C: Topics:The Medieval Art of Love

Surprising as it may sound, love has a history. Many of our modern notions of love are largely an inheritance from the 12th to the 15th centuries, a period that witnessed a vigorous and often contentious discourse about love: What is love, exactly? What causes and sustains it? What are its effects on the individual, and on society? How does it relate to sex? To marriage? How should a lover behave? And who has the authority to define what love is--the lovers themselves, or a corporate entity like the church or government?
Just as our current ideas about love are transmitted and shaped by visual media like movies, advertisements and greeting cards, so too in the Middle Ages, images of love and lovers saturated both popular and elite culture. These visual expressions of love are the focus of this course. We will examine diverse media, including manuscripts, murals, prints, sculpture, textiles, and much more, in a quest to understand how medieval people approached and imagined the interrelated topics of love, sex, and marriage. Students will be challenged to exercise critical thinking and sharpen their looking skills through close visual engagement with the art and arts of medieval love.

290D: Topics:Art of the Spanish Golden Age