ART 350 - Oceans, Rains, Rivers, Pools: Histories of Water

Why did artists from the regional courts of India paint poetic visions of rains, lakes, and rivers during periods of drought? How can the ocean serve as an archive, metaphor, and method for thinking about early modern and colonial material cultures, trade, and mobility? How do media images of environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina make visible, and invisible, the ocular tactics of biopolitical racism? How do our current water crises demand a wholesale rethinking of how we write and think about art? This class will focus on water as a subject and a methodology for studying early modern, colonial, and contemporary visual cultures. We will study a range of case studies, including regional Indian paintings, early modern hydro-architecture in South Asia, material cultures shaped by the Manila galleon trade and Indian Ocean trade networks, media images of environmental catastrophes, recent museum exhibitions on climate change, and more. Our studies will be supplemented by writings in art history, environmental humanities, anthropology, and new materialism. We will also consider the emergence of an art historiography of water that has been shaped by the ecological turn in the humanities

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).