ART 301 - Recent Writing About Art

While open to all students who meet the prerequisites, this course is required for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Juniors will have additional assignments that will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history.

Art History Beyond the Visual
Art history is a discipline, institutionalized in the nineteenth century, that mobilized vision as a tool of western imperialism. In this course, we seek to decenter the visual by problematizing our definition of visuality and by examining aspects of works of art that have gone unseen. For example, we will explore the ways in which works of art acted on the body and the sensorium; the significance of materials whose identities were not visible; the purposes for which art was never meant to be seen; and the artistic practices that provoked non-physical ways of seeing. While studying how works of art have interacted in non-visual ways with their human interlocutors across a wide range of times and places, we will also consider how art historians can integrate new methodologies that go beyond the traditional ocularcentric approaches. This team-taught course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art-historical scholarship. While open to all students who meet the prerequisites, this course is required for all declared art history majors in their junior year. Juniors will have additional assignments that will serve as the junior qualifying exam in art history.

Unit(s): 0.5
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): ART 201 and one 300-level course in art history or studio art
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken 3 times for credit
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).