Global Arc

This seminar explores how the complex and contested concept of "race" intersects with the categories of "art" and "visual culture" in the history of the United States (colonial era to the present). By examining the work of a range of artists and image-makers, we will explore how the concept of "race" is imagined, constructed, used, and/or challenged by artists and audiences as well as the manner in which the discipline of art history approaches considerations of race and racial/ethnic identity. Our approach will be thematic rather than chronological; material studied will include painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and film.

An in-depth exploration of the history, theory, and interpretation of American art and visual culture from the colonial period to the present day. Topics covered will include race and representation in American art and culture; art and science; landscape art and theory; the Harlem Renaissance; and the art and artists of the Stieglitz circle. Visits to the Princeton University Art Museum as well as to other area museums (such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) will be an integral part of this course. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

Museums have long disciplined conducts and framed ways of seeing through the production and reproduction of dominant values. But can they also act as instruments of transformation, even emancipation? This course investigates the museum and the exhibition as sites of experimentation within the overlapping spheres of art, society, and technology, with particular focus on their implications and enactment in Latin America. Key components will be hands-on work with the collections of Latin American art in the Princeton University Art Museum and Marquand and Firestone Libraries, as well as visits to museums and artist's studios in New York.

This course explores royal Maya courts of the 7th and 8th centuries, with particular attention given to art and writing. We will consider in depth several of the most impressive Maya courts. Regular decipherment assignments will complement assigned readings. A spring recess trip to Chiapas, Mexico, is a mandatory component of the course (funded by Princeton). Students will conduct independent research on a topic of their choosing, presenting their findings both as an oral presentation and as a term paper.

Painting was the ancient Maya expressive mode par excellence. Whether depicting mythology, history, or hieroglyphic writing, painting was for more private acts of visual consumption than architecture or sculpture. This seminar invites students into this private realm of ancient Maya scribes, nobility, and royal patronage. The course explores the 1500-year history of Maya painting, including murals, ceramics and books. We will consider techniques of production, iconography, aesthetics, and social context. Students will gain basic literacy in Maya writing and training in Maya astronomy.

This course explores the interface of American art, ecology, and environmental history in the context of a groundbreaking exhibition held at Princeton's art museum in Fall 2018. Using emerging interpretive strategies of ecocriticism, we will approach American art as creative material that has imagined and embodied environmental issues and attitudes concerning nationhood, development, species extinction, pollution, climate change, sustainability, and justice since the 18th century, when the foundations of ecology began to emerge. We will also address conceptual and practical issues surrounding the mounting of a major traveling loan exhibition.

This seminar focuses on the classical and traditional arts of the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of Southern Nigeria. Through readings on key aspects of the groups' philosophies, ritual practices, aesthetics and socio-cultural formations, we examine the conceptual bases and formal conditions of the arts of the two groups, and rethink earlier scholarship on Igbo and Yoruba art, politics and visual cultures.

Easily recognized as among the most important examples of canonical African art, Kongo sculpture, textiles, and ritual design are famous for their conceptual density, stylistic variety and rigorous abstraction. The course examines the role of art in the life of the Kongo Kingdom and related peoples, from the arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 15th century, through the era of Belgian colonization from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, to the period since political independence in 1960. The seminar coincides with and will explore the Kongo Across the Waters exhibition at the Princeton University Museum.

This seminar examines the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program, military dictatorships, and political crises on artistic production in the 1980s, and the dramatic movement of African artists from the margins of the international art world to its very center since the 1990s. How familiar or different are the works and concerns of African artists? What are the consequences, in Africa and the West, of the international success of a few African artists? And what does the work of these Africans at home and in the West tell us about the sociopolitical conditions of our world today?

Contrary to the notion that the Nazi defeat of 1940 marked the decline of art in France, this course examines how artists in France drew upon the legacies of the avant-garde with a renewed sense of commitment in order to express their wartime experiences, address themselves to the public, contest social norms and engage the political sphere. Through the study of aesthetic experiments across media and readings in existentialist, feminist and Marxist philosophy, artists' writings, art criticism and art history, we investigate how art was politicized by artists and their publics from the Nazi Occupation through the French riots of 2005.