Previous course offerings can be found here.

ARTH 102

Art History II. 3 Units

Prof. Erin Benay

MWF 10:35-11:25

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ARTH 260

Art In Early Modern Europe:  Decorum and Decadence in the Age of Reason

Prof. Erin Benay

MW 12:45pm-2pm

This course explores the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era of rising nationalism, political aggrandizement, religious expansion and extravagant art patronage. Artists like Caravaggio, Bernini, Velazquez, and Rembrandt negotiated emerging tensions between naturalism and idealization, court and city, public and private, and church and secular patronage. Grand commissions vied with the new culture of open-air markets, and collectors squirreled away magnificent paintings, sculptures, and prints alongside dried specimens of natural history in their cabinets of curiosity. These changes in artistic style, systems of patronage, and cultures of connoisseurship will provide the themes of the course as we explore what characterized the arts of Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Spain.

ARTH 545

Seminar in Medieval Art

Prof. Elina Gertsman

W 12:45pm-3:15pm

One of the greatest strengths of the Cleveland Museum of Art is its collection of late medieval European art. The seminar will study a multitude of objects in this collection with a special focus on those associated with the Capetian and Valois dynasties. Although their reign was far from tranquil, the two dynasties ruled the land generally known for its political and economic stability, powerful armies, vibrant spiritual and intellectual life, flourishing urban communities, and, most of all, for its magnificent visual and material culture. This culture will be explored in the seminar through consideration of some of the major themes in late medieval art, keyed to specific objects in the CMA’s collection. The course will serve as a teaser of sorts for the major Burgundy show scheduled to open in 2026.

We are fortunate to have assured the participation of the several scholars: Gerhard Lutz, curator of medieval art at the CMA, who will visit our class and focus specifically on object study; Erik Inglis, professor of medieval art at Oberlin College, who will lead a session centered on primary sources; and Pamela Patton, director of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton, who will deliver the Julius Fund lecture in medieval art on March 28

ARTH 286

Intro to Contemporary Art

Prof. Benjamin Murphy

TR 1pm-2:15pm

This course offers an overview of the major trends and developments that have shaped the visual arts from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the radical break from modernism inaugurated by Pop art, the course will move through styles and movements such as minimalism, conceptual art, postmodernism, body art and performance, concluding with a consideration of artistic practices of the present day that take digital platforms, screen-mediated experience, and other dimensions of contemporary life as their medium of experimentation. The class will take a global perspective on these developments, emphasizing the intersecting trajectories of art made in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and other spheres outside the traditional canonical centers of Europe and the United States. Through this global view, the course will explore how artistic practice has critically engaged pressing questions that have structured the past half century including war, conflict, and violence; migration, diaspora, and (de)colonization; struggles for racial, gender, sexual, and Indigenous rights; and current states of emergency amid democratic collapse and climate catastrophe. The course will actively engage the Cleveland Museum of Art, with lectures, discussions, and student projects centered on the museum’s collections.

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ARTH 571

Seminar in Contemporary Art

Prof. Benjamin Murphy

W 10am – 12:30pm

What is art’s role within our increasingly complex global economy? Is it just another luxury commodity, to be bought, sold, and insured? Or can art critique, and perhaps even disrupt, the process of commodity exchange itself? This seminar explores these questions by surveying modern and contemporary artists who explicitly use money and other financial instruments as their medium. From early twentieth-century iconoclasts ironically appropriating coins and paper currency, to postwar conceptualists who manipulated contracts, bonds and other “dematerialized” financial instruments, to contemporary creators who make digital works based on the structure of cryptocurrency, artists have often sought to blur the boundaries between art’s aesthetic value, its financial value, and its material form. Tracking these artistic blurrings, we will dive into some of the major theorizations of modern capitalism and its alternatives across a range of fields including critical theory and postcolonial studies, with the goal of developing conceptual tools for analyzing the ways in which art embraces, or resists, monetization. The course will focus on the Americas, drawing from scholarship that has analyzed how the historical dynamics that structured the experience of modernity throughout the American hemisphere – namely colonization, enslavement, extraction, and dispossession – functioned as the central motors for the emergence our current condition of globalized capitalism.

ARTH 393/493

Contemporary Art: Critical Directions: Media Histories of the Visual Construction of Race

Dr. Ksenia Un

MW 3:20pm-4:35pm

Media Histories of the Visual Construction of Race

When did looking become politicized in racial terms? How do art, media, and visual cultures enforce racial hierarchies and systems of difference? Which picturing strategies transfer across media and are there formal conventions that are unique to certain image-making techniques?

This course explores how art and visual culture shaped modern understandings of race, from the eighteenth century to present in a global context. We will examine a range of media and art, including orientalist painting, installations, moving image works, and drone imaging. Reading assignments will offer theoretical frameworks to mine visual materials for histories of race-making, which can be both jarring and elusive. Course requirements are designed to develop a critical awareness of the medium-specific strategies of art that continue to inflect discourse on race. Along with written assignments, students will be asked to produce an annotated media portfolio on a topic of their choice from the position of an artist, curator, journalist, scholar, or archivist.

Arts of China

Prof. Bo Liu

T/TH 2:30pm – 3:45pm

This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to the arts of China from the Neolithic period through the twentieth century. We will consider examples of different media (including painting, calligraphy, bronze vessels, bronze mirrors, sculpture, ceramics, architecture, and murals) in the context of Chinese literature, politics, philosophies, and religions, with some attention to dialogues with other cultures, such as Europe and West Asia. Specific topics will be discussed, including the relation between images and texts, artists’ places within a specific social structure, intellectual theories of the arts, and questions of patronage. The course will ask the students to ponder questions like “Why was a particular artifact considered a masterpiece?” “What values did a work of art represent, and how did it get those ideas through?” “Who would want it and why?”  “What is the stake for people to debate and compete on different artistic themes, styles, and tastes?”  Instead of viewing artworks purely as aesthetic creations, students are encouraged to study artworks critically as social products that are defined by specific social contexts and, at the same time, promote, challenge, or reshape the latter through various ways.

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War Games:  Videogames and the US Military

Prof. Steven Ciampaglia

R 7pm-9:30pm

This course examines the longstanding and symbiotic relationship between the commercial videogame industry and the US Military, or what has been called the Military-Entertainment Complex. The first videogame, Spacewar!, was created by computer researchers at MIT in 1962, using nascent computer technology funded by the US Department of Defense. Since then, the commercial videogame industry has grown in tandem with—and partly thanks to—the US Military’s development of computer and digital technologies. Today, military-themed videogames have come to dominate the gaming industry and gamer culture. Indeed, the ubiquity of these games has facilitated the US Military’s recruitment efforts. Games such as America’s Army and Call of Duty present seductive depictions of armed combat and military service and specifically target young gamers. Enlisted soldiers are trained for actual warfare on simulators that are nearly indistinguishable from games. The line between “real” and “virtual” combat has become increasingly blurred, further conflating war with fun and games, and eclipsing moral and ethical concerns about the relationship between technology and violence.

The history of fashion is intimately tied to issues of health, the body, and the environment. Adopting a case study model spanning the nineteenth century to now, this course will explore the full lifecycle of textile fabrication, including production, consumption, and waste.  Focusing on the nexus of environmental justice and health equity, we will trace the far-reaching impact of extractive global industrialization in the Anthropocene, including the production of raw materials, the fabrication of cloth and clothing, and the increasing ecological crisis of textile waste pollution.  In particular, we will foreground considerations of race, class, and gender in the fashion and textile industry, from the health impact on laboring bodies producing raw materials, fabric, and clothing, to the ways bodies have been shaped by and through clothing, to the toxic legacies of textile byproducts and waste.  As a community engaged course, we will follow the interconnected threads of the global and the local by developing relationships with Cleveland-based institutions centered on textiles and fashion in the context of sustainability and bodily and environmental health.  We will also engage with the collections and staff of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The course is open to all undergraduate and graduate students, with instructor permission, and a maximum enrollment of 12 students.  Please write a short statement of 200-300 words describing your interest in the course.

*This course will be cross-listed with HUMN and BETH.