Freshman Seminar 30x
The Life Project
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Wednesday, 2-4pm
What happens when contemporary artists treat their everyday lives as artistic material, "sculpting" their eating, sleeping, or living habits and reporting on the process? What kind of art is this? In the era of reality TV, personal informatics, and "challenge literature" have such projects gone mainstream? How do they relate to the "life projects" of ascetics, experimental subjects, or the mentally ill?
Freshman Seminar 36x
Money Matters
Evridiki Georganteli
Thursday, 1-3:30pm
Money matters aims to engage first-year students with the economics, politics and aesthetics of one of the most fascinating and enduring aspects in human history. The seminar is a study of money in all its manifestations from the early agrarian societies to the first financial crisis of the 21st-century global market. How have individuals and societies reacted to and used money in business, politics and religion? What are the factors that shaped the metallic content and iconography of coins from the 7th-century BC to the end of the Gold Standard in the 20th century? Why are early modern American and European banknotes so important for the study of social history? What are the links between art, literature, theatre, cinema and money? Seminars will take place at the Harvard College, the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, introducing students to the world-class Harvard Coin Collection and offering them the opportunity to handle, research and discuss priceless artifacts. Money matters is intended for students with an interest in history, art history, archaeology, political science, economics and the study of world religions. Handling sessions, group discussions and a short essay on a choice coin from the Harvard Coin Collections will offer students a sense of immediacy and accessibility of Harvard’s splendid numismatic holdings and the opportunity to understand why money makes indeed the world go round.
Freshman Seminar 61L
“Get Out of My Space!” Making Sense of Our Built Environment
Patricio Del Real
Wednesday, 3-5pm
Today space is at a premium. We all want space, but what sort of space do we want? We have social space, virtual space, personal space, safe space, collective space. How much space is there? Can we run out of it? How much do you need when you tell me: “Get out of my space!” What makes it “yours?” How do we make space? Who controls it? Architecture helps us define space. We live, study, work and play in buildings and cities that have become the stages for our everyday lives, helping us do what we do and live our present. But architecture has another much more important function: It helps us imagine other possible ways of living. Architecture helps us envision the spaces we want to live in. In this seminar, we will explore the different ways in which we have created, claimed, fought over, shared and continue to imagine space. Our discussions will put a premium on the way architects, artists and social actors have produced space, and how their ideas and projects guide the way we understand our constructions of space. We will make space through hands-on projects such as mapping social networks and transforming your space through the technique of collage. These projects will challenge and help you record, transform and produce space. This seminar is designed to enrich your knowledge of space so that you may take a position on contemporary social questions, debate the nature of our built environment, and claim space for yourself.
Freshman Seminar 61x
Soft Power: The 21st Century Art Museum
Ethan Lasser, Rachel Saunders
Tuesday, 1-3pm
What are museums good for in the twenty-first century? Should they be temples of scholarship or purveyors of popular entertainment? Are they places in which we seek contemplative refuge in the experience of “beauty,” or are they viable sites in which to work for social justice? Should we be investing public funds in museums, or are they a luxury best supported by private sources? To whom do museum collections “belong?” Art museums today are thriving, yet they have never faced so many contentious questions about their role and responsibilities. Co-led by two curators at the Harvard Art Museums, this seminar will consider the big issues facing art museums across the globe today. The course is intended for both long-time museum goers, as well as those who have never set foot in an art gallery. We begin with a primer on museum basics—the work of collecting, conservation, display, and research—and an introduction to the many resources of the Harvard Art Museums. In the second half of the seminar, we consider the challenges that face both august, traditional institutions—like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—as well as younger, start-up museums like the private/ public collections being established across Asia.
Humanities 11a
Frameworks: The Art of Looking
Jennifer Roberts
Tuesday, 11:30-1pm
Visual information today is superabundant thanks to our smartphones, tablets, and other screen-based gadgets. But few of us recognize how thoroughly our habits and experiences of looking have been conditioned by interfaces with long and complex histories. Participants in this course, developed as part of the Humanities Project at Harvard, will approach looking through a consideration of key technologies from its history, such as the telescope, the cinema, and the easel painting. Students will learn about the hidden intricacies of looking and hone skills of visual, material, and spatial analysis through encounters with aesthetic objects from Harvard's collections.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 43
Visual Culture of the Ottoman Empire Between East and West, 15th-17th C.
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday/Thursday, 11-12pm
Examines the visual culture of the Ottoman Empire straddling three continents (Asia, Europe, Africa), together with cross-cultural artistic interactions with Western and Asian Islamic courts (Safavid Iran, Mughal India). Ottoman urbanism, architecture, miniature painting and decorative arts studied in their socio-political contexts that informed their production and reception. The selective fusion of Ottoman-Islamic, Byzantine and Italian Renaissance elements in the codification of a distinctive visual tradition that helped processes of multicultural empire building and identity formation is analyzed. Earliest representations of the East by European artists working in the "Orientalist" mode are also considered.
HAA 18k
Introduction to Japanese Art
Melissa McCormick
Monday/Wednesday, 11-12pm
Surveys the arts of Japan from the prehistoric period to the nineteenth century. Includes Japanese painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as calligraphy, garden design, ceramics, and prints. Essential themes include the relationship between artistic production and Japanese sociopolitical development, Sino-Japanese cultural exchange, and the impact of religion, region, gender, and class on Japanese artistic practice.
HAA 88
China in Twelve Artworks
Eugene Wang
Monday/Wednesday, 11-12pm
China is grasped through twelve artworks, spanning three millennia from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. These artworks form both a timeline and a jigsaw puzzle with recurrent themes, e.g., the correlation between cosmos, body, and mind. The course consists of case studies, revealing both larger intellectual trends and the nuanced way artworks engage established formal conventions. Students learn about China through art and acquire visual literacy that takes art on its own terms.
HAA 99
Senior Thesis Seminar
Jennifer Roberts
Monday, 3-5pm
In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser. Part one of a two part series.
HAA 124e
Architecture and the Construction of Early Modern Islamic Empire
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday, 1-3pm
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, three empires - the Mediterranean-based Ottomans, Safavids in Iran, and Mughals in India - developed interconnected yet distinctive architectural cultures with individualized ornamental idioms by fusing their common Timurid heritage with cosmopolitan regional traditions. Explores connections between empire building and architecture, with respect to aesthetics, religion, imperial ideology, and theories of dynastic legitimacy.
HAA 138m
From Byzantium to the British Isles: The Materiality of Late Antiquity
Evridiki Georganteli
Monday, 1-3pm
This course explores the extraordinary cultural transformation Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East underwent from Diocletian's reorganization of the Roman Empire in the late third century to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. Monuments and sites, sculpture, mosaics, frescoes and ceramics, icons and relics, textiles, coins and seals chart the movement of people, commodities and ideas along routes of warfare, pilgrimage, trade and diplomacy. Was the world of late antiquity still bearing the hallmarks of Roman connectivity, administration and culture? Were Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Englans really the edge of the known world? What was the extent of the Eastern Roman Empire's cultural power in late antique Europe, Africa and the Middle East? How did religious changes influence urban topographies, geographies of power and artistic choices?
Close-up inspection of works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Business School and the Boston Fine Arts Museum; art making in the Harvard Art Museum Materials Lab and the Harvard Ceramics Studios; and study of archaeological records of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis offer participants a rare insight into one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of art and architecture.
Japanese Literature 133
Gender and Japanese Art
Melissa McCormick
Thursday, 1-3pm
Examines the role of gender in the production, reception, and interpretation of visual images in Japan from the twelfth through the twenty-first centuries. Topics include Buddhist conceptions of the feminine and Buddhist painting; sexual identity and illustrated narratives of gender reversals; the dynamics of voyeurism in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints; modernization of images of "modern girls" in the 1920s; and the gender dynamics of girl culture in manga and anime.
HAA 143m
The Art of the Court of Constantinople
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday, 1-3pm
This course will study monuments of the Byzantine Empire from the end of Iconoclasm in 843 to 1204 when Constantinople, the capital city fell to the armies of the Crusaders. It will focus on objects and monuments, which can be linked to individual patrons or institutions. These are primarily the imperial court and the high officials of the government and the church, which together make up only a small but important class of Byzantine society. The material will be studied in relation to historical events, and to court ceremonial and religious feast days. The course will be run in part as a lecture course with ample discussion periods in the form of a seminar.
HAA 171g
Modern Art in Revolution: Paris Commune to October 1917
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 1-3pm
This seminar examines the relationship between art and activism during two major popular uprisings against the state: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917. What was the role of modern and avant-garde artists in these revolutionary events? What new forms of production and distribution did they invent, and how did their work engender, rather than simply reflect, processes of emancipation and social transformation? How, in other words, was the utopian imagination made into spatial and pictorial form? The first half of the course addresses Courbet’s activism, the use and abuse of photography for partisan purposes, Manet’s depiction of state violence, and the flowering of Impressionism in the wake of the Commune’s suppression. We then analyze the participation of Russian and Soviet avant-garde artists in the building of the first socialist society in the 1920s, considering the politics of abstraction, the turn to experimental and factographic models of photography, the fine artist’s transformation into media-worker, and the radicalization of exhibition practices. Weekly meetings will be organized around first-hand study of original works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, and photographic albums and artists’ books in Houghton and the Fine Arts Library. Note seminar location: Study Center of the Harvard Art Museums (show your ID at the desk on the 4th-floor). Requirements: seminar attendance and participation, weekly readings, and the preparation of a research paper based on original works and/or historical materials in Harvard collections. Open to undergraduates. Limit: 12.
HAA 176e
Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday/Thursday, 1-2pm
This course is organized around a guiding question: How has visual representation both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Today, as we are awash with images, and as social media has allowed us to witness racially motivated injustices with a speed unimaginable until recently, we have had to call upon skills of visual literacy to remain engaged global citizens. This course will allow us to understand the understudied historic roots and contemporary outgrowth of this crucial function of visual literacy for justice in American civic life.
Sequenced chronologically, the lectures are organized into three parts, examining the role of visual representation as Civic Evidence, as Civic Critique, and as Civic Engagement (i.e. movement building and solidarity). Exploring these three categories in turn, topics include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, narratives supporting and critiquing Native American “removal,” the abolition of transatlantic slavery, immigration, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the New Negro Movement, Japanese Internment, and the long Civil Rights movement. Each lecture centers on case studies to show the historic roots of the contemporary interplay between visual representation and justice at these inflection points in the contestation for citizenship in America.
We are fortunate to have invaluable holdings at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Peabody Museum and via Cooper Gallery exhibitions that vividly showcase this contested relationship between art, justice, race, and culture over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Lectures will incorporate material from these holdings and sections will meet at these locations to facilitate object-based study. This course will also include guest lectures from architect Michael Murphy and artist Theaster Gates. Students will leave the course having developed rigorous skills of visual literacy and critical analysis foundational to be engaged global citizens regardless of their concentration or future field of study.
HAA 179x
Tectonics Lab: Materials and Form
Mark Mulligan
Monday, 9-10am; Friday, 2-5pm
Tectonics Lab introduces students to material properties, structural behavior, and fabrication-and-assembly issues in architecture through a combination of lectures, workshops, and design-build projects. The course emphasizes two modes of architectural experimentation: analytical and intuitive. Abstract and architectonic exercises involving these modes of experimentation will take place in a workshop format, with students working in teams of varying sizes. Weekly lectures provide a theoretical basis for the design-build projects, with topics including fundamental, non-quantitative statics (e.g., free-body diagrams, types of forces and reactions) and generic structural approaches; material properties and fabrication; joinery and assembly; scalar transformation; modular construction; kinetic structures; and more. Design-build projects challenge students to engage lecture material in a hands-on manner; these projects focus on the construction of full-scale artifacts that may be tested against a range of performance criteria. In each project, students will explore the role of material expression, figuration, and formal gesture in communicating their ideas. Project documentation through drawing, photography, and video is an essential component of coursework, and a comprehensive course portfolio will be due at the end of term.
The principal objective of Tectonics Lab is to extend our shared knowledge of material properties, structural behavior, and construction techniques by testing new ideas. Our research model is a hybrid: equal parts scientific laboratory (where narrowly defined hypotheses are tested and evaluated) and artist’s atelier (where expression of ideas, both articulated and ineffable, is the goal).
HAA 183w
Women in South Asian Art
Jinah Kim
Monday, 1-3pm
This course aims to provide a historical perspective for understanding the contemporary politics of body and gender representation by exploring historical examples of female patronage of art and by attending to the development of goddess cults through archaeological and art historical evidence. By scrutinizing visual representations of female body in South Asia and by locating them in the context of aesthetic theories and erotic science, we will also problematize exoticizing views of “erotica Indica”, including the prevalent use of erotic imagery from medieval temples for illustrating the Kamasutra in the West. The readings for this course are interdisciplinary, and we will cover a broad range of materials from medieval sculptures, to miniature paintings, and to an interpretive animated cartoon of the Hindu epic, Rāmāyana
HAA 206
Science and the Practice of Art History
Narayan Khandekar
Wednesday, 1-3pm
This course leads students through the examination of a work of art from the collection of Harvard Art Museums using the perspectives of a curator, conservator and a conservation scientist. Students will examine and interrogate a work using these different perspectives to understand how and from what the object is made and how it has changed since its creation using visual and instrumental techniques. The course will conclude with a presentation of a forgery/attribution/authentication case by individuals. The course will be taught by curators, conservators and conservation scientists from the Harvard Art Museums.
HAA 240
Family and Daily Life in the Byzantine World
Ioli Kalavrezou
Thursday, 1-3pm
The course will focus on the private and public life and world of everyday Byzantine society. Although most of the surviving material evidence originates from court and religious environments, the course will attempt to study Byzantine society as a whole. Course topics will examine the private as well as public life of the individual from childhood to adult life through artifacts from the household, work and other social environments. Emphasis will be on the early and middle Byzantine periods (5th – 12th c.).
HAA 247p
The Art of religious Experience: Devotional Images Before and After the Reformation
Jeffrey Hamburger, Felipe Pereda
Tuesday, 1-3pm
The Reformation, in 2017 500 years old, marks a caesura in the history of European religious art. Between the late Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, however, there are also important continuities. The course will pay special attention to the construction of religious experience through a series of comparative case studies.
HAA 274k
The Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes
Maria Gough
Thursday, 1-3pm
On the centenary of the 1917 Revolutions, this seminar offers a major test case for assessing the relationship between aesthetics and politics by returning to the pioneering example of Russian and Soviet avant-garde artists, photographers, designers, and architects who participated in, or otherwise responded to, the building of the first socialist society. The key issue on the table is the avant-garde’s problematization and ultimate rejection of the modernist principle of the autonomy of the work of art. The significant role of women in this major shift within the history of modernism, as well as the work of non-architects in the field of architecture, is discussed.
We begin with the pre-revolutionary embrace of the autonomy principle in the differentiation of poetic vs. everyday language, Suprematist nonobjectivity, and the understanding of faktura (facture, texture) as materiological determination. We then turn to the troubling of that principle in the wake of 1917, in both Lissitzky’s art of the proun, which ranged across media from painting to architecture, and also laboratory Constructivism, which, following Picasso’s example, advanced constructed sculpture as a major new procedure. The rejection of autonomy altogether is found in the Productivists’ subsequent call for artists to enter into industrial production and the design of every day life. Major examples for discussion include: the reinvention of textile and clothing design; the advent of new typologies for interior and urban space; the recourse to experimental and factographic modes of photographic practice; and the radicalization of graphic design and exhibition design.
The seminar is supported by a dedicated exhibition in the Harvard Art Museums, “What about Revolution? Aesthetic Practices after 1917,” and a weekend study trip to the centennial exhibition, “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test,” at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Requirements: seminar attendance and participation, weekly readings, and the preparation of a research paper based on original works of art. Open to graduate students. Limit: 12.
HAA 284m
Medieval Japanese Ink Painting
Yukio Lippit
Monday, 3-5pm
This seminar explores the golden age of Japanese Zen monk-painters (ca. 1200-1600). Issues to be explored include ritual and portraiture, techniques of accidentalism, inscriptions and Zen discourse, the status of the monk-painter, the Ashikaga collection, and the relationship to Chinese literati painting. Knowledge of Japanese or Chinese is required
HAA 290m
Constructing Latin America
Patricio Del Real
Thursday, 1-3pm
In the 20th Century, architects, designers and urban planners in Latin America realized and projected visions of modernity through buildings and ideas that established the canonic works of modern architecture in the region. How do these buildings, forms and ideas engage the intellectual milieu produced by artists, writers and intellectuals in Latin America? What is the relationship between the notion of mestizaje debated by José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gámio, and Mexico’s University City? How did the idea of acomodação advanced by Gilberto Freyre impact the forms of Brazilian modernism? In this seminar, we will explore how architecture in Mexico and Brazil was mobilized to imagine and construct modern nations. We will engage in a close analysis of key works of architecture and examine the interactions between ideas and forms, texts and buildings, writers and architects. Our aim is to examine architecture in its expanded field and to study the multiple sites and strategies of constructing and imagining Latin America.
HAA 292
Colonial Art of Mexico and the Andes
Thomas Cummins
Wednesday, 1-3pm
“Something New, Something Old: A Marriage Made in Hell”
This seminar will examine how the new is rendered as something known. This conundrum is, in and of itself, an unprecedented problem. As such, the seminar will examine the relationship between differing theoretical approaches to urban spaces, architecture, pictorial production and consumption, and the historical investigation of colonial Latin American art and architecture in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some questions to be explored through specific readings and works are:
What is the intersection between formal studies of colonial objects and images with the questions formed to interpret them? Is it the same as in the study of European studies, or are there differences? Is pictorial perspective a visual imperative once it is introduced? What is the nature of hybridity/syncretism, emulation, copying and materiality? How does one study synthetics in the colonial period? Do the differences between European and American languages affect space, vision and object? How do text and image operate in the various publics of Mexico and Peru?
HAA 310a
Theories and Methodologies in the History of Art and Architecture
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 11-1pm
A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods.