Freshman Seminar 62m
Can Art Inspire Social Justice?
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
How do images—photographs, films, and videos—create narratives that shape our definition of national belonging? Social media has changed how we ingest images. Protests, social injustice, and collective moments of triumph are all played out in photos and videos in real time unlike anything we thought possible just a few decades ago. What skills of visual literacy and critical consciousness are required to understand of the opportunities and challenges that technology is presenting to civic life? The seminar will explore the connection between images and justice in America, focusing on case studies that deal with historic and contemporary topics from emancipation, indigenous conflict, desegregation, Japanese internment, borderland conflicts, the long Civil Rights movement, and more. It will wrestle with the question of how the foundational right to representation in a democracy, the right to be recognized justly, is indelibly tied to the work of images in the public realm. What constitutes a figurative emblem of protest? What does effective resistance look like in art and in the digital realm? By the end of the course, students should be able to consider how images have had persuasive efficacy in the context of social and racial justice movements, critically engage with and contextualize the narratives surrounding images posted online, and understand how democratic rights are connected to visual representation in the United States.
HAA 11
Landmarks of World Architecture
Joseph Connors
Tuesday/Thursday 12-1:15pm
Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.
HAA 14k
The Roman World in Transition: 4th to 8th centuries
Ioli Kalavrezou
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-2:45pm
The course will focus on major moments in the history and politics from the Conversion of Constantine I the Great to the Fall of Constantinople.
HAA 17k
Introduction to Contemporary Art
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
This class is about encountering the art of your time. You will learn why artists today have such a different range of choices than their counterparts in other periods, and how to make sense of the experiences they create, in order to take up the opportunities contemporary art provides: to retune your senses, reassess your assumptions, and reencounter matters that concern you as one of the globally interconnected, differently positioned constituents of the contemporary period.
HAA 17p
Introduction to Contemporary Photography: War and Conflict
Makeda Best
Monday/Wednesday 10:30-11:45am
HAA 19z
Introduction to the Arts of Pre-Columbian America
Thomas Cummins
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
This is a general introduction to and survey of the arts of Ancient America. We will look at both Mesoamerica and the Andean art and architecture beginning with some of the earliest cultures and ending with Aztec, Maya, Muisca and Inca. Questions about the materials, urban planning, meaning and aesthetics will be addressed. The course will also take advantage of the great collections at the Peabody Museum as well as the MFA. There are no prerequisites.
HAA 56g
Spanish Golden Age Painting: Truth and Deceit
Felipe Pereda
Monday/Wednesday 9-10:15am
The art of the Spanish Golden Age is well known for its radical naturalism, on the one hand, and its intense religious imagery, on the other. This course will be an introduction to the major artists of this period –Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán and others— from the point of view of painting’s power to produce visual illusions and deceive their spectators. Consequently, the course will consider artistic tropes of illusion and disillusionment in relation to early modern debates on belief and skepticism.
HAA 83
Buddhist Monuments
Jinah Kim, Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang
Monday/Wednesday 12-1:15pm
This introductory lecture course examines architectural monuments of the Buddhist world, including sites in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. Roughly following the history and development of Buddhism in chronological sequence, the course explores pertinent topics in the study of Buddhist monuments, such as cosmology, pilgrimage, ritual, materiality, relics, meditation, world-making, and the relationship between Buddhism and local religions. Through Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.
HAA 96a
Architecture Studio I: Transformations
Elle Gerdeman
Wednesday/Friday 1:30-4:15pm
Architecture assembles multiple models, surfaces, and materials; it is not a single monolithic thing, rather it is comprised of disparate parts and organizational systems operating at different scales. Design, the bringing together of these elements, requires sensitivity, registers scale, and renders perceptual effect. This course is an introductory architectural design studio focused on building foundational architectural concepts and design methodologies studied through a process of making. A series of physical modeling/fabrication assignments explore spatial and organizational transformations as a consequence of the changing interactions among material, fabrication technique, and form. Resultant expressions of space, scale, and perceptual effects are discussed and evaluated in relation to a series of course readings that frame the intentions of each assignment within architectural theory and history discourse.
Both studios in the Architecture Studies Track (Transformations HAA 96A and Connections HAA 96B) explore architectural means and methods of design. Each begins from a different scale of inquiry, but converges at a similar end. This studio originates at the scale of material - focusing on specific capacities and effects thereof as well as the details of assembly - and expands from this to an investigation of an occupiable architectural scale in relation to a dynamic site.
The course emphasizes fluency in the visual and spatial communication of ideas through instruction in 2D drawing and 3D modeling techniques. Technical workshops are provided in choreography with serial assignments encompassing drafting and 3D modeling (AutoCAD + Rhino), techniques of fabrication (Rhino to various outputs), 3D printing, and representational processing (Adobe Creative Suite). The studio exposes students to critical architectural thinking and design methods for more broad disciplinary application following. No particular skill set, technical or otherwise, is a required prerequisite for this course; students from all backgrounds are welcome.
HAA 96b
Architecture Studio II: Connections
Lisa Haber-Thomson
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-4:15pm
The practice of architecture fundamentally asks us to continuously engage with, and re-conceptualize, the world for which we are designing. As such, architecture as a discipline is not only about designing buildings, but also about challenging us to imagine new ways of seeing the world. This studio takes on the challenge through a series of design exercises focused on understanding, engaging with, and reimaging the urban condition. Throughout the course, we will approach architectural design as both a method of producing urban environments, and also as an avenue through which to understand our cities. We will be directly confronting the social, political, and environmental contexts that are necessarily implicated in any design process.
Both studios in the Architecture Studies Track (Transformations HAA 96A and Connections HAA 96B) explore architectural means and methods of design. Each begins from a different scale of inquiry, but converges towards a similar end. This studio originates at the scale of the urban site, and begins with a set of design research assignments that ask students to imagine the city from the perspective of a non-human agent. Extrapolating abstract principles from these agents, we will be mobilizing the possibilities of architectural representation to reimagine the city through mapping, diagraming, and collage.
The studio culminates in a design proposal for a site in Harvard Square. Students will be given an architectural brief, and will produce projects that address existing site conditions, programmatic space requirements, and projected users of the site. Technical workshops will provide all the necessary skills required for the course, and will allow students to develop aptitude in architectural drawing, mapping, rendering, and simple animation. No existing expertise or technical proficiency is necessary for this course. Students from all backgrounds are welcome; we will be encouraging interdisciplinary thinking throughout the design research process.
HAA 100r
Sophomore Excursion Seminar: Camino de Santiago
Felipe Pereda, Jeffrey Hamburger
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
This course introduces sophomore concentrators to on-site study of art and architecture through the case study of a particular geographic and cultural area. This year: Camino de Santiago
HAA 122x
Architecture in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
Gulru Necipoglu
Thursday 3-5:45pm
Architecture of the eastern Mediterranean basin (at Italian, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts) with emphasis on cross-cultural encounters and transmission of the Romano-Byzantine heritage, science and technology, architectural practice, ornament, urban design, military, religious, and domestic architecture.
HAA 127m
Medieval Architecture in Greater Iran and Central Asia
David Roxburgh
Monday 3-5:45pm
The seminar examines cities and monuments built in Greater Iran and Central Asia from the 11th through 15th centuries spanning three principal dynastic periods (Seljuqs, Mongols, and Timurids). Various functional types—mosques, madrasas, minarets, tombs—, urban systems, and spatial organization are studied including the cities of Baghdad, Bukhara, Herat, Isfahan, Mashhad, Nishapur, Rayy, and Samarqand. We will examine the materials, construction and design processes of buildings, their typologies and morphologies, as well as their relationships to law, religion, climate, social and political life. A variety of primary sources are also considered ranging from geographies to histories and travel narratives.
HAA 155V
Making Art in Amsterdam, c.1645-1675; from Rembrandt and his Competitors to the Lower Tiers of the Art Market
Eric Jan Sluijter
Monday/Wednesday 12-1:15pm
This lecture course will focus on the production of paintings in Amsterdam between c. 1645 and 1675, a market which surged to its summit in the 1650s and early 1660s – both in quantity, and, propelled by artistic and economic rivalry, in quality ̶ and quickly contracted within a matter of years. Central will be the later career and work of Rembrandt (from c. 1645 until his death in1669) and of his most distinguished pupils and competitors, up to the highly successful Gerard de Lairesse, who arrived in 1665. The main thread of the lectures will be the question how painters positioned themselves in relation to each other within this competitive and continually changing art market. What choices did they make with respect to style, subject matter, techniques, and targeting audiences? How did they distinguish their works from, or follow the examples of, other artists, and how did they find buyers for their products or patrons for commissions? How did they acquire a reputation, and how was the monetary value of their works related to this? With these questions in mind, we will examine primarily the successful artists who made expensive high-quality paintings for wealthy patrons and knowledgeable connoisseurs, but we will also consider those making cheap, mass-produced work for the lower end of the art market.
HAA 164n
The Motif in Renaissance and Baroque Art of the Italian Peninsula
Shawon Kinew
Monday 3-5:45pm
This course studies the invention, permutations and transformations of visual motifs in the art of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, 1400-1700. The mirror, the shadow, the nymph, a person who can fly—what can the specific study of these motifs tell us of origins and identities, of love and violence, in early modern Italy? By taking this non-chronological approach, this course thinks critically and diachronically through the artworks of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Bernini and others, artists often in conversation with one another across space and even across time.
HAA 168v
The Vatican
Joseph Connors
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
The evolution of St. Peter’s basilica from Constantine to Bernini. Growth of the Vatican Palace, Library and Museums from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries. Artists covered will include Giotto, Fra Angelico, Pollaiuolo, Bramante, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, Ligorio, Domenico and Carlo Fontana, Maderno and Bernini. Students should keep spring break free. Permission of the instructor is need to enroll.
HAA 176w
Bauhaus and Harvard: The Making of an Exhibition
Maria Gough, Benjamin Buchloh, Laura Muir
Thursday 12-2:45pm
- In conjunction with a major exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, this seminar introduces students to the utopian politics, experimental pedagogy, and wide-ranging aesthetic production of the Bauhaus, the most influential school of art, architecture, and design of the 20thC. Founded in Germany in 1919, in the wake of the devastation wrought by the first world war, the Bauhaus sought to reunify art and architecture—and thus remake the cultural production of everyday life—through a return to manual craft. In the mid-1920s, however, it abandoned craft in favor of a new alliance with industry in a bid to bring its design prototypes into mass production. In the final weeks of the course we will turn to the “red Bauhaus” of Hannes Meyer in Soviet Moscow in the early 1930s, and the migration of other key figures to the United States after 1933, among them the school’s founding director, the architect Walter Gropius (who joined the Harvard faculty in 1937), Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (founder of the New Bauhaus in Chicago), Mies van der Rohe (head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology), and Anni Albers and Josef Albers (faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and subsequently Yale). / Key issues to be discussed include: the contribution of textile design to the development of modernist abstraction; the ways in which the culture and organization of the school was marked by gendered norms and assumptions; the workshop model; craft object vs. design prototype; the design of domestic vs. public space; the role and variety of lens-based technologies (photogram, photo-collage, new-vision photograph, and photo document); print media, from lithography to advertising; utopia vs. technocracy; the cosmopolitan nature of both the faculty and student body; the vagaries of financial support from the state; the school’s relation to its sole foreign counterpart, the Vkhutemas in Moscow; and the constitutive role of exile in the transfer of Bauhaus principles to foreign institutions. / Comprising some 200 objects drawn almost entirely from the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Harvard exhibition will serve as our chief laboratory, enabling first-hand study of original textiles, furniture, homewares, architecture, typography, and photography, as well as student exercises and works of fine art. Co-taught by its curator, Laura Muir, along with HAA faculty Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Maria Gough, the seminar will also familiarize students with the curatorial principles and practices that informed the making of the exhibition itself. / Requirements include: preparation of weekly readings; class attendance and participation; and a paper based on original research in the museum’s rich and voluminous Bauhaus collection. We are particularly interested in research papers that focus on artists in the collection whose work has been underserved by the secondary literature, especially if not exclusively women. Open to undergraduates and graduate students. Attendance at the first session is mandatory. Limited to 12.
HAA 183k
Himalayan Art
Jinah Kim
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Understood as a divine abode in Indic mythology and envisioned as the immortal realm of "Shangri-la" by later western interpreters, the Himalayas abound with Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. This course explores the vibrant visual culture of the Himalayan region. Two learning goals are: 1) Understanding the historical development of distinctive artistic forms in paintings and sculptures of Nepal and Tibet during major moments of artistic innovations in the region, including the artistic responses to the current political situation; 2) Locating this knowledge in the context of the history of reception and collecting of Himalayan art in the west.
HAA 193n
Global Art History
Suzanne Blier
Monday 3-5:45pm
Global Art History is a relatively new field taken up partially a response to the challenge posed by global and the challenge to rewrite Art History. Often framed by hermetic and geographically-defined vantages – including nationalist ones, such approaches have often left out insights into the cultural dynamics and entanglements cross between places and peoples. This course focuses both on the core issues in play in creating a more global approach to Art History, and, in a pragmatic sense, on constructing a new course around this subject. Reframing the disciplinary model of art history around related discussions and exercises encourage us to explore often marginalized broader world artistic practices and experiences as well as related contexts of cross-engagement and entanglement.
HAA 240r
Topics in Byzantine Art: Images of Devotion
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesdayday 3-5:45pm
The seminar will study the cult of relics and icons housed in churches and palaces of medieval Constantinople. Topics include the development of image and relic veneration, the roles attached to the power and protection of the Virgin Mary, civic rituals and public processions, the political and diplomatic use of icons and reliquaries, and their place in the public and private lives of the citizens of the imperial metropolis.
MEDVLSTD 250
At Cross Purposes: The Crusades in Material Culture
Evridiki Georganteli
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Crusading expeditions in the Holy Land, Spain and Eastern Europe from 1096 until the end of the Middle Ages shaped the political, socio-economic and cultural map of Europe and the Middle East. This course explores the multifaceted encounters between crusaders, Byzantines, Jews, Armenians and Muslims through the material traces they left behind: architecture, Byzantine objects dispersed across Western Europe, coins, sculptures, frescoes, and manuscripts from the East and the West.
HAA 262k
Bernini: Roman Baroque Sculpture and Spirit
Shawon Kinew
Thursday 3:00 – 5:45pm
This graduate seminar investigates Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his sculpture within the context of Seicento art theory, aesthetics and his own spiritual practice. We will study Bernini alongside his contemporaries and their aims, while also critically examining the sometimes-parochial study of Bernini. What can Bernini teach us in 2019?
HAA 265r
Topics in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art
Joseph Koerner
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Considers the history of prints in Germany and the Netherlands from its beginnings in the fifteenth century through to Rembrandt, with special reference to the difference that history makes to larger narratives of artistic development in the historical culture. Classes held in the Harvard Art Museums and focused on holdings of the collection.
HAA 278k
On Line: Drawing
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This seminar seeks to reassess the role of drawing in modern artistic culture. We will follow the trope of line, the most basic drawing mark, not to construct a linear history of the medium, but to provide a selective account of its uses, purposes, and functions as an instrument of modernity--or, as the case may be, of anti-modernity. Focusing on the period spanning the eighteenth century to the present, we will approach drawing not as a monolithic entity, but as a heterogeneous phenomenon. We will consider it as a medium, a practice, an object, and a concept, and explore its interaction with, and cross-pollination by, other mediums and practices, (e.g., prints, photography; dance). We will discuss diverse approaches to draftsmanship–e.g., chronometric, kinetic, embodied, sculptural, automatic, blinded, black–and different modes of practice, (studio vs. urban drawing), and acquaint ourselves with procedures, techniques and materials by using them ourselves. We will also participate in a life drawing class in order to get a better sense of what the practice entails and what it makes possible.
Convened in the Harvard Art Museums study room, the seminars will offer students a hands-on experience of the works of art combined with the discussion of the assigned readings. In an effort to assess as well as reimagine the role of drawing, students will be encouraged to experiment with the format of their final project: aside from the classic research paper, annotated drawing series, an exhibition project, a film, a podcast and other inventive modes of presenting an argument will be welcome. (Enrollment limited.)
HAA 278w
Photography in Weimar Germany, and in Exile, 1919-1959
Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday 9:00 - 11:45am
The seminar, offered to graduate students and advanced qualified undergraduate art history majors, will study the development of photographic practices in Weimar Germany, from 1918-1933, and trace a number of selected case studies of photographers in exile in the US, Latin American countries and France after 1933.
Focusing on the opposition between the key movements of New Objectivity and New Vision, the seminar will study the theoretical and artistic and cultural implications of this opposition, with August Sander and Laszlo Moholy Nagy serving as the key opponents.
Particular emphasis will be given to the large number of female photographers working both as artists and producers for the milieu of advertisement and fashion. In particular figures like Lotte Jacobi, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, Gisele Freund, Anne Biermann and Ilse Bing, will be at the center of our studies tracing the differentiations in their oeuvres between Weimar and their production in Exile.
The seminar will read the major theoretical and critical literature on photography to emerge from the Weimar debates as much as it will carefully study the increasingly detailed monographic accounts that have been published over the past ten years on the work of these photographers.
HAA 279p
The Object in the Art Museum
Ethan Lasser and Rachel Saunders
Tuesday 3:00-5:45pm
Practicing art history in today’s increasingly mobile art world—whether as a field curator, academic researcher, critic, or other professional specialism—requires museum literacy, intellectual empathy, and the ability to work in multiple voices and mediums, in addition to art historical expertise. This object-centered seminar will introduce students to the central competencies required of art historians working in or with museums today, ranging from skills for assessing the quality and authenticity of objects on the market, to tools for working with living artists and presenting works of art to non-expert audiences. Through practical and written assignments accompanied by key readings, as well as site visits and behind-the-scenes introductions, students will gain an understanding of how the practice of art history in the gallery both differs from and relates to its practice on the page. The course will consider the key issues, debates, and interpretative strategies driving museum practice, and tackle existential questions about the role and responsibility of the 21st-century museum. Throughout the semester, students will work towards public-facing outcomes. They will identify potential acquisitions, and produce and present a temporary installation at the end of the semester. The course will meet at the Harvard Art Museums, a uniquely rich university museum environment endowed with deep collections and state of the art curatorial and conservation facilities.
HAA 286s
The Shoso-in Treasury
Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang, David Roxburgh
Thursday 3-5:45pm
This graduate seminar examines the remarkable array of objects preserved in the eighth-century Shōsō-in Imperial Treasury in Nara, Japan. Each session will be centered around in-depth analysis of case studies drawn from different categories of objects (painting, calligraphy, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, glass, and metalwork among others) created in different cultural regions along the Silk Road, spanning Persia and Japan, from the sixth through eighth century. The goal will be to work outwards from specific objects to larger themes including the interregional transmission of artistic techniques and cultural knowledge along the Silk Road; transposition of modalities of making from one material or process into another; the role of artifacts in diplomatic exchange; vernacular iconographies; pseudomorphology; the role of treasuries in the construction of kingship; the relationship between art and environment in Central and East Asia; the contribution of conservation science to discursive forms of art historical analysis; and the merits and demerits of various digital humanities approaches to the study of the Silk Road and its cultural history.
HAA 298p
Displaying Latin America
Patricio del Real
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
Exhibitions have been integral to the promotion of modern architecture. They helped imagine, construct and order a modern world under the hegemony of modernism. This graduate seminar explores the theory and practice of exhibiting architecture. It focuses on ‘Latin America’ as a historical category imagined through national and international magazines, pavilions and museum exhibitions in the 20th Century. Our aim is to study how the ‘exhibitionary complex’—to use Tony Bennett’s characterization—engaged modern architecture to help render visible a place called ‘Latin America.’
HAA 310b
Works of Art: Materials, Forms, Histories
Jeffrey Hamburger
Friday 12-2:45pm
A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.