Art Criticism and writing
This course introduces students to the history and practice of art criticism and provides them with relevant tools and experiences to craft their own body of art criticism and conduct artist interviews. Students participate in site visits to San Antonio and Austin. At the end of the semester, students post their exhibition reviews and artist interviews to our class website as well as a list of resources relevant to art criticism.
history of photography
This introduction to the history of photography from its earliest manifestations until the present digital age offers a thematic overview of photography’s contested identity as a medium. The course begins with a consideration of photography’s uniquely intimate and frequently debated relationship to the real, including ethical questions around its assumed truthfulness and universal nature. Next, we examine how photography’s realism both troubles and identifies as art. The course concludes by turning to photography’s expanded field, including its inherent multiplicity and objecthood. Through this thematic organization, students will be introduced to a broad range of issues and approaches for thinking critically about the medium, including the traditional history and practice of photography as well as more recent theories and debates.
U.S. LATINX ART HISTORIES
In this course, students will examine art created by Latinx diaspora communities across the United States and its histories. We begin by considering theoretical concepts, issues, and debates central to the conceptualization of Latinx art. We then move to a discussion of the role of political struggle and activism to the development of Latinx art, including the Chicano movement. The class concludes with an examination of the critical role that the U.S./Mexico border, or la frontera, has occupied within Latinx art. Race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity are topics embedded over the entire semester. The course addresses Latinx communities with a multigenerational presence in the U.S. as well as newer arrivals, and it takes up works of art in multiple media that range from painting, sculpture, and prints to installation, performance, and film.
documentary photography
This course explores key issues in the theory, history, and practice of documentary photography. We begin by analyzing the socio-historical, political, and aesthetic significance of documentary photography, its history, and practice and critically discussing specific theories associated with the practice of documentary photography, including its claims to truthfulness and authenticity. Next, we discuss and evaluate issues around ethics and activism as they relate to the practice of documentary photography in a global context. Students learn how to communicate ideas and questions about documentary photography, its theory, history, and practice as well as conduct independent research.
history of American art
This course provides an introduction to American art and visual culture up to the 1950s. Our investigation is firmly grounded in the social and cultural history of the United States, and so we explore the varying social, political, religious, and technological factors that have impacted the production and reception of art and visual culture in this country at specific moments in its history. This investigation is informed by a transnational approach, which defines American art and visual culture not in terms of its difference from others but through its complex and even contradictory encounters, exchanges, and appropriations of other histories, cultures, and traditions. In so doing, we move beyond identifying American art and visual culture in singular and nationalistic terms and instead consider its multiple local, regional, international, and cross-cultural influences.
the black image in postwar America
This course explores the historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in which blackness, and, by implication, identity and difference, has been figured and represented in a range of cultural productions in postwar America as well as experienced, negotiated, and contested by artists, theorists, and historians. Students develop a critical understanding of the significant role that racial images play in American society as well as some of the strategies that have used to respond, intervene, and subvert these frequently monolithic representations. General topics discussed include the role of visual culture in creating and sustaining racial stereotypes, racism and white-skin privilege, and the intersections of constructions of race with those of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
race and representation
This course explores the variegated ways that race, and, by implication, identity and difference, is figured and represented in a range of cultural productions, including art, film, and visual culture. We begin by considering how racial difference has been conceptualized, especially in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. We then move to a discussion of race’s spatial dimensions as well as its commodification. The class concludes with an examination of race and the archive. As part of this section, students will work with primary sources from the Archives of American Art.
THE ARTS IN POPULAR CULTURE
Far from being a frivolous or debased alternative to high culture, popular culture is an important site of popular expression, social instruction, and cultural conflict that deserves critical attention. This course examines popular culture, including the emergence of mass culture, and its complex intersections with the fine arts from the 19th-century onwards. We begin by examining theoretical texts that help us to “read” art and popular culture, including differences between “high” and “low,” and then use these theories to analyze specific forms and artifacts of art and popular culture that range from commercial art to television commercials, photography albums to comic books, “handicrafts” to the fashion industry, and popular music to graffiti. Throughout the course, we will consider how the meanings of these forms and artifacts are influenced by the terms of their political, economic, and social contexts and also pay special attention to the ways in which they in turn mediate and produce knowledge about the world.