Courses

Public Notes

The nineteenth century was a period of continuous revolution and reinvention. This course examines how art and visual culture in Europe and North America both reflected and shaped the cultural discourses of politics, class, gender, race, selfhood, and science that accompanied these ongoing changes. Particular attention will be paid to processes of industrialization, urbanism, and colonialism and their effects on art’s making and reception from the widespread Revolutions of 1848 through the beginning of World War I (1914). In addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, we will chart the development of emerging media from new printmaking technologies to photography and early film. 

Public Notes

This lecture explores artistic, social, and political dimensions of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present. How do photographic practices shape our assumptions about art, reality, fiction, history, or memory? How do they perpetuate power dynamics or produce new forms of being-with-others? How are they naturalized or activated by storytelling?

Public Notes

What does it mean to talk about the art and architecture of the city, rather than simply art and architecture produced in the city? This course explores this question by looking at artistic and architectural production in the Islamic World, with a particular focus on Constantinople / Istanbul, or simply the City, as it was known in various languages of the Ottoman Empire and its neighbours. After our introductory weeks that will provide the necessary background information, we will navigate through visual and material culture, whether produced in royal and princely courts of the cities, or in urban workshops for socially and culturally diverse audiences. And, we will examine architecture's interactions with various social groups as a living, dynamic component of the city. As such, the course will reveal art and architecture as the quintessential components of urban life in the Islamic World.

Public Notes

Arts of the Northwest Coast Peoples (The North): Iconic Cultural Heritage, National Symbolism & Artistic Change in Northern British Columbia & Alaska 

This lecture-based course introduces students to art forms emanating from Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian territories, as well as other well-known First Nations and tribes residing along the Northwest Coast of northern British Columbia and Alaska. The easily identifiable material culture and art associated with these regions differ significantly from those of the southern Northwest Coast (southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon), and have captured the anthropological and art historical imagination for decades, even centuries. These communities possess an iconic cultural heritage that is recognizable to many outsiders, consisting of mediums such as totem poles or Chilkat weavings that are now synonymous with the Northwest Coast as a general region and even co-opted as national symbols in Canada and the United States. We will delve deeper into the cultural, historical, and political significance of these familiar art forms, while also discussing how academic intrigue, social organization/clan systems, settler colonialism, and tourism/commodification have influenced the trajectory of the bold, colorful art forms located along the Northwestern coastline. Likewise, we will utilize MOA to examine basketry, masks, regalia, petroglyphs, and little-known artistic components such as natural pigments and dyes. You will learn how to identify different art forms belonging to specific communities, while exploring past and present debates surrounding the circulation, appropriation, and adaption/adoption of Northwest Coast art.

Public Notes

Arts of the Northwest Coast Peoples (The South): Re-Examining Underrecognized Visual Cultures of Southern British Columbia, Washington & the Peripheries 

This lecture-based course examines ancient and historical Indigenous art forms of the southern Northwest Coast, defined as southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. This region is severely underrepresented in Native Northwest art history, where scholarship tends to emphasize the bold, colorful artwork emanating from northern First Nations including the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian. Redirecting our attention to local settings, we explore the more understated, abstract material culture found in southern locales, with a particular focus on Coast Salish art. In addition, we investigate why different genres of Northwest Coast art exist, and how these diverse styles have been categorized, classified, and even mischaracterized by scholars throughout the decades. Through textual analysis, discussion, research, visits to MOA, and public art on campus, we will investigate various mediums: petroglyphs and stone carvings in archaeological contexts; monumental art, architecture, and welcome posts; and belongings such as masks, regalia, and weavings. By the end of the course, you will be able to identify nuances in southern Northwest Coast artistic expression, hypothesize possible reasons for these differences, and possess a greater understanding of Native art traditions in proximity to Vancouver and UBC. 

(Note: This course fulfills the Place & Power requirement in the Faculty of Arts. Place & Power courses offer students new ways to examine local landscapes through the lenses of settler colonialism, decolonialism, Indigeneity, environmental justice, etc.)  

Public Notes

This course explores the critical and reparative possibilities of art and art history as ways of perceiving and responding to ecological crisis. We will investigate how aesthetic practices can perpetuate the harms of extraction or model ways to sense, relate, and imagine otherwise. How does artwork relate to other kinds of human shaping of the lifeworld? Can visual media help us understand entanglement and responsibility at multiple scales of planetary and intergenerational relations?