MW 9–10:30
Mode of Instruction: Internet
Instructor TBA

TTH 1–2 + Discussion Section
Dr. Allison Kim

Art is a language: how do we decode its meaning and its extraordinary effect on us, the viewers? How does art reflect the era, location, and culture of both its maker and its patron? Through a blend of online lectures, quizzes, and tests, as well as TA-led visits to UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, students will learn that art is a prism—often beautiful, always challenging—through which we can view the human experience, both past and present. Throughout the semester, students will increase their visual literacy and critical thinking skills by looking at a global array of works from many eras and locations. The only prerequisites are open eyes and open minds! We will concentrate on the familiar media of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but we will also examine drawings, prints, photography, garden planning, ceramics, textiles, earthworks, installation art, and other forms of visual culture, both through live online lectures and through in-person visits to UT’s collections of art.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Dr. Douglas Cushing

This course discusses art from the prehistoric period to the Early Renaissance (ca. 1300) in Europe, the Middle East and the ancient Americas, with emphasis on style and social and cultural context. The focus on arts-architecture and city planning, sculpture, painting, metalwork, and ceramics—is global with special attention lavished on ancient Near East, Egypt, Africa, Greece, Rome, Islam, Mesoamerica, India, and the European Middle Ages. The control of the viewer’s experience, the political and religious use of art, the meaning of style, the functions of art in public and private life, and the role of art in expressing cultural values will be among the major themes considered. This is also an introduction to the discipline of art history and archaeology, training students in basic vocabulary and techniques of close looking and analytical thinking about visual material.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Dr. Ann Johns

As a class, we will explore an extraordinary array of art and architecture from across the globe, including art of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Cultures. Our course begins c. 1300, in the late Global Middle Ages, and concludes with international artistic trends of the early 21st century. While we will concentrate on the familiar media of painting, sculpture, and architecture, we will also be looking at drawings, prints, photography, the decorative arts, garden planning, ceramics, textiles, interior design, earthworks, installation art, and digital media.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Sylvia Wu

This seminar focuses on primary research for art history: what it is, how it’s done, and the value it brings to answering your questions about art and wider society. Starting with a selection of conceptual readings and practical exercises to hone your critical thinking skills, we will quickly move to conducting research using library and archival collections on campus. We will approach these resources not as an end to research but catalysts in an open-ended process that will help you learn to design an effective research project and articulate a strong argument.

Restricted to Art History Majors

Fulfills → Writing flag

MW 1–2:30
Dr. Astrid Runggaldier

Are textile arts considered fine arts? Are they part of art museum collections? How are Indigenous textiles from the Americas displayed and described in museums around the world? This course examines the ethical implications of these questions while exploring the textile holdings of the Art and Art History Collection (AAHC) at UT Austin, examining 19th century hand-woven Navajo textiles from the US Southwest, ethnographic collections of huipiles and other clothing from the Maya region, and Pre-Columbian cloth from the Andean cultures of South America. Working with objects from UT’s collections, students learn about manufacture from weaving and dyeing technologies, about social and ritual meaning from symbolism and iconography, and about gender, power, and the economic value of hand-crafted cloth in ancient societies. Through course readings on archaeological, anthropological, and iconographic studies of ancient textile traditions, both in the Americas and in comparative global perspective, students develop a critical assessment of the ethical issues concerning exhibitions and collections of Indigenous American textiles. This course is a discussion-based seminar focused on scholarly literature, and a hands-on lab centered on textiles in the AAHC. Student can expect to produce weekly written assignments and a semester-long digital humanities project. This course fulfills a requirement in the “Objects, Collections, Preservation” strand for the certificate in the Bridging Disciplines Program in Museum Studies.

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 1:30–3
Dr. Penelope Davies

This survey of the public art of the city of Rome begins with Augustus’ accession to power (27 BCE) and ends in the late antique period in the early fourth century CE. Lectures are concerned with state or imperial works of architecture and sculpture, assessed within their cultural, political and topographical contexts as vehicles for propaganda, commissioned and designed by the political elite, often as a means of retaining power and suppressing dissent. Politics and power changed the face of Rome through these monuments, which in turn provided sculptural, architectural and urbanistic models that influenced western cultures for centuries to come.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → C C 340.2

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 12–1:30
Dr. Ann Johns

In this course, we focus on the rich artistic and architectural history of late medieval Italy (1200-1350), an era closely associated with the great poet Dante and the artistic achievements of the age’s most famous artist, Giotto. Geographically, we explore the art of late medieval Rome, Pisa, Assisi, Siena, Florence, and the imperial court of Frederick II in southern Italy. Artistically, we examine the work of artists as diverse as Arnolfo di Cambio, Giovanni Pisano, Pietro Cavallini, and the prodigiously talented Lorenzetti brothers, as well as the anonymous creators of frescoes at sites as varied as Assisi, Palermo, and Sant’Angelo in Formis.

Through lectures, discussions, and group work, we learn that the art of the era is inextricably linked to the tumult of this pivotal moment in Italian history, much of which is chronicled in Dante’s encyclopedic account. While we as a class focus on the extraordinary artistic output of the later middle ages in Italy, the continuing battles between church and state, the rise of the wealthy bourgeois merchants, and the devastating plague of 1348 ensures that we also delve into social, economic, and cultural issues of the era, punctuated by weekly readings (in English) from Dante.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → CTI 375 / EUS 347.49

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 9–10:30
Dr. Allison Kim

This course will examine and deconstruct the concept of the “artist” from the mid-fifteenth to seventeenth century in parts of Europe, including Italy, Flanders, Germany, and France. Students will critically examine historical constructs, such as the rise of the individual artist and myth of genius during the period known as the Renaissance.

Fulfills → Global Cultures flag

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 9–10:30
Dr. Sally Coleman

Art and cultural development in the sixteenth century; artists include Duerer, Gruenewald, Holbein, and Brueghel.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → EUS 347.32 / R S 357K

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 3–4:30
Dr. Douglas Cushing

This course surveys the major movements, ideas, and social contexts of visual modernism in Europe (and related movements in the Americas) from the late nineteenth century through the Second Word War.

Fulfills → Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → EUS 347.46

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MWF 1–2
Dr. Rikki Byrd

A survey of visual art produced by people of African descent in the United States with an emphasis on the twentieth century and its sociohistorical framework. Changes in modes of expression, formal concerns, pictorial themes, and the impact of the Black Arts movement, feminism, and Afrocentrism on art are explored, as well as the relationship of the work of black artists to art from West and Central Africa and the visual traditions of European and Euro-American artists. 

Cross-listings → AFR 335K

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 12–1:30
Mode of Instruction: Internet
Dr. Moyo Okediji

Border crossing by cultures and groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean islands has generated the production of images by immigrants, exiles, and nomads in alien lands.  With examples drawn from various continents, class investigates art across borders in the contexts of the cultural circumstances that produced the diasporas. Students will investigate the arts of voluntary, forced, colonial, distant, and recent diasporas. Illustrations will draw on images, music, and cinematography.

Fulfills → VAPA / Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → AFR 335G / WGS 340.48

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 12:30–2
Dr. David Stuart

This course introduces students to the hieroglyphic writing traditions of ancient Mesoamerica, with a special emphasis on the Mayan and Nahuatl (Aztec) scripts. We will look at the general principles of these systems, their relationships to visual culture, and they ways that their graphic forms convey language (syllables and words). The reading of texts and related iconography also introduces students to many aspects of Maya and Aztec history, religion, and culture. No previous exposure to Mesoamerican art and archaeology is required.

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 11–12:30
Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya

The use of commercial and mass media imagery in art became recognized as an international phenomenon in the early 1960s. Items such as comic strips, advertising, movie stills, television programs, soup cans, “superstars,” and a variety of other accessible and commonplace objects inspired the subject matter, form, and technique. This course will critically examine the history and legacy of Pop Art by focusing on its social and aesthetic contexts in the Americas. We will examine artistic production and critical dialogues that emerged in the Americas during the decades while emphasizing U.S. Latinx and Latin American artists and theories. Particular attention will be devoted to print traditions and techniques in Latin America and the critical role of printmaking in Latinx art history. An important component of the course involves developing skills in analyzing visual images, comparing them with other forms, and relating them to their historical context. The course will provide the opportunity to study art objects in local collections, including the Blanton Museum of Art.

Fulfills → Global Cultures flag

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Carma Gorman

Explore contemporary color notation systems and color management techniques. Survey economic, health and safety, environmental, cultural, legal, political, and other ethical considerations pertinent to using color.

Cross-listings → DES 323

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 10:30–12
Dr. Sylvia Wu

This course explores the southern Chinese coast as an integral part of the Indian Ocean world, whose multi-directional networks connect this East Asian region to South and Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the East African coast. It examines the region's material cultures—from the built environment to artistic production for both domestic and international markets—within a broad maritime context. By tracing the flow of raw materials, crafted objects, human agents, skills, and intellectual ideas through the region's ports and hinterlands, the course highlights how these exchanges shaped its material expressions. Adopting a longue durée perspective, the course employs a temporal framework from the first millennium to the present. It examines the region’s changing material culture, incorporating the shifting religious landscape and the practices of different social strata, to offer a nuanced understanding of South China's complex and rich artistic heritage at the crossroads of many worlds.

Fulfills → Global Cultures flag

Cross-listings → ANS 361 

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Allison Kim

What do memorials and monuments represent and capture? Ideas? Memories? People? Ideas of people? This course explores monuments and memorials across time and cultures. It also investigates the themes brought about by monuments and memorials, such as memory, preservation, grief, mourning, loss, celebration, and commemoration, bringing into question the very definitions of these terms and whom they serve (and whom they do not). We will be looking at large-scale and smaller objects, buildings, and sites across the globe, as well as varying types of art, design, and visual culture. In doing so, we will address questions that include, what defines monuments and memorials? How do they change across time and cultures? What sets monuments and memorials apart, and are they mutually exclusive? Are they static or constantly changing? Are they permanent, or can they be ephemeral? How have they been created in the past, whom have they served, and where will they go from here?

Cross-listings → AFR 370

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

T 3:30–6:30
Michael Benedikt

Architects offer several lines of reasoning for why their buildings look the way they do. Some lines of reasoning are functional; some are esthetic; some are economic, and some are social. This seminar focuses on a line of reasoning that cuts across these because it has to do with something universal and basic, namely, the quality of human experience in these times. Within architecture, human experience falls into two domains: (1) the experience of the building per se—its materials, proportions, spaces, movement-patterns, sounds, quality of construction and style, and (2) the experience of visiting, living, or working in the company of other people, with media and tools, and with things to do other than appreciate the building they are in (or near). The good architect is interested in both domains. Why the special interest in experience? And why now? The idea that individual experience is the locus/focus of absolute value has been established in prosperous Western cultures like the USA for at least sixty years, with a history that goes back much further. Today, each and every person, as they mature, is charged with seeking, finding, realizing, and providing not just material goods and labor services for others, but experiences: experiences of happiness, personal growth, pleasure, entertainment, profit, and enlightenment. The result, collectively, is that we now live in an “Experience Economy” (see Readings below). The art of architecture has been more or less swept up into this economy. There are reasons to wonder whether this is a Good Thing. The focus on “positive experiences” might ignore and displace other concerns, like social justice, like the health of the planet, like consequential relationships, like real beauty…not just the experience of these things, note, which can always be arranged by media and/or by pharmaceuticals, but the things themselves, valuable for reasons independent of our momentary happiness. The question arises: what kind of architecture would result from moving our concerns not only beyond practical matters (budgets, laws, construction, politics), but beyond “experience,” talk about which, today, usually suffices to satisfy architects’ need to appear to transcend practicality. None of this is to condemn “positive experiences.” (Our seminar will be a positive experience!) It is to begin to see that the more just, sustainable, and beautiful world we all want might depend on our going past our devotion to arranging pleasurable and interesting experiences for each other, to at least supplementing them with something else, something deeper. And what is that “something deeper?” Jonathan Hale, author of Merleau-Ponty For Architects, comes close to telling us what that “something deeper” is on the jacket of Architecture Beyond Experience, another of our readings. There, Hale says of the instructor, “Benedikt paradoxically offers a new and deeper understanding of experience: rather than being the prime object and outcome of architectural design endeavors, experience is allowed to emerge as a property of the relations being acted out between works of architecture themselves, their components, and the bodies and behaviors they house.” (“Close,” say I, because Hale still privileges experience.)

Cross-listings → ARC 327R / ARC 386M / PHL 385

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MWF 12–1
Dr. Phillip Townsend

Explore issues related to the acquisition, stewardship, and repatriation of the art of the African Diaspora in the face of an increasingly virtual and market-driven art world.

Fulfills → Ethics flag

Cross-listings → AFR 335Q / AMS 333

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 1:30–3
Grace Sparapani

“Hauntings in Art History” asks the question: What haunts us? From spooks and specters, such as those found in Victorian spirit photography, to the larger questions of hauntology, in which the past—and lost futures—return, ghostly, to the present, this course considers what it means to make art, even in the face of trauma, death, and worlds beyond, and how artists have reckoned with this task. This course will be multidisciplinary, covering artworks of multiple mediums, novels, and films.

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 11–12:30
Dr. Eddie Chambers

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Julia Guernsey

This course, which carries Writing and Independent Inquiry Flags, provides an introduction to the discipline of art history and to some of the most significant methodological approaches and challenges to the study of art and visual culture. This course does not follow a lecture format but instead focuses on class discussion, active participation, and collaborative learning. Our goal is to become familiar with the fundamental characteristics and objectives of various methods and traditions in art history, and to create a productive environment in which to analyze, critique, compare, and utilize them. Because this class carries both Writing and Independent Inquiry flags, emphasis will also be placed on a series of written assignments and papers that enable the student to more fully research and explore a topic of particular art historical interest to her/him/them.

Restricted to Art History Majors / Prerequisite: ARH 321: Problems in Art Historical Research

Fulfills →  Independent Inquiry flag / Writing flag

Individual projects to be completed under faculty supervision.

Requires consent of instructor to register.

Fulfills → Independent Inquiry flag

Individual conference course in which student researches and writes a thesis.

Restricted to those participating in Art History Honors Program. Requires approval by Art History Honors Program Director to register.

Fulfills →  Independent Inquiry and Writing flags