MW 10–11 + Discussion Section
Astrid Runggaldier

MW 9–10 + Discussion Section
Mode of Instruction: Internet
Douglas Cushing

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

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Stephennie Mulder

TTH 5–6:30
Instructor TBA

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

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Jessica Maratsos

TTH 5–6:30
Instructor TBA

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

TTH 12:30–2
Julia Guernsey

Refer to Course Schedule for more information.

Fulfills → COM

T 12–3
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.

TTH 9:30–11
Nassos Papalexandrou

The course investigates the Greek idea of sacredness and the material configuration of belief in the context of important Greek sanctuaries. Our focus will be on sacred space and the various frameworks around religious practices of individuals and communities alike: healing, coming-of-age, divination, athletics, sex, fertility, social identities. We will study major monuments of architecture, sculpture, and painting and their role as performative backdrops during which the Greeks communicated with their gods and with each other. By doing so we will concentrate on major artistic ideas and behavioral categories of a culture that is distant and alien to us but also familiar to some extent through the survival of the classical tradition. Major theme in the agenda include the nature of divinity, the role of sanctuaries as arenas for symbolic, competitive display of individuals and groups alike, the political dimensions of the archaeological exploration of the big sanctuaries (e.g. Olympia, Delphi) since the nineteenth century, the function of images in sacred space and why the sanctuaries epitomize a universal cultural heritage of paramount importance.

MW 2–3:30
Stephennie Mulder

In AD 921, a learned courtier from the most elegant city in the 10th century world, the glittering capital of Baghdad, set off on a journey into the uncharted land of the Vikings as secretary to the embassy of the Abbasid caliph. A couple of centuries later, in 1130, a Christian king would conquer the Italian island of Sicily from the Muslims and then begin to create a kingdom that merged the Islamic and Christian cultural traditions. Just a few decades later, around 1160, a young Crusader would journey to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and find a Christian Kingdom that had all the hallmarks of an Islamic Sultanate. This course will explore the art and culture of the global Middle Ages, and will look closely at recent films, popular and academic publications and works of art and architecture that show the interconnected character of the European and the Islamic worlds.

Cross-listings → GSD 362F / MES 343.13

TTH 2–3:30
Katherine Taronas

In AD 921, a learned courtier from the most elegant city in the 10th century world, the glittering capital of Baghdad, set off on a journey into the uncharted land of the Vikings as secretary to the embassy of the Abbasid caliph. A couple of centuries later, in 1130, a Christian king would conquer the Italian island of Sicily from the Muslims and then begin to create a kingdom that merged the Islamic and Christian cultural traditions. Just a few decades later, around 1160, a young Crusader would journey to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and find a Christian Kingdom that had all the hallmarks of an Islamic Sultanate. This course will explore the art and culture of the global Middle Ages, and will look closely at recent films, popular and academic publications and works of art and architecture that show the interconnected character of the European and the Islamic worlds.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → RS 361

MW 9:30–11
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

Cross-listings → EUS 347.49

MW 1–2:30
Ann Johns

The focus of this upper division course will be the rising status of the artist and architect in 15th century Italy. We will begin in Florence, the canonical site of Renaissance artistic innovation, with a close examination of the various competitions involving Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and others. We’ll examine workshop practices, artistic handbooks, and other training resources available to artists in the early 15th century. We will also read from the many artistic biographies and early art historical accounts, including those of Ghiberti, Manetti, and Vasari.

We’ll then move to other artistic centers within Italy. Florentine artists such as Masaccio, Masolino, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Fra Angelico undertook important projects outside of Florence, including the cities of Rome, Naples, Padua, and Siena. We’ll also examine how prominent non-Florentine artists such as Mantegna, Sassetta, Melozzo da Forli, and Piero della Francesca reacted to the prevailing artistic developments of Florentine artist and patrons.

Throughout, we’ll examine the rising independence and opportunities of both artists and architects.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → CTI 352D / EUS 337F

TTH 11–12:30
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 World War.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → EUS 347.46

W 12–3
Ann Reynolds

This course has a number of overlapping goals: to engage with the work of the performance, film, video, and installation artist, Joan Jonas; to use Jonas’ work as a case study for developing ways of writing about time-based media, and to consider a wide variety of approaches both within and beyond art history that might provide tools for doing so. You will be assigned weekly readings and several screenings and 2-3 page bi-weekly reading response papers based on these readings and screenings. You will also be expected to create an archive related to a specific work by Joan Jonas. Periodically, you will be asked to present aspects of your archival practice to the class. These contributions and your work on your archive will result in an in-class presentation, a written narrative of your practical and conceptual research process and a working outline of a larger project that it might become.

Fulfills → VAPA

T 11–2
Susan Rather

Many U.S. medical schools partner with museum educators on art-centered courses meant to sharpen powers of observation, build empathy, foster teamwork, deepen cultural sensitivity, and promote wellness in future doctors. ARH 339R introduces students of diverse majors to such programs and explores how fundamental practices of art history enhance those same capabilities, important life tools for anyone.

Weekly meetings take two primary formats: (1) classroom-based lecture/discussion consideration of historical Euro-American artworks relating to allopathic (“Western”) medicine, and (2) on-site, project-oriented meetings in the Blanton Museum, in which students work individually, collectively, and with professional art educators and curators in a process of systematically deepening powers of observation, description, analysis, interpretation, and communication. Class members are expected to complete regular short reading and writing assignments, to make oral presentations, and to engage productively with classmates, the instructor, and invited guests. No exams and no book purchases necessary.

Open to all majors, without prerequisite or prior experience of art history.

Fulfills → VAPA

TTH 2–3:30
George Flaherty

This course looks closely at Mexican art and visual culture from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s, a period characterized by rapid modernization but also violence and glaring social and political injustices. With the Mexican Revolution, the first major social upheaval of the twentieth-century, the country became a beacon for politically committed art throughout the Americas and beyond. Our focus will be the emergence of cosmopolitan avant-garde artists and their relationship to state and market. Mixing native and international influences, these artists, writers, and intellectuals contributed to notions of national identity that still resonate today.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → LAS 327.2

MW 11–12:30
Jennifer Sales

What did it mean to be modern in Latin America in the first half of the 20th century? This course examines the various currents of modern art that developed in Latin America from 1900 to 1945, with particular emphasis placed on the artists and art movements of South America and Mexico. We will discuss how artists worked across distinct social, political, and historical contexts of artistic production in various Latin American centers while engaging with local and international debates about modernism, the avant-garde, nationalism, identity, and colonialism. Students will study how artists responded to revolution, racial difference, urban transformation, and shifting ideas about national culture. This course will take advantage of UT's rich collections of Latin American art, including the Benson Latin American Collection and the Blanton Museum of Art.

Cross-listings → LAS 327 / MAS 374

TTH 3:30–5
Natalie Zelt

What are the limits of photography? And how is photography entangled with ideas of Blackness in art? Some artists working today use the photograph and its loaded history in the United States to interrogate formal elements such as tonal range or the chemistry of light, while others delve directly into the politics of representation, the history of art, the boundaries of citizenship, or the performance of gender. This undergraduate seminar will examine various intersections of Blackness and photography in contemporary art of the United States. Paying attention to representation, aesthetics, materiality, and the politics of identity, students will investigate select ways living artists use photographs to grapple with a medium, history, Blackness, and a nation. Each week we will spend time looking an artwork—in class or on campus—reading scholarly texts, and putting them in conversation. This is a discussion-based seminar with a writing flag, not a lecture course. Students will practice close looking with visual texts and will foster analytical skills necessary to carefully and persuasively write about history-making and art in culture. Some of the artists studied will include Nona Faustine, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zora J. Murff, and Mickalene Thomas.

Cross-listings → AFR 335T / AMS 370.77

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.

Cross-listings → AFR 335G / WGS 340

MW 9:30–11
Katherine Schumann

This class examines the art and architecture of the ancient Maya and their neighbors. Special attention will be given to the way that art, architecture, and both physical and imagined space worked together to foster a uniquely Mesoamerican view of the world. We will focus heavily on the cultural and artistic relationships between Mesomerican civilizations that shaped Maya art and ideology from the early Preclassic period until the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s CE. Additional attention will be given to the interplay between painted environments and lived experience that cultivated Maya and broader Mesoamerican perspectives of reality.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → ANT 323V / GRG 322M / LAS 327.5

TTH 3:30–5
Katherine Schumann

This course surveys the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Aztec (Mexica) civilization, focusing particularly on the fourteenth century and on into the early colonial period. Students will be instructed on ways to view Aztec art and architecture contextually, and care will be taken to situate central Mexican material culture within the larger political, economic, and mythological landscape within which it was created, known, and remembered.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → LAS 327.11

TTH 3:30–5
Jennifer Sales

What can artistic practice do under dictatorship? This course examines artistic production in Latin America during and after military rule, with particular attention to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile from the 1960s through democratic transitions. We will study how practitioners used performance, conceptualism, and new media to confront censorship, exile, and state violence. Rather than treating art production as a mere reflection of political history, the course asks how it challenged structures of power and generated forms of resistance, solidarity, survival, and remembrance. Students will also consider the continuing relevance of these practices amid renewed attacks on democratic institutions and ongoing struggles over justice and the interpretation of the past. Discussions will examine how race, gender, sexuality, and coloniality complicate dominant accounts of repression, human rights, and political transition in Latin America and beyond.

Cross-listings → LAS 327

TTH 12:30–2
Jessica Maratsos

What can artistic practice do under dictatorship? This course examines artistic production in Latin America during and after military rule, with particular attention to This course explores the artistic production of the Low Countries, Germany and France from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, focusing predominantly on painting, sculpture, manuscripts, and printmaking. During this critical period these regions witnessed dramatic upheavals in the political and religious spheres, as well as concomitant changes in the visual arts. To understand these complex and interrelated phenomena we will investigate a broad range of topics, including technical, stylistic and iconographic innovations; devotional versus secular function; the changing role the patron and the market; concepts of national and regional identity; and the significant impact of the Reformation. We will examine works by such well known figures as Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, and Pieter Bruegel, as well as examples of the decorative arts and prints made by anonymous masters. A crucial aspect of this course will be the self-reflexive analysis of art historical writing itself, to which end a variety of different analytical frameworks will be employed throughout the semester.

TTH 2–3:30
Douglas Cushing

This course traces the development of three avant-garde movements: Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationist International. Founded successively, the movements share a historical lineage characterized almost as much by their disagreements as their accordance. All three movements are united, however, in their stance regarding the primacy of resistance and revolution (aesthetic, intellectual, and political) in their activities. We will survey the motivations, ideas, strategies, and aspirations of each movement, firmly grounding our understanding in a study of historical context.

MW 12:30–2
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.

MW 3:30–5
Grace Sparapani

This course compares the fin de siècle, or the turn of the century from the nineteenth into the twentieth, with Y2K, or the turn from the twentieth into the twenty-first, through the lens of visual culture, including fine art and popular media. To do so, we will ground these turns in their historical contexts, thinking about the years leading up to the century changes, and extrapolate their effects forward to the years following. Main considerations include technology, from the development of photography to cell phones and AI; decadence and social revolutions; political and social changes, from the Industrial Revolution to 9/11 and beyond; and why centuries’ ends bring so much fear. We will think along these categories across time, space, and mediums.

Ariel Evans

Black Art, Brown Art focuses on visual art made by contemporary African American, Mexican American and Latino artists. Students will consider artists' relationships to issues of difference, including but not limited to gender, 'identity politics' and 'post-identity', as well as think about whether they engage in a transnational dialogue with the cultures of their ancestors. Attention will be paid to exhibitions, such as Phantom Sightings and Freestyle, that seek to (re)define the parameters of 'ethnic' art. Artists studied include Rashid Johnson, Juan Capistran, Michael Ray Charles, Kara Walker, Pepon Osorio, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, and Enrique Chagoya among others.

Cross-listings → AFR 335N

W 9–12
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.

MWF 12–1
Phillip Townsend

Most structures that underpin the ethics of collecting, conservation, exhibition, and stewardship that art museums follow were established some time ago. As art-making practices and our society change, many of the codes of museum ethics under which institutions operate need re-evaluation. This undergraduate course will 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. We will also investigate many of the logistical aspects of the museum, including laws and mission statements, which will provide tools for thinking critically about the (in)visibility of African Diaspora leadership and art in the collections of U.S. art institutions. This is not a lecture-based course – the emphasis is on class participation and presentations.

Cross-listings → AFR 335Q / AMS 333

TTH 8–11
Scherezade García-Vazquez

TTH 11–2
Rowan Howe

This course introduces a beginning painting student to basic materials, techniques and ideas germane to historical and contemporary painting. Through the production of painting, one-on-one conversations with the instructor, and class discussion/critique, each student will become more sensitive, insightful and critical about works they produce and encounter. Note: The content of this course is determined by the instructor.

TTH 11–2
Alexander Pepin

This course introduces a beginning drawing student to basic materials, techniques and ideas germane to historical and contemporary drawing. Through the production of drawings, one-on-one conversations with the instructor, and class discussion/critique, each student will become more sensitive, insightful and critical about works they produce and encounter. Note: The content of this course is determined by the instructor.

TTH 2–5
Annie Klein

As a print survey course, Print for Non-Majors will introduce students to the basic conceptual issues of print and the technical processes of risograph, relief, intaglio, monoprint etc. This course is a “sampler platter” in that it will give students a taste of numerous processes so that students can get a sense of which they would like to explore further. The structure will include a mix of demonstrations, hands-on instruction, and lectures on historical and contemporary print artists.

TTH 11–2
Melissa Nuñez

This class will introduce you to the fundamentals of black & white photography. You will learn how to use a manual medium-format camera, expose and develop black & white film, and make gelatin silver prints. You will also study aspects of photographic history and begin to define your individual voice as an artist using photography.