New Approaches to General Education Teaching in History of Art
In Autumn 2022, Ohio State instituted a new set of General Education requirements. Students now take courses in both “Foundational” subjects as well as in “Themes.” While many longstanding GE courses taught in the department, including broad survey courses on different parts of the world, are still being offered, we have also begun to develop a range of new courses for the new GE. Many of these are developed by recently-hired faculty members, and expand our course offerings in really exciting ways. Here are just a few of the new general education courses developed over the past year or two, along with brief course descriptions.
History of Art 2007: Buddha to Bollywood: The Arts of India
This course is designed to offer students a comprehensive overview of the diverse visual cultures of South Asia. We will delve into a broad range of topics, including architecture, sculpture and painting, performative traditions, and film. Through lectures, discussions, and assignments, we will develop a critical vocabulary to better understand and interrogate the rich visual heritage of the Indian subcontinent. Our focus will be on exploring the various ways in which visual culture has been utilized as a modality to express political power, gender roles, ethnic and racial identity, diverse religious beliefs, and social aspirations.
History of Art 2009: Introduction to African American Art
This class argues that the history of African American Art offers us, in practice and theory, histories of “high” and “low” art, everyday objects, and ways of seeing. By conducting a chronological approach to African American Art, we will trace moments of historical continuity as well as emerging practices in order to better understand how the methods, materials, and meanings bracketed under the category of African American Art have been a site of innovation, experimentation, and avant-garde practice. We will spend this semester juxtaposing conventional approaches to art (painting, sculpting, line drawing, installation) with innovative approaches to visual culture (found objects, everyday materials, contemporary performance). Central to our approach is the role of visual, performing, and expressive arts as cultural objects that help us study how race, ethnicity, and gender diversity are formative to African American art and its histories.
History of Art 3562: Latinx Art in the United States
This course provides an overview of contemporary Latinx Art in the United States from its origins in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement through today. U.S. Latinx Art refers to the artistic, visual, and creative production emerging from Latinx communities in the context of diaspora after immigration from Latin America. This course will examine the visual arts created by these communities across the continental United States, from the second half of the twentieth century into the present and with a focus on the major Latinx hubs such as Los Angeles and New York. As this is an emerging field of inquiry within Art History, many of the readings will be drawn from adjacent disciplines such as Literature and Ethnic Studies, giving the course a strong interdisciplinary component.
History of Art 3905: The Developing World on Screen
This is a co-taught in-person course in Film Studies and Development Studies that explores relationships between the lived environments of the developing world and their representations in film. In this course, which is designed to satisfy the requirements of the General Education “Lived Environments” theme, students will view narrative and documentary films from around the world and engage the stories they tell by way of readings on global poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, among other themes. This course engages a diverse range of approaches to studying the developing world, focusing on the production of knowledge and structures of perception that shape relations between social groups at different spatial scales.
History of Art 4240: Arts of the Black Atlantic
Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic—a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Crucial to this class is the artwork of practitioners like Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Josephine Baker, Aubrey Williams, AfriCOBRA, Frank Bowling, Wangechi Mutu, and Renee Green. We will work with concepts like “modern” visual forms, the afterlives of slavery, “the aesthetics of cool”, and the anticolonial imagination.
History of Art 4630: Inventing the Americans – The Art of Citizenship, Nationhood, and Democracy, 1776-1900
This course is concerned with how citizenship, nationhood, and democracy were constituted in and through works of art from the founding of the United States in the late 18th century, through the nation’s rise to global dominance by the turn of the 20th century. We will look at a range of artworks— including painting, sculpture, print, and photography—with a view to understanding how the nation, its citizens, and its approaches to democracy were made visible (or rendered invisible) in culture. Unifying themes in this course include the implications of geographical and political redefinition of the United States through Westward expansion; processes of economic and social modernization; shifting definitions of what it meant to be an “American;” who counted as a “citizen;” and how democracy has been pictured for different audiences.