Courses

This course delves into drawing as an expansive, exploratory practice that underpins all forms of visual art. Designed primarily as a hands-on workshop, the class is enriched with slide lectures, video presentations, and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will engage in individual and group critiques, fostering dialogue about their work. Beginning with still life and progressing to drawings of artworks, artifacts, and figure studies, the course investigates drawing as a dynamic practice connected to a wide array of visual cultures.

This course delves into drawing as an expansive, exploratory practice that underpins all forms of visual art. Designed primarily as a hands-on workshop, the class is enriched with slide lectures, video presentations, and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will engage in individual and group critiques, fostering dialogue about their work. Beginning with still life and progressing to drawings of artworks, artifacts, and figure studies, the course investigates drawing as a dynamic practice connected to a wide array of visual cultures.

This course examines three masters of European Baroque art—Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)—artists who are all well represented in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through classroom discussions and museum visits, we will examine Baroque art as part of a continuing and developing accumulation of forms and ideas throughout the 17th century, and consider the impact these artists had on their contemporaries and in ensuing centuries. Roughly half of the class sessions take place at the Metropolitan Museum, a luxury that allows for close, firsthand analysis of art, but it is not an art appreciation course. It is a history course concerned with a study of ideas, artists, and visual facts and their application to emerging art forms within their cultural-historical context. In addition to developing a critical eye, the class is intended to develop analytical thinking and communication skills as well as knowledge of the subject matter.

This course examines some of the key moments of architectural modernity in the twentieth century in an attempt to understand how architecture participated in the making of a new world order. It follows the lead of recent scholarship that has been undoing the assumption that modern twentieth-century architecture is a coherent enterprise that should be understood through avant-gardist movements. Instead, architectural modernity is presented in this course as a multivalent, and even contradictory, entity that has nonetheless had profound impact on modernity. Rather than attempting to be geographically comprehensive, it focuses on the interdependencies between the Global North and the South; instead of being strictly chronological, it is arranged around a constellation of themes that are explored through a handful of projects and texts. Reading primary sources from the period under examination is a crucial part of the course.

The adjudged authenticity of a work of art is fundamental in determining its value as a commodity on the art market or, for example, in property claim disputes or in issues of cultural property restitution. Using case studies some straightforward and others extremely vexing--this course examines the many ways in which authenticity is measured through the use of provenance and art historical research, connoisseurship, and forensic resources. From within the broader topics, finer issues will also be explored, among them, the hierarchy of attribution, condition and conservation, copies and reproductions, the period eye and the style of the marketplace.

This course will introduce students to the history of museums and display practices through New York collections. The birth of the museum as a constitutive element of modernity coincides with the establishment of European nation states. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, museums were founded in major European and American cities to classify objects, natural and manmade, from plants and fossils to sculpture and clothing. This course presents the alternate art history that can be charted through an examination of the foundation and development of museums from cabinets of curiosity to the collection-less new museums currently being built in the Middle East and beyond. We will consider broad thematic issues such as nationalism, colonialism, canon formation, the overlapping methods of anthropology and art history, and the notion of 'framing' from the architectural superstructure to exhibition design. We will visit a wide variety of museums from the American Museum of Natural History to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum as in-depth case studies of more general concepts. Students will have the opportunity to meet museum educators, conservators and curators through on site teaching in a variety of institutions.

Through an examination of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography. fashion and visual culture of the United States from 1750 to 1914, the course will explore how American artists responded to and operated within the wider world, while grappling with issues of identity at home. Addressing themes shared in common across national boundaries, the class will consider how American art participated in the revolutions and reforms of the "long" nineteenth century, and how events of the period continue to impact our country today. The period witnessed the emergence of new technologies for creating, using and circulating images and objects, the expansion and transformation of exhibition and viewing practices, and the rise of new artistic institutions, as well as the metamorphosis of the United States from its colonial origins to that of a world power, including the radical changes that occurred during the Civil War.  With many sessions taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the class will investigate how American art engaged with international movements while constructing national identity during a period of radical transformation both at home and abroad.

This course is a topical (not comprehensive) survey of some of the musical traditions of South and West Asia, and of their diasporas. Each tradition will be described locally, connecting it to critical themes that the course aims to explore. The purpose of the course is to introduce you to a range of indigenous and diasporic “Asian” musical styles, ideas, traditions, and artists through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of music as culture. No previous background in music is required.

Readings in translation and discussion of texts of Middle Eastern and Indian origin. Readings may include the Quran, Islamic philosophy, Sufi poetry, the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Indian epics and drama, and Gandhis Autobiography.

Introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent. The course covers the early art of Buddhism, rock-cut architecture of the Buddhists and Hindus, the development of the Hindu temple, Mughal and Rajput painting and architecture, art of the colonial period, and the emergence of the Modern.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief systems, arts, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.