Art History

This course will explore the politics of photography from the nineteenth-century to the present. Through careful analysis of lens-based images and image collections, paired with readings in photo history and criticism, we will ask how “light writing” shapes and is shaped by intersecting systems of class, gender, sexuality and race. We will also interrogate core principles of photography itself, from objectivity to democracy. Students will be introduced to a broad range of photographic forms, including (but not limited to): scientific, art, ethnographic, commercial, war and protest. They will also develop visual literacy skills and a critical toolkit for analyzing histories of technology and image making. Lecture-based with discussion posts, papers and presentations. May be taken for credit toward the Film and Media Studies major or minor.

The built environment plays a major role in how we understand and experience race. Racial difference also shapes the buildings and landscapes we occupy and imagine. In this course, we will approach these phenomena by studying 1. how modern and contemporary architecture has enclosed, divided, circulated, and framed bodies in particular ways, and 2. how specific architectural structures have emerged as racial formations, from the eighteenth century to present day. Topics may include: plantations, parks, skyscrapers, slums, suburbia, freeways, prisons, camps, shantytowns, and zoos. Students will acquire historical contexts and develop analytical skills for engaging both race and the built environment. Lecture-based with discussion posts, papers, and presentations. May be elected as Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies 135.

This course presents an overview of Buddhist art and architecture, beginning with its origins in South Asia and tracing its dissemination into East and Southeast Asia. A variety of media will be examined and interpreted within the context of Buddhist religious practice, regional artistic traditions, and shifting religious doctrine. Topics including the origin of the Buddha image, pilgrimage and modes of worship, Buddhist iconography, and the intersection of Buddhist religion and politics will be discussed. Several short papers, presentations, exams, and class participation are required. May be taken for credit toward the Chinese or Japanese major or minor or the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.

This course explores the relationship between Hindu theology, epics, religious practice, aesthetics, and ritual spaces. While much of the course focuses on Hindu visual culture within India from the 2nd century BCE to today, we will also discuss Hindu monuments and artistic traditions in Southeast Asia as a means of exploring networks of exchange in the Indian Ocean world. Temples, sculptural icons, painted manuscripts, popular prints, theatrical and dance performances, and film will be examined within their historical and cultural contexts. Topics include ways of representing and interacting with the divine, gender and the body in goddess imagery, Hindu art in political contexts, pilgrimage and festivals, monument conservation, Hindu icons in museum spaces, and artistic exchange with different religious groups (including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity). Short papers, presentations, exams, and class participation are required. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.

This course presents an overview of the art and architecture of the Indian subcontinent spanning roughly 5,000 years of history, from the Indus Valley Civilization to the 21^st century. Particular emphasis will be placed on the study of objects and sites in their religious, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Topics addressed in the class include (but are not limited to) the origin of the Buddha image, the function of erotic sculpture in religious contexts, ritual practice and sacred space, trends in patronage, cultural exchange between Muslim and Hindu courts in the medieval and early modern era, methods of art collecting and display, the impact of British imperialism on artistic production in India, the importance of visual culture in the Indian nationalist movement, and the tension between tradition and globalization in the contemporary art of South Asia. Several short papers, presentations, exams, and class participation are required. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.

This course will focus on the physical development and transformation of the city of Walla Walla, including the Whitman campus, since the 1850s.  Students will conduct primary research on individual buildings and plans, and present their findings to the class throughout the semester.  Two project reports and presentations.  May be taken for credit toward the Art-Environmental Studies major.

This course takes its title from underground director George Kuchar’s irreverent approach to making low-budget, low brow movies that helped situate film and video as a legitimate artistic media. Topics will explore experimentations with technologies of the moving image that exist outside of mainstream commercial moviemaking practices, histories of individual artists, groups and collectives experimenting with film and video, “expanded cinemas,” and how new forms of image production and distribution in the digital era challenge traditional hierarchies of taste and value. A weekly screening, typically no more than 1 hour, is required. The class will agree on a set screening time during our initial class meeting. Requirements include short papers and presentations and one longer research project chosen in consultation with instructor.  May be taken for credit toward the Film and Media Studies major or minor.

This course is a critical study of the discipline of art history. Students will examine a range of works within different cultural contexts, dating from antiquity to the present day. We will interrogate categories that have been at the center of art history as a discipline: the object, the artist, the viewer, and the institution. Our goals will be 1) to understand how social power has manifested through the idea, production, and circulation of “art” and forms of visual culture more broadly, and 2) to practice reading, writing, discussion, and sustained looking in relation to the visual field. Short papers, presentations, and/or exams are required. Required for the art history and studio art majors and minors. Open to sophomores and juniors; others by consent of instructor.

This course is designed to introduce students to the museum as a social institution that produces value, organizes material culture, and structures knowledge. An exploration of the ways in which museum display can augment and/or alter the meanings and functions of objects will be central to the class. Students will examine the birth of the museum in 18th century Europe as a product of Enlightenment values and imperial ambitions. Using historical and contemporary examples from Britain, France, and the United States, students will research and critique shifting collecting and exhibition philosophies. The class will explore the following topics (and more) as they relate to the rhetoric of display: identity formation, race and gender politics, memory and history, ethnography and social taxonomy, "non-Western" art in Western museums, repatriation of objects, sacred art in secular spaces, narrative constructions and claims of historical veracity, and the modern encyclopedic museum. The course is based on student presentations and discussion, with various written assignments and/or exams. Multiple field trips are required to complete the course. These will take place outside of class time, and may be scheduled either during the week or on Fridays and/or Saturdays.

Monuments have become focal points in the struggle for racial justice in the United States, particularly those honoring protagonists of the Southern Confederacy and Westward settlement. Meanwhile, through transnational movements such as #Rhodesmustfall, activists in former colonies around the world and their colonial metropoles have been demanding the removal of stone and bronze statues glorifying colonial legacies. These events have prompted a range of creative interventions that reimagine what it means to remember in and as a public. But how so, and to what end? In this course, we explore the power and limits of monuments today and in the past, and public works that differ from monuments’ conventions. Key questions include: What is a monument? What is a memorial? What histories and communities do different forms of remembrance enable? Which do they make difficult? What models of memory do they imply? And what role have artists and historians played in the life cycle of these public objects and sites? Students will develop skills in visual and spatial literacy, while building historical and conceptual knowledge about this core topic in art history. Discussion-based with short assignments, site visits, and exams.

This course explores the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Beginning with the Bronze Age and ending with the Roman Imperial period, we will examine the material evidence for key areas in Greek and Roman society and history, from class and socio-political change, to cultural identity, religious practice, and daily life. We will consider the nature of the surviving archaeological record, from public monuments to works of sculpture and pottery, to coins and other remains. All the while, we will highlight the ways in which the visual heritage of a “classical” and “Greco-Roman” past have been and continue to be exploited in the construction of subsequent self-images and claims to supremacy. In this light, we will not only encounter the histories of “classical” archaeology and art history, but we will also emphasize the ways in which the material cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have been manipulated – both in antiquity and modernity – for a wide array of cultural and ideological aims. May be elected as Classics 224 or History 224.

Despite Rome being one of the greatest cities in the ancient world, its identity was fundamentally rooted in its natural landscape. In this intensive 4-week course in Italy, we will study the ancient city of Rome and its supporting landscape, both through the lens of ancient literary accounts and directly through field trips to major archeological sites and museums. We will explore how the realms of urban, rural, and wild were articulated in Roman culture, conceptually and materially. We will investigate both how the Romans conceived of the relationship between the built environment of urban space and the natural environment that supported and surrounded it and how they dealt with the real ecological problems of urban life. Students will also actively participate in archeological excavation at a Roman coastal settlement. May be elected as Classics 319 or Environmental Studies 319.

Modernism in the visual arts and the built environment is more than “my kid could paint that” and clean lines on HGTV. In this course, we will study key makers, movements, works, exhibitions and institutions in the canon of modern art and architecture before 1945, as well as scholarship that has called this canon into question. Emphasis will go toward the social, political and material conditions under which modernism emerged and flourished as an aesthetic category, and how modernism articulated different senses of an avant-garde marked by nation, class, gender, sexuality and race. Our ultimate goal is to learn how artistic and architectural modernism was invented, mobilized and modified in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Students will sharpen their visual and spatial literacy skills and deepen their historical knowledge of art and architecture. Lecture-based with presentations, short papers and exams.. May be taken for credit toward the Art-Environmental Studies major.  

This course examines some of the issues raised by artists and critics since the end of World War II, including the changing nature of the art object, how Modernism differs from Postmodernism, the influence of technological developments on aesthetic practices and the role of popular culture, mass media and new methods of scholarship in challenging the distinctions between high and low art, the universality of meaning, the genius European male artist, the precious museum work. While the majority of the material is devoted to movements and figures from the United States and Europe, the course also will investigate “the margins” — those artistic practices that may have been overlooked by the mainstream, but which nevertheless have a broad cultural base in their respective communities. May be taken for credit toward the Art-Environmental Studies major.  

What theories have inspired contemporary avant-garde Theater, installation and performance art, tanz-Theater, experimental video/film, and new media? In this interdisciplinary course we will chart the evolution of performance theory from the writings of Bertolt Brecht to the present day. We will explore how artists have embraced and challenged these emerging forms, and examine seminal works from each genre in their historical, political, and social contexts. Designed to bring students from a variety of disciplines (art, art history, theater, dance, film, and video, etc.) into a collaborative forum; coursework will include outside readings, in-class screenings, class discussions, and short essays, as well as group and individual projects. May be elected as Theater and Dance 357.

See course schedule for any current offerings.

Projects designed by the student and under supervision of a professor that expand upon a completed 200- or 300-level course.

This seminar examines the various ways in which ancient Egypt has been imagined in the European, Egyptian, and American nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on visual culture. Egyptology, the scientific discipline that studies Ancient Egypt, emerged in the nineteenth century in tandem with “Egyptomania,” a Western obsession with all things (ancient) Egyptian. At the same time, Egyptians were struggling against European colonial intervention and vying for control over Egyptian archeology. With particular focus on the ways in which people, imagery, and discourses circulated between three continents, the course will introduce students to the history of Europe’s “discovery” of (ancient) Egypt, the use of Pharaonic imagery in the construction of Egyptian nationhood, the place Egypt occupies in museum collections and art historical narratives, the role of ancient Egypt in American racial politics, and Egypt in European and American pop culture. Discussion-based with short response papers and a longer final paper. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, And Ethnicity Studies major or minor or the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major. May be elected as Classics 325.

This seminar will study the emergence of Los Angeles as a center for cultural production since 1945. It will assess the relationship between urban space and the visual arts — including painting, photography, architecture, film, and video. And it will investigate the role of representation in shaping the social topography of the city. This course will ultimately seek to answer a series of questions: How has Los Angeles established itself as one of the most important global art centers? How do the city’s history and landscape create the conditions for certain artistic movements and styles? And how do Los Angeles’ ethnically and economically diverse communities use the arts to address issues of social justice and marginality?

This class will explore contemporary artistic responses to climate change. Whether we call this period “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “The Sixth Extinction,” or “The Dithering” we are now forced to confront a new era of human-generated global warming and rapidly vanishing biodiversity. How are artists and other cultural producers helping us to rethink and reimagine our relationship to the planet? From the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 70s to more recent experiments in so-called “Third Nature” digital domains, this course will explore how creative individuals and collective actions are helping to envision human adaptability, cross-species justice, and new modes of collaboration to halt—or at least slow—ecological disaster. Likewise, the class will explore how art is often implicated in the same cycle of overconsumption that threatens our shared habitats. Lectures, in-class screenings, guest speakers and fieldtrips will be used to supplement course readings. This is a writing intensive course open to students from all disciplines but rooted in the capacity for the Arts and Humanities to generate creative responses to complex problems. May be taken for credit toward the Art-Environmental Studies major.

What does blackness look, sound, and feel like? To whom does it belong? When and how has it generated value, reinforced power structures, or remade the world? This seminar investigates racial blackness through the lens of modern and contemporary art, broadly conceived. Moving between expressive objects, archives, and critical scholarship in Black Studies, Art History, and Black Visual Culture, we will study how blackness has been imagined and experienced through artistic practice since the early 20th Century. We will ask how these practices have negotiated Euro-American canons, state violence, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, environmental harm, and the politics of gender and sexuality. And we will explore and assess the possibilities of art as a channel for Black people's liberation. Topics may include: The Harlem Renaissance, black abstraction, The Black Arts Movement, Digital blackness, and Diasporic aesthetics. Discussion-based classes with presentations, regular Canvas posting, and short papers. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major or minor or the Gender Studies major or minor.

This course examines art and visual culture as an expression of Indigenous people in North America. Working directly with campus collections and regional arts and culture centers, we will study the material, formal, and iconographic dimensions of specific artworks and visual objects, while considering the historical, social, and environmental conditions that have shaped and are shaped by them. The course will expose students to traditions, cosmologies, and frameworks for understanding Native North American art and visual culture, and develop research and writing skills for interpreting all forms of cultural expression. Topics may include: sovereignty, settler colonialism, “Indian-ness,” gendered and queer indigeneities, and human/nonhuman relations. Discussion-based classes with field trips, presentations, short papers, and projects. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major, Gender Studies major, or the Art-Environmental Studies major.

This class explores the art and architecture of the Mughal dynasty in South Asia, from the origins of the empire in the sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, when British forces exiled the last Mughal ruler. Manuscript and album paintings, palace and tomb architecture, jewelry, enameled weaponry, and elaborate textiles will all be interpreted within the context of Mughal politics, Islamic doctrine, art workshop structures, and pre-existing aesthetic traditions in South Asia and the broader Islamic world. Topics examined include (but are not limited to) public space and imperial propaganda, art objects in networks of gift exchange, artistic and cultural exchange between Mughal and contemporary Rajput courts in Rajasthan and the Himalayan foothills, and the impact of the British presence on Indian visual culture. Various written assignments, presentations, and class discussion are required. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.  

This seminar examines the impact of European colonial expansion on the art and architecture of South Asia between 1750 and 1947, when India and Pakistan gained independence from British control. Although multiple colonial powers were present in India beginning in the early sixteenth century, a study of the British Empire in South Asia will be the primary focus of this course. Paintings, photographs, buildings, monuments, and other objects produced by both indigenous and European artists will be considered. This course explores the ways in which visual forms engaged with imperial ideologies, either promoting or resisting Western presence in India. Issues including race, gender, religion, class/caste, and the politics of display will be addressed as they relate to artistic production in this period. Various written assignments, presentations, and class discussion are required. May be taken for credit toward the South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies major.

Special studies not generally considered in other courses offered by the department. The specific material will vary from semester to semester and may cover various subjects from early times to contemporary developments in art. See course schedule for any current offerings.

Projects designed by senior Art History majors under the supervision of a professor.

Weekly discussions and critical papers based on: 1) selected primary and secondary readings in the history of western art theory (ancient, medieval, renaissance, the academy); 2) primary and secondary readings in the methodology of modern art history; and 3) primary readings in contemporary approaches to art. Emphasis will be placed on the role of the art theorist/historian in the history of art. Required for the major.

Open only to senior Art History studies majors except those registered for Art History 498. Taken during the spring (or final) semester of the senior year. Devoted to the completion of a substantial written project under the supervision of at least one faculty member.

Designed to further independent investigation leading to the preparation of a written thesis or research project in Art History. Taken during the spring (or final) semester of the senior year. Required of and limited to senior honors candidates in Art History.