This course will focus on expanding the definition and activity of drawing to incorporate time-based methods. Students will home in on drawing as an exploratory practice through assignments and activities that shy away from static images and embrace more expansive temporal possibilities. Studio work will engage with various drawing methods, including drawing as performance, silhouettes and stop motion, analog and digital animation tools, automatic drawings, and time-sensitive media such as reactive dyes.

(Offered as ARHA 279 and EUST 279) In this course we will explore Dada and Surrealism as twentieth-century movements in the visual arts, performance, and film. We will place the emergence of Dada and Surrealism into the European context of war and revolution and discuss major artists of the 1910s to 1930s, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, René Magritte, and others.

(Offered as ARHA 276 and BLST 276) Can art achieve political change? This course investigates that question in relation to transatlantic campaigns to end chattel slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will begin by developing familiarity with critical approaches to slavery, visual culture, and the archive, before tracing abolitionist activism across artistic media. We will consider paintings, sculptures, photographs, and decorative arts, as well as imagery that circulated in newspapers and books.

This intermediate studio course explores creative photographic practice through ideas of movement, fluidity, and transformation. Rather than treating the photograph as a static record, we will explore their dynamic potential as images that circulate, translate, and cross disciplines. Projects will move between digital and analog processes, including creating digital negatives for darkroom experimentation, performance for the camera, installation strategies, zine-making, and digital dissemination.

(Offered as ARHA 241, ARCH 241, and EUST 241)  Michelangelo, a defining genius of the Italian Renaissance, emerged from a rich cultural environment that forever changed how we think of art. Artists of the Renaissance developed an original visual language from the legacy of the ancient world, while also examining nature, their environment, and encounters with other worlds to the East and West. Their art revealed a profound engagement with philosophical attitudes toward the body and the spirit, as well as with ideals of pious devotion and civic virtue.

The combination of language with visual information offers a rich range of possibilities. In this course we will investigate strategies of interweaving image and text to create works that draw upon the qualities of each to produce hybrid forms. The class will look at a variety of sources and respond to them in a series of hands-on studio projects. These sources include maps, diagrams, calligraphy, illustrations and manuscripts, as well as work from the history of art and literature.

This course explores the visual structures of natural things. The processes and disciplines of drawing, acrylic painting, watercolor and sculpture will be used to examine natural subjects such as plants, animals, landscape and the figure. We will work directly from life. Out-of-class trips will be frequent to access natural subject matter not found in the classroom.

Requisite: One of ARHA 111, ARHA 214, or ARHA 215 (because of the diversity of subject and materials used). Limited to 12 students. Spring 2026: Visiting Lecturer Phipps.

(Offered as ARHA 191 and MUSI 191) This course explores sound as a medium of art-making with a rich history and radical potential. With an emphasis on the materiality of audio, techniques covered will include constructing microphones and speakers, creative manipulation of analog media, and building lo-fi electronics. Accompanying readings draw from artists’ writings and media theory to contextualize collective exploration. Students will be expected to create studio-based art for critique. No musical experience is required.

Spring 2026: Assistant Professor House.

(Offered as ARHA 157, ARCH 157, and BLST 193) This course engages the buildings, cities, and landscapes of the former colonies of Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Beginning with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the non-European territories, which once comprised the lucrative possessions of modern European empires, quickly became independent states charged with developing infrastructure, erecting national monuments, and handling the influx of laborers drawn to the metropolises formed as sleepy colonial towns grew into bustling postcolonial cities.

This introductory course explores art produced between 1960 and the present. We will take a transnational approach, from the emergence of Pop art as an  international phenomenon in the 1960s to the mushrooming cloud of biennials in the twenty-first century. The course will sometimes look at art’s intersection with architecture, film, and visual culture more broadly. We will keep in mind the following questions: How have new technologies, civil rights movements, emergent subjectivities, new forms of theoretical inquiry, and processes of globalization shaped the work of art?