Readings (and reflections when prompted) are due by the start of class so that our in-class looking is primed with a collective base of knowledge. The weeks listed here correspond to the organization and themes on the course syllabus.

All readings are made freely available through the links below. In some cases, they are stored on the password-protected Student Page found on the menu bar and you will be directed to find them there.

*Week 1* How to Look at a Work of Art

• Jennifer Roberts, “The Power of Patience”

*Week 2* The Sacred, the Spiritual, the Sanctified

• “Art and Ritual Life” in Intro to Art: Design, Context and Meaning (PDF)
  • Read pages 253-261

*Week 3* Performing Citizenship in Ancient Greece and Rome

• Helibrunn Timeline of Art History, “Theater in Ancient Greece”
• Helibrunn Timeline of Art History, “The Roman Republic”

*Week 4* The Gothic Middle Ages…on campus?!

• Smarthistory, “The Middle Ages, an introduction”
• Smarthistory, “Medieval churches: sources and forms”
• Recommended: CCNY, “Our History”

*Week 5* Monuments, Memorials, Murals, and the Politics of Public Memory

• Work on turning in Assignment 1
• Smarthistory, Mexican muralism: Los Tres Grandes”
• Art21, “Kara Walker: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (video)

*Week 6* Material Culture by Sea

• Edward S. Cooke, “The need for material literacy”
• The Institute Podcast, “Re-post: Maritime Artistic Creation with Maggie Cao” (listen or read transcript)
  • I strongly recommend listening to (or reading the transcript of) the entire conversation, which is just under 20 minutes. If you are short on time, listen to the first minute to be introduced to the speakers and then from [5:00] to [11:12] to hear Cao reflect on which disciplines influence her work as an art historian and a discussion of her project New Media in the Age of Sail
• Recommended: Center for Material Culture Studies, “What is Material Culture?”

*Week 7* Multi-sensory Objects in Pre-conquest Mesoamerica and the Andes

• Smarthistory, “Defining ‘pre-Columbian’ and ‘Mesoamerica’”
• Smarthistory, “Andean art, an introduction”

*Week 8* African Sculpture, Repatriation, and Postcolonial Entanglements

• Work on turning in midterm
• Smarthistory, “Aesthetics and African art”
• Smarthistory, “African art and the effects of European contact and colonization”
• Recommended: Tate Museum, “Postcolonial art”

*Week 9* Bodies Out of Bounds

• Helibrunn Timeline of Art History, “The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity”
• Sherry C.M. Lindquist, “Confronting Power and Violence in the Renaissance Nude”

*Week 10* Renaissances in the North and South (of Europe) & Alt Text as Poetry

• Smarthistory, “Humanism in renaissance Italy”
• Smarthistory, “The Northern Renaissance, a brief introduction”
• The Royal Academy, “How to read a Renaissance painting”
• Recommended: Easy Accessibility, “Alt Text 101” (video)

*Week 11* Landscape Painting, Photography, and the Making of American Myths

• Work on turning in Assignment 2
• “Living Traditions and Icons of Defeat” in American Encounters (PDF)
  • Read pages 222-224 (up to the section titled “The ‘Bad’ Indian”) and page 318 (“The North American Indian by Edward Curtis”)
• Smarthistory, “Wendy Red Star, 1880 Crow Peace Delegation”(video)
• Recommended: Jenni Sorkin, “Americanist Questionnaire,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 2 (Fall 2024)
  • Read the introduction plus the respondents’ reflections on the terminology of “American” versus “US” art (up until the second question “How do you feel about the social justice direction…”)

*Week 12* The Daunting “-isms” of the Western Canon

• Smarthistory, “Neoclassicism, an introduction”
• Smarthistory, “Romanticism in France”
• Smarthistory, “Realism, an introduction”
• Smarthistory, “Modern Art, Colonialism, Primitivism, and Indigenism: 1830-1950”
  • Read all the sections of text on this webpage, but you don’t need to read all the linked articles and videos in the gray boxes.
• Recommended: Smarthistory, “Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine”

*Week 13* Whose Line Is It Anyway? Riffing on the Line

• Nadia Radwan, “Rethinking Geometric Abstraction”

*Week 14* Art as Institutional Critique

• Smarthistory, “A brief history of the art museum”
• Go to the Student Page tab for your second reading