For Students: Courses

RELGH/ICPRH300A01 Picturing Religion: Spiritual Art in an Age of Materialism
Course can fulfill a requirement in the History of Art major at Bryn Mawr.

NEW COURSE.
This course will cover topics in the intersection of religion and art in Europe and the U.S. from 1850 to the present. We will examine how spirituality fueled new directions in Western artistic production, most notably abstraction, and explore art's role in visionary and contemplative experiences. The course will conclude with some recent moments when art has been perceived as sacrilegious, sparking debate and controversies. In addition to focusing on particular artists, including Paul Gauguin, Mark Rothko, Andres Serrano, and Kiki Smith, we will discuss practices of writing about religious art.

ICPRH304A01 Artworlds: Contact Zones
Course can fulfill a requirement in the History of Art major at Bryn Mawr.

NEW COURSE.
This course will look at art worlds past and present as contact zones bringing together vastly different systems of value and groups of people. We will look at a series of case studies in which Westerners and non-Westerners create art forms, practices and styles that were direct products of intercultural contact. Through these, we will counter narratives that a)pose global interconnection as a recent occurrence and b)present modernity as a purely Western product later "exported" to the rest of the work. Instead, we will see how all culture is interculture. Always focusing on art objects, producers, practices and institutions, we will look at 1)African, Native-American, and Melanesian art worlds of "first contact" in the age of discovery; 2)the great World Fairs of Victorian Europe and America; 3)the co-construction of Primitive Art and European Modernism 4) the contemporary phenomenon of tourist art.

ICPRH229A01 Topics in Rhetorical Theory: Roland Barthes and the Image
Cross-listed in Comparative Literature and Independent College Programs. Enrollment limited to 25 students.

An exploration of the rhetoric of visual culture through an examination of 20th century French critic Roland Barthes' many writings on photography, film, and what he calls the "civilized code of perfect illusions." We will spend the semester reading his texts, charting the trajectory of a career that begins with the euphoria of an ever-expanding semiotic and ends with a meditation on the limits of this very project.