Born in the late 1800s, the New Negro movement demanded political equality, desegregation, and an end to lynching, while also launching new forms of international Black cultural expression. The visionary modernity of its artists not only reimagined the history of the Black diaspora by developing new artistic languages through travel, music, religion and poetry, but also shaped modernism as a whole in the 20th century. There are required museum trips, mostly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Harlem Renaissance exhibition and to museums in Philadelphia. These trips will take place in lieu of a class meeting.

Apartheid, the political doctrine of separation of races in South Africa (1948-1990), dominated the (South) African political discourse in the second half of the 20th century. While it lasted, art and visual cultures were marshaled in the defense and contestation of its ideologies. Since the end of Apartheid, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, and scholars continue to reexamine the legacies of Apartheid and the social, philosophical, and political conditions of non-racialized South Africa. Course readings examine issues of race, nationalism and politics, art and visual culture, and social memory in South Africa.

Connect contemporary American art and visual culture with environmental justice movements. Examines photographers, performers, filmmakers, writers, and other artists, with a focus on Indigenous and other BIPOC artists and media makers. Examines how artists engage with environmental justice movements around climate change and energy transitions, food and water security, land use and land back, biodiversity loss, and allied issues. What roles do the arts play in such movements?

This course on cartographic cinema explores the digital film archive as a trove of images that can be re-appropriated, re-mixed, re-assembled into new ways of thinking about and imagining cities. Cutting a horizontal trajectory across cities --- New York, Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Hong Kong, Lagos, Calcutta --- the cinema has captured the dynamic force of urban mutations and disruptions. It has also imposed a vertical axis of memories, allowing time to pile up and overlap, confounding meaning and points of view, especially in cities of trauma.

Architecture has always been deeply collaborative, like moviemaking or opera where the credits are long and layered. But in architecture there is a huge effort to credit a single figure. Why this pathological need to keep collaboration secret? What is so threatening about the collaborators? What are we afraid of? What is at stake? This seminar explores questions of authorship, the signature, copyright, the anonymous, networks, labor, etc. It also thinks through the ideological implications of this narrative and the implications of its undoing. What would a post-author discourse look like?

A survey of architectural history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary America, that includes comparative material from around the world. This course stresses a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.

What was the role of women in Chinese art? How did Chinese people think about this life and the afterlife? Why and how is calligraphy considered an art form in China? These are but three of the questions this course asks and endeavors to explore. Focusing on ten important and provocative topics, this course aims to provide a comprehensive but spotlighted picture of Chinese art and culture. Together the ten point to the interrelated nature of the visual and Chinese philosophical thought, aesthetic values, religious beliefs, social life, political expression and commercial practices.

The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

This course will appeal to those interested in Mexican culture and politicized art practices. It will cover major events in Mexican art from approximately 1910 to 1970, ending with the struggles around Mexico '68. Mexican modernism circulated worldwide, and cultural pilgrims rushed to Mexico to learn from their example. For them, the Mexican Revolution was just beginning, having migrated from the political to the cultural realm. Throughout this course, we will consider the relationship of art to revolution and how history works to make meaning from the past.

Before the digital age, the production of prints, which allows multiple images and texts to be generated from a single matrix, revolutionized the spread of information and pictures throughout the world. Through close examination of works in the Princeton University Art Museum and Firestone Library, this seminar considers the origins, evolution of techniques, and impact of prints from the 15th century to the present, with a focus on Europe and the Americas. In addition to individual research projects, the class will also visit dealers in New York and select and purchase a print for the Museum's collection.

This seminar will examine the historical concept of 'plague' from antiquity to the present using works of art, archaeological contexts, and bioarchaeology. Students will also learn the scientific principles behind each disease outbreak, including how the pathogen was first discovered; how it is currently understood by modern infectious disease experts; and how it functions within the human body and as part of ecosystems. The course will explore in particular the three pandemics of Y. pestis, malaria, and smallpox; the social impact of plagues during the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods; and the history of medicine.

Belief in photography's indexicality has haunted the medium since its inception. Once understood to offer proof of something real, the idea that we might trust a photograph to relay anything genuine now feels absurd. Looking to shifting discourses regarding photography's relationship with objectivity, authenticity, and fact, this course examines the origins and evolution of our understanding of the medium's duplicity. Over the course of the semester, we will trace the historically erratic belief in photography's ability to document and attempt to think critically about the medium's capacity to create, reveal, and critique the real.

An introduction to the history, methodologies, and theories of archaeology. The seminar discusses topics and problems drawn from a wide range of cultures and periods. Issues include trade and exchange; the origins of agriculture; cognitive archaeology (the study of the mind); biblical archaeology (the use of texts); artifacts in their cultural contexts; and the politics of the past. Emphasis on what constitutes archaeological evidence, how it may be used, and how archaeologists think.

This seminar will explore ethical issues in the study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. Students are expected to substantively contribute to class discussions on a weekly basis, as well as to lead the discussion of one set of readings. Weekly seminars will be accompanied by a group midterm debate on an assigned ethical issue and an individual final research project (with a class presentation and 20-minute final conversation with Prof. Kay).

Antioch was unique among the great cities of the classical world for its position at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and Asia. Students in this course will get exclusive access to the archives and artifacts from Princeton's mostly unpublished Antioch excavations of the 1930s. The focus of the 2024 course will be death and its aftermath in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic worlds, based on excavations in an area just outside the ancient walls of Antioch, which revealed burial remains and the famous and unparalleled Mnemoysne mosaic, which depicts a symposium of women participants.

This course considers the intersecting roles of gender and power, labor and knowledge, sacrifice and sustenance in the conception of Nahua femininity. Students who complete this course will gain familiarity with the culture of Nahuatl-speaking people of central Mexico and the representation of Nahua women. Special attention will be given to the changing perception of Aztec goddesses under colonialism and their Chicanx reclamation, as well as to historical figures such as Malinche, the "tongue" of Hernán Cortés, and Doña Luz Jiménez, muse to the Mexican Muralists following the Revolution.

Direct and regular contact between China and Europe in the early modern period brought new artistic forms and expressions to China and reconfigured the entire picture of Chinese art. Even though China appeared to have been the recipient of European art, it did not play a passive role; in fact, Chinese agents, including emperors, artists, literati, and merchants, appropriated European artistic resources according to their own agendas. This seminar will tackle the multiple dimensions of how European art worked at the Chinese imperial court and in local societies from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

ART 425 examines Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th - 19th century. We will consider the following: formal and technical aspects of prints; varied subject matter, including the "floating world" of the brothel districts and theatre; Japanese landscape and urban centers; and links between literature and prints, especially the re-working of classical literary themes in popular prints. The seminar will emphasize the study of prints in the university's Art Museum. Students will research Japanese prints from an art gallery in New York and recommend one for purchase for the Museum's collection.

Photography was invented simultaneously in England and France, but so complete was the US intervention in photographic history that by the late 1980s, it was possible to claim that 'even though Americans did not invent photography they should have.' Photography is as much a technological as a discursive invention, and the subject of American photographs have been continuously reinvented throughout the medium's history. This course frequently convenes around Princeton's holdings at Firestone Library.

Despite its position at the center of the Mediterranean, Sicily has long been misunderstood. This seminar intends to provide a survey of the island's rich architectural history from Antiquity to present. Ravaged by volcanic eruptions, seismic activities, and droughts, Sicily has been forced to rebuild itself in the wake of devastation. Through close examination of building projects, visits to Firestone's Special Collections, and guest lecturers, the seminar seeks to provide a fresh look at a vibrant and diverse architectural center. To study the architecture of Sicily is to study architecture in and of the Mediterranean.

This seminar examines the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program, military dictatorships, and political crises on artistic production in the 1980s, and the dramatic movement of African artists from the margins of the international art world to its very center since the 1990s. How familiar or different are the works and concerns of African artists? What are the consequences, in Africa and the West, of the international success of a few African artists? And what does the work of these Africans at home and in the West tell us about the sociopolitical conditions of our world today?

This seminar focuses on the Netherlands in the late sixteenth early seventeenth centuries, when new scientific discoveries and geographical expansion challenged established worldviews. We examine how Netherlandish artists used elemental imagery to draw attention to the hidden forces of nature, the beginning and end of the world, the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and the transformative powers of their own craft. How did they imagine and represent the elements and other ultimate particles of the material world at a time when the intersections of life and art were being redefined?

This course is intended to ensure a continuing breadth of exposure to contemporary art-historical discourse and practices. It requires attendance and participation in the department lecture/seminar series. Students must take the course sequentially in each of their first four semesters and take the appropriate letter version of the course (A,B,C,or D) based on their semester of study. The course is taken in addition to the normal load of three courses per semester and is for first- and second-year graduate students only. Topics discussed cover all fields of Art History and address current questions and practices.

What is 'banality', and why have so many artists, authors, architects, and others been drawn to it? How can we distinguish the banal from the commonplace, the everyday, the trivial, the vulgar, the vernacular, and related terms - and why do so? What aesthetics can be discovered in the banal? What politics?

This seminar probes the notion of 'the global contemporary' as an art historical, exhibitionary, and market phenomenon. Although widely critiqued from across a spectrum of political and methodological positions, the category has become firmly entrenched within vocabularies and institutional frameworks of art history and curation. How do we decenter Eurocentric formations of modern and contemporary art without reinscribing contemporary articulations of power that may be equally suspect? Conceived as a laboratory for teaching global contemporary art, particular attention is given to resources available at Princeton.

This seminar explores the politics of color in the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who create or engage images in ways that challenge us to see color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead as portals that allow us access to powerful social and cultural dynamics. Our emphasis is on the resonances of dark color, specifically the varying intensities of blacks, browns, blues, and violets. We consider their extended manifestation in shadow, night and negative space, blind fields and color adjustments.

The course is designed for post-generals students who are currently working with their academic adviser on developing research for their dissertation. This course provides a platform for students who have been nominated/awarded an internship from another university, research institute, private foundation, or outside organization that is relative to the student's dissertation research topic. A summary of the research and its relevance to the student's dissertation is required no later than one week after the completion of the internship.

An interdisciplinary investigation of the status of the human body in the modern reinvention of space within the overlapping frames of art, architecture, and the performing arts from the 1890s to the present. Works by artists, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers will be supplemented by readings on architectural theory, intellectual and cultural history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and aesthetics.

This course explores the basic ideas, works, and principles of Surrealism as it developed in France and around the world from the early 1920s into the present. A very wide array of material will cover diverse literary genres and media to show how the Surrealists wanted to revolutionize both art and life in its political and ethical dimensions, as well as the movement's ongoing impact. The course is highly interactive, built around two digital creative and critical projects, which will constitute the students' assignments throughout the semester.

How do films structure values and desires? What is propaganda? Is there a politics of narration? These and other deeply contemporary questions of media history and theory will be explored through an interdisciplinary interrogation of key works of expressionist, documentary, proletarian, avant-garde, queer, horror, and paranoid-thriller cinema (both silent and sound) produced in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Films and texts will be subjected to close readings, situated in their socio-political, media-historical and cultural context, and examined in light of the reigning debates in film criticism and aesthetics.

What does it mean to look at language? What does it mean to read art? Focusing on the intersection of language and visual art in modernist and avant-garde experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, we study such phenomena as the global rise of concrete and visual poetry, language-based conceptual art, and score-based performances. Utilizing methods drawn from art history, literary studies, history, and philosophy, students explore close looking and reading in relation to such topics as medium, representation, abstraction, networks. Students also as engage material practices by realizing instruction pieces, assembling magazines, etc.

This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

"Chromapolitics" challenges us to consider color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead deeply enmeshed in powerful social and cultural dynamics. Structured around creative and collaborative student responses to the work of Black, Latinx and Indigenous artists and thinkers this seminar asks students to reexamine their own use and understanding of color by focusing on the resonances and intensities of the color black and adjacent dark tonalities such as browns, blues, and violets, as well as how shadow, night, and negative space register both in the work of artists and theorists of visual culture and in their experience as makers.