Courses

500/600-level HADVC Seminar Courses (2023-2024)

 

HADVC 600 A1 (*3) Theories & Methods in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Fall Term, T 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Lianne McTavish

*3 (fall term) This course provides students with an introduction to theories and methods in the study and history of art, design, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the modern period. We will examine a wide range of approaches, covering both historical and contemporary examples. The course covers biographical, formal, iconographic, semiotic, Marxist, feminist, and phenomenological approaches to the study of visual culture, as well as those informed by literary theory, film studies, material culture studies, and critical museum theory.

Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.


HADVC 511 SEM 800 (*3) History of Modern and Contemporary African Photography
Fall Term, W 9:30-12:20 (remote delivery)
Instructor: Daniela Perez Montelongo

*3 (fall term) This course explores histories and theories of twentieth and twenty-first century African photography through a range of in-depth case studies. The course traces the development of African perspectives and approaches to the medium, with an emphasis on local and regional strategies. How was photography adopted and transformed to reflect the cultural, social, and political contexts of different African countries? What role did the medium play in the making of African postcolonial identities? To what extent can landscape photography from an African perspective undo the colonial myth of the African wilderness? And what are some of the visual strategies mobilized by contemporary African photographers engaging in debates around race, gender, and sexuality.

Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.

HADVC 511 SEM B1 (*3) Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) and the Representation of Animals
Winter Term, W 9:00-11:50
Instructor: M. Elizabeth Boone

*3 (winter term) The Art Gallery of Alberta has in its collection holdings over 830 wood engravings by British artist Thomas Bewick that he and his apprentices created for print publications in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They include studies of animals and vignettes of British life created using the classifications systems of the day, referencing natural history documentation practices. This class will feature a selection of images from A General History of Quadrupeds (1790). Some classes will take place at the AGA’s off-site storage facility, where Collections Manager/Curatorial Associate Danielle Siemens will introduce us to the original works of art.

Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.


HADVC 511 SEM B2 (*3) The History of Museums
Winter Term, T 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Lianne McTavish

*3 (winter term) Museums are no longer considered “neutral” spaces that simply preserve valuable objects for the education and enjoyment of the public. Questions have been raised about the social function of museums: Do these institutions reinforce class distinctions? Do organized exhibition spaces guide the visitor through a narrative of national identity? Whose (hi)story is told in museums and who gets to tell it? Who benefits, financially or otherwise, from museum exhibits? Students will analyze different approaches to these questions by reading historical and theoretical texts about the earliest cabinets of curiosities, the “universal survey museum” of the nineteenth century, and contemporary organizations. Our case studies will be based on museums and display areas in Alberta, with a few corresponding readings about these organizations.

Prerequisite: Consent of the department. Students are normally expected to have completed one 300-level course with a minimum grade of B.

HADVC 512 SEM B1 (*3) Museumification and Modernization of Japan
Winter Term, T 13:00-15:50
Instructor: Walter Davis

*3 (winter term) This seminar seeks to understand how Japan has employed museums and exhibitions for economic development and cultural modernization while constructing the nation as an aesthetic object, negotiating its ties to its past, and articulating its relations with other nations and cultures. We will initially consider how at the end of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th, Japan embraced Euro-American art institutions and forms of display in order to build its industrial base, orient itself away from the historical influences of continental Asia, and construct an empire comparable to those of the West. We will examine how state and private interests developed new spaces, structures, modes of viewing, and forms of preservation for the sake of instituting national ideology, stimulating commerce, and controlling Japan’s cultural patrimony. Turning our attention to the era after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, we will see how the nation, eager to rebuild itself and leave behind its prewar militarism, has continued to integrate museums and exhibitions into its diplomacy and efforts at economic development. We will ask how such mid-20th century and contemporary phenomena as Japan’s participation in international exhibitions and its development of private art concerns and art tourism have departed from, or carried on the legacy of, late-19th and early-20th century precursors. Term work will include critical discussion of readings, short presentations of student research on various topics, and a substantial research project that results in a conference-style presentation and a research paper.

Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.