Courses

500/600-level HADVC Seminar Courses (2026-2027)

 

FALL TERM

HADVC 503 (A01) – Bewick’s Birds
Fall Term W 12:30-15:20
Instructor: Betsy Boone
*3 (fall term)

The Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) has in its collection holdings over 830 wood engravings by master printmaker Thomas Bewick, created for publications in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These books and prints provide artists, designers, and historians today with an opportunity to think about the presentation of birds and our relationship to them in the past and in the contemporary moment. Some classes will take place at the AGA’s off-site storage facility and Bruce Peel Special Collections, where staff will introduce us to rare books and 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 (A01) – Making the World
Fall term T 12:30-15:20
Instructor: Lisa Claypool
*3 (fall term)

In 1907 the Chinese fiction writer and social critic Lu Xun essayed the thought that making the world depended on attunement towards beauty’s emotional vibrancy and on an imaginative frequency to scientific thought, both. This seminar asks after art and design made in twentieth-century China, mostly by brush-and-ink painters, but also by graphic designers, embroiderers, photographers, cartoonists, taxidermists, mapmakers, and others who worked self-consciously within the arts and sciences, popular or academic. Their pictures and designs carry within them their struggles with the rationalities of science, as well as emotions and imagination, to make the world. There is no expectation that students have any knowledge of China. There will be field trips most weeks. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B. Winter Term

 

WINTER TERM

HADVC 600 (B01) – Theory and Methods in Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Winter Term T 14:00-16:50
Instructor: Lisa Claypool
*3 (winter term)

How to look and why? This seminar provides you with an introduction to theories and methods used in the practices of art history, both historical and contemporary, exploring how they produce and obscure meaning-making. We will explore the texture of the discipline in the past and the importance of self-reflexive and feminist art historical practices to seeing the world today. This is not a course about visual culture studies (especially as an antidote to the perceived and real failures of art history) and it’s also not about design theories and methodologies. It’s about the art of art history, and its activist methods. 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 (B01) – History of Museums
Winter term M 12:30-15:20
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 Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.

HADVC 556 (B01) – Contemporary Indigenous Art
Winter term R 14:00-16:50
Instructor: Erin Sutherland
*3 (winter term)
This course will explore practices by Indigenous artists based in Turtle Island from the 1990s to present. With a focus on themes of indigenization, visual sovereignty and decolonization, this course will introduce students to a broad range of contemporary Indigenous art. Prerequisite: Consent of Department. Students are normally expected to have successfully completed one 300-level HADVC course with a minimum grade of B.