Undergraduate Courses

ARTH200 Art of the Western World to 1300 (Professor Hutson)
TuTh 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)

ARTH201 Art of the Western World after 1300 (Professor Hargrove)
TuTh 9:30-10:20 + section (ASY 2203)

ARTH 250 Art and Archaeology of Ancient America (Professor Wiersema)
MW 10-10:50 + section (ASY 2203)

ARTH275 Art and Archaeology of Africa (Professor Ater)
MW 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)

ARTH290 Art of Asia (Professor Suzuki)
MW 9-9:50 + section (ASY 2203)

ARTH320 Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Northern European Art (Professor Martinez)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3215)

ARTH324 Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art (Professor Gill)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3211)

ARTH330 Seventeenth-Century European Art (Professor Colantuono)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 ( ASY 3211)

ARTH335 Seventeenth-Century Art in the Netherlands (Professor Wheelock)
M 3-5 (ASY 3211)

ARTH350 Twentieth-Century Art to 1945 (Professor Mansbach)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3215)

ARTH361 American Art Since 1876 (Professor Metcalf)
Th 3:30-6 (ASY 3215)

ARTH370 Latin American Art and Archaeology before 1500 (Professor Bland)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3211)

ARTH 371 Latin American Art and Archaeology After 1500 (Professor Wiersema)
W 2-4:30 (ASY 3215)

ARTH385 Art of China (Professor Kuo)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3215)

ARTH389A Special Topics in Art History and Archaeology: Film as Illustration (Professor Metcalf)
W 3-6:30 (ASY 3211)

ARTH457 History of Photography (Professor Grossman)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3211)

ARTH462 Twentieth-Century Black American Art (Professor Childs)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3215)

ARTH488K Colloquium in Art History: Expressionisms - Western, Eastern, and Beyond (Professor Mansbach)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3217)

ARTH488L Colloquium in Art History: Royalty and Religion: The Tudors and 16th Century English Art (Professor Martinez)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3217)

ARTH489J Special Topics in Art History: Archeology, Heritage, and the Contemporary Middle East (Professor Scham)
Tu 3:30-6 (WDS 1114)

ARTH496 Methods of Art History and Archaeology (Professor Georgievska-Shine)
M 3-5:30 (ASY 3221)

ARTH498 Directed Studies in Art History I. Individual Instruction course
TBD

ARTH499 Honors Thesis Individual Instruction course
TBD




Graduate Courses

ARTH679: Studies in Japanese Art: Colloquium in Japanese Art
"Sacred Spaces" and "Sacred Geographies" in Japanese Visual Culture
Professor Yui Suzuki
M 12-2:40 ( ASY 4304)

Throughout history and cultures, people have demarcated special areas as “sacred sites”, associating them as places of mysterium tremendum where divinities are made manifest, and miracles are performed. They are also understood as being the “centers of the universe” and as places charged numinous power, where ritual activities are routinely performed.  A site can hold special meanings to people through time, as it takes on distinct associations from historical and/or mythical events that took place there. This seminar will explore the concept of “sacred space,” how it is constructed and how it is represented in Japanese art.

We will begin with an exploration of various methodological approaches, drawing from art history, religious studies, cultural anthropology, history, and examine how these can be applied to the ways in which the Japanese visually and conceptually envisioned sacred spaces. These can be actual geographical locations, as well as imagined spaces.

ARTH738: Seminar in Seventeenth-Century Southern European Art
“Luxury Objects in 17th-Century European Culture”
Professor Anthony Colantuono
Tu 12-2:40 ( ASY 4304)

This seminar provides a new foundation for research on 17th-century luxury objects including coaches and carriages, tableware, guns, musical instruments, scientific instruments, costume, cosmetic items and many other categories.  Proceeding from critical readings of anthropologically-based histories of "material culture" and the traditional "decorative arts" models, as well as theories of ornament, the seminar will seek to develop a new theory of the luxury object and its mundane analogs.  Although the course will center on 17th-century Europe, with Italy and France as key focal points, its scope includes the European colonies and, chronologically, a vertically comparative view that encompasses objects from Roman antiquity through the present day.  The course will also address the vulnerabilities of the "visual culture" model, particularly in the study of reproductive engravings, books and other media that address the manufacture, everyday use or advanced techniques of the luxury objects under investigation.  Students will be assigned weekly readings to present in class, and will select a particular category of object as the topic of a seminar paper.  Readings will include texts by Alois Riegl, George Kubler, Edmund Burke Feldman, Henry Petroski, Thomas Schlereth, Nicholas Mirzoeff, James Deetz, Antoine Schnapper, Jacques Le Goff, Giulio Angioni, G.W. Stocking and others.

ARTH749: Seminar in Nineteenth-Century European Art
The Sculptor’s Studio in 19th-century Europe
Professor June Hargrove
Th 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)

The creative  practices of the sculptor changed dramatically in the 19th century in the face of the technology that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The new means of carving, casting, and transporting opened new opportunities for the artist to sustain his/her art. The period  became the Golden Era of the Public Monument, but it also fueled the decorative arts. As a result,  major sculptors, from Houdon and Canova to Rodin, created works  from  public statues to Sèvres porcelains as a part of their oeuvre. The amplified potential for artists  working in three-dimensions meant that the number of sculptors proliferated, encouraging  painters, such as Gérôme, to pursue the plastic arts. Inventions like the Collas Machine, improved techniques for pointing and carving marble, spawned an astonishing array of new creative processes. Some of these resulted in a whole new category of commercial sculptures, such as the “braonze d’art,” or Rodin’s remarkable system of  “marcottage.” The literature on making art expanded as rapidly as the modern printing press allowed, and the number of ateliers in which young artists could develop their skills multiplied. This course will delve into the work of a wide range of sculptors, while exploring the transformation of the making and marketing of sculpture in the nineteenth century.

ARTH758: Seminar in American Art
Nature, Sustainability, and 19th-century American Landscape Painting
Professor Renée Ater
M 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)

In this graduate seminar we will examine the concept of nineteenth-century American landscape painting through the lens of nature, environment, and sustainability. We will read a broad range of scholarship including the work of Nancy Anderson, Rebecca Bedell, Lester Brown, Michael Conzen, William Cronon, Franklin Kelly, Angela Miller, Barbara Novak, and Ted Steinberg. We will consider the ways in which the interpretation of the American land and landscape painting has shifted over time.

This seminar also will explore the issue of sustainability—the ability to provide for the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs—historically through nineteenth-century landscape painting. How were artists of the nineteenth century concerned with or indifferent to environmental issues and what we now call sustainability?

My interest in sustainability is a personal concern related to the difficult environmental issues we face living in the early twenty-first century and a professional interest connected to how to teach sustainability as a concept pertinent to the history of art. In May 2009, I participated in the Chesapeake Project: Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum. The Chesapeake Project is “a learning community of University of Maryland faculty who are finding unique ways of teaching about sustainability across the disciplines to prepare students to find solutions to the world's most challenging problems.”

Two mandatory trips are planned as part of the seminar. One to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to view the exhibition, Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections; the other to the New York Historical Society in New York City to see, Nature and the American Vision: The
Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society.

ARTH778: Seminar in Chinese Art
Modern and Contemporary Chinese Painting
Professor Jason Kuo
F 12-2:40 (ASY 4303)

As with the Stream our voyage we pursue,
The gross materials of this world present
A marvellous study of wild accident;
Uncouth proximities of old and new;
And bold transfigurations, more untrue
(As might be deemed) to disciplined intent
Than aught the sky's fantastic element,
When most fantastic, offers to the view.

           William Wordsworth, ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS

The new Chinese ink painting to be explored in this course, despite their intimate bond with Chinese classical civilization, are often more audacious and more idealistic than much of what is being produced by contemporary Chinese artists that has been regarded as avant-garde. The struggle of artists to assert contemporary relevance to the immensely long and culturally essential tradition of ink painting and calligraphy is fascinating and has led to great ingenuity, imagination, and groundbreaking creativity. The abandoning of the preeminence of oil painting and traditional hierarchies of media was a manifestation of new ideas about representation and, indeed, the ontology of art itself.

The Chinese today are trying to come to terms with the creation of pictorial and graphic languages that can capture the transformation of Chinese society, a transformation that has been concentrated in a little over two decades. The new Chinese ink painting seems to be gathering momentum and attracting increased attention because it so clearly embodies fundamentals: the values of highly accomplished pictorial and graphic technique allied to attention to serious conceptual content.  Although our focus will be on the “bold transfiguration” in contemporary ink painting, the genesis of both modern and contemporary Chinese painting in their historical contexts will be examined.

Students can expect to have the opportunity to study original works of art in the private and public collections (such as the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC, and the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore) for possible exhibition projects. Students interested in taking this course are encouraged to contact the instructor at jck@umd.edu to request further information.