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THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
TEA, COFFEE OR CHOCOLATE? THE VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE OF EXOTIC DRINKS IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
We are so familiar with these three hot drinks but they became commodities and part of our everyday only recently. This course explores what values were attached to these plants before the era of industrialized production, i.e. before ca. 1800. We will survey how Westerners adopted these beverages by looking at medical theories, the issue of morality, and the expansion of sugar production. We will also study how the craving for these products reinforced or even spurred slavery in French, Dutch, and English colonies. Special attention is dedicated to how ritual behavior affects design in terms of the sociability around these beverages, required manners, and the tableware crafted for them. The methodology is based on the analysis of images, discussions of assigned readings, written responses, visits to museums (RISD and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), and touring the facility of a chocolate artisan.
Elective
BORDERLANDS: LATINX ART AND VISUAL CULTURES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course focuses on representations by, of, and for Latinx peoples in the United States, beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded one-third of Mexican territory to the United States, until the present day. Drawing from Glorφa Anzalda's theory of the borderland as a both physical and psychological "in-between space," we will address questions of identity and belonging, assimilation and resistance, and visibility and erasure as they are encountered and debated by (and about) diasporic communities in the United States. Topics of discussion will include nineteenth-century debates of Pan-Americanism, the popularization and critique of Hollywood stereotypes during the Good Neighbor era, and Chicanx activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Issues of racial and ethnic identity will be considered alongside and in dialogue with those of gender, sexuality, class, and immigration status, and our discussions will encompass not only visual art but also music, cinema, literature, and activism. We will ask ourselves, what is the relationship of Latinx art and visual culture to that of the U.S.? What is its relationship to "Latin American" history and identity? And how might we begin to expand our definitions of U.S. art history?
Elective
INTRODUCTION TO IRANIAN CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
From international film festivals to university campuses, from museums of modern art to neighborhood theaters, Iranian cinema has now emerged as the staple of a cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization. Hamid Dabashi writes this in the introduction to his landmark study of Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future (Verso, 2001). This course introduces you to the history of Iranian cinema, from the Iranian New Wave (1960s) to the present. It examines the ways in it occupies an important place on the scene of global cinema while it defies the logic of nativism. We will watch some of the most prominent movies by acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Nasser Taghvai, Amir Naderi, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Forough Farrokhzad, Jafar Panahi, Masoud Kimiai, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Marzieh Meshkini, Asghar Farhadi, Tahmineh Milani, Ebrahim Hatamikia, and Kamran Shirdel. We will also look at the works of diasporic artists, including Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Ramin Bahrani, Mitra Farahani, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Granaz Moussavi.
Elective
HUMANITY OR NAH?: BLACKNESS, GENDER, RESISTANCE, AND MEMORY IN MONUMENTS, MAPS, AND ARCHIVES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to be a deep-dive into the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(s) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers that resist the epistemic regimes of antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students have the opportunity to engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of "Man" and modern ideas of "human." This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere. Students will examine research from multiple scholars that troubles the assumption that becoming assimilated and included as "human" and "citizen" in the eyes of the State is progress for Black and Native communities. Using the Black Digital Humanities, students will demonstrate their comprehension and command of the thematic foundations of the course by creating their own narratives of memory and resistance via spatial visualization and/or auditory digital software.
Elective
THE ILLUSTRATED BOOK
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this seminar, we will examine the often complex, dynamic relationships between words and images in the book, broadly conceived, from the birth of the codex in the ancient mediterranean to the so-called “death” of the codex and rise of digital illustrated texts today. Working directly from RISD’s Special Collections and the collections of the RISD Museum, we will attend to the history of the illustrated book, the materials and techniques of its production, and the distinct means by which books tell stories beyond words. A series of critical essays—in psychoanalysis, Black studies, thing theory, among other methods—will enrich our perspective on picture books of all kinds.
Elective
MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course provides an introduction to the built environment of the Middle Ages. From the fall of Rome to the dawn of the Renaissance, a range of architectural styles shaped medieval daily life, religious experience, and civic spectacle. We will become familiar with the architectural traditions of the great cathedrals, revered pilgrimage churches, and reclusive monasteries of western Europe, as well as castles, houses, and other civic structures. We will integrate the study of architecture with the study of medieval culture, exploring the role of pilgrimage, courts and civil authority, religious reform and radicalism, crusading and social violence, and rising urbanism. In this way we will explore ways in which the built environment profoundly affected contemporary audiences and shaped their lives. Throughout, we will also reflect on how medieval architecture is still present with us today—whether through medieval revivals here in Providence, museum collections, or tragedies such as the burning of Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019.
Elective
PERFORMANCE ART HISTORY & THEORIES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
While definitions of “performance art” remain vague and contested, this introductory class examines the practice as it emerges in the early 20th century as a tool to explore shifting understandings and experiences of embodiment. We will return to the open questions of how artists engaged the locus of 'the body' to evaluate and reevaluate the rapid changes of the 20th and 21st centuries, in all of their ethical unclarity. We will consider recurrent themes of ephemerality, time, technology, documentation, and the shifting roles of artists, cultural institutions, and audiences. Students will develop the skills to describe languages of the body, both in stillness and in movement, interrogate theoretical texts and frameworks of performativity, and develop a sense of historical narrative to contextualize the thematic questions broached by “performance art.” We will keep a journal to ground interpretations of key works and readings in close analysis, attend a performance artwork and write a critical response, and craft a final project with the option for a research paper or performance work.
Elective
ART HISTORY, POSTCOLONIALISM, DECOLONIALITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In recent years, the idea of decolonizing museums, academic institutions of art, and the narrative and curricular spaces of art history has gained increased urgency. But the concept and practice of decolonization have a much longer history than their recent (re)emergence in the art world. As a response to colonial and imperial orders of the world, decolonization set new boundaries for thought, knowledge, and for “being” itself. This seminar asks whether these boundaries have been effectively translated into the recent challenges that are posed against institutional practices of art and art history. It also asks about the ways in which postcolonialism, with a genealogy different from decolonization, is situated vis-à-vis the historical origins of decolonization in the writings of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and its resurgence in art history and museology. We will read texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aníbal Quijano, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward W. Said, Geeta Kapur, and Walter Mignolo among others.
Elective