New course: Decolonizing the Camera

This Fall the Newcomb Art Department is offering a new course ARST 3011: DECOLONIZING THE CAMERA, taught by visiting assistant professor Shabez Jamal.

In this course students will examine their own visual practice through the framework of decolonization. Through this process, students will engage with topics of race, representation, and power, while they build a visual practice that takes into account the complicated colonial legacy of photography. We will investigate the ways in which the camera has historically been used as a weapon of violence against those deemed as the Other. By approaching photography in such a way, students will gain a better understanding of how the camera works in racial time, which will result in a more informed and intentional practice of art-making. Throughout the course, students will engage in critiques, readings, and visual analyses that will support the cultivation of language to directly address the formation of otherness in image-making. Simultaneously students will be looking at contemporary lens-based artists who are working to correct this legacy from behind the camera in order to leverage the medium of photography as a tool of liberation. Students will employ these contemporary techniques to develop their own artistic practice.

Shabez Jamal is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. His work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Often turning the lens on himself, Jamal utilizes self-portraiture as a means of radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. 

M/W 3- 5:50pm, 204 Woldenberg Art Center

New art history course: Theories of Baroque Art

 

Registration for Spring 2022 courses is now open! Prof. Leslie Geddes will be teaching a new history of art course, Theories of Baroque Art, on Thursdays at 3:30pm in the Woldenberg Art Center.

This seminar investigates innovations in artistic media, primarily painting, sculpture, and architecture, that can be described as Baroque in diverse locales, including its origins in Italy to its diffusion in the present day.   

How do we characterize the strange and fertile period of art production associated with the Baroque? What happened to art production following the High Renaissance? In the latter half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, there was an explosion of new approaches to art making in diverse geographies. This time coincides with cultural upheavals and religious wars in Europe, with scientific discovery and new geopolitical landscapes. The period known as the Baroque is a historical style characterization rife with misunderstandings. The name itself derives from a term used by Portuguese jewelers for deformed pearls (barrueco). How can we best understand this time of remarkable artistic production, its early and late critics, and how does understanding art help us make sense of the rapidly changing, expanding world of the Early Modern period? Register today!

New Course Spring 2020: Art and Science of Delta Clay

This 3 credit studio art course examines the nature of the clay New Orleans is built on, from the perspective of geologic sedimentation, an urban living environment and as a material for ceramic art. We will dig clay from four sites in the city, process it in the studio and use it as the material for original ceramic artworks. Working individually and in small groups students will develop new pieces that explore issues of identity, change and risk in the New Orleans region.

Guest speakers from the Earth Science dept. will present current research on the processes of sedimentation and land building, as well as the challenges of sea level rise, subsidence and climate change on this unique delta. As a studio arts course it will cover the chemical makeup and application of clays and emphasize creative thinking and the development of skills and original works. No prerequisite is required.

Professor Jeremy Jernegan: jjernaga@tulane.edu

New Courses Spring 2020: Asian Art

Dr. Fan Zhang will be teaching three new courses in Spring 2020.

Art of Death: Funerary Art and Ritual in Ancient China This course guides the students to explore the complexity concerning the art of death in ancient China from the Bronze Age to the Medieval Period. We will examine the evolving structure of the burial architecture, scrutinize mural paintings covering the burial chambers, and analyze the funeral goods that create mimesis of the living world for the dead. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this course inquiries into the social dimension of mortuary art and explore the intersection between art history, history and archaeology.

Dragon and Lotus: Chinese Visual and Material Culture This course, focusing the visual and material culture of China from the prehistoric to the medieval period, is to interrogate the dynamics between art, politics, and rituals. Each week we will examine selected masterpieces in decorated pottery, engraved jade, cast bronze, stone sculpture, woven textile, gold and silver. We will investigate the production, circulation, transmission, and reception of the artworks to reconstruct the social life of things against its historical background. Lastly, we will highlight three of the most prominent motifs in Chinese art—animals, flowers, and human forms—as case studies to illustrate how similar patterns were interpreted via different mediums, used in different contexts, and articulated different social relations throughout the Chinese history.

Monks and Merchants: East Asian Art after 1100 introduces students to the visual and material culture of China, Korea, and Japan from the medieval period to the present. Among the topics discussed in class are: art and imperial patronage, art and cultural identity, transmission of Buddhist art, garden and urban designs, etc. Special attention will be given to the transcultural exchange among China, Korea, and Japan and the encounter between the East and the West.

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New Course Spring 2020: Art & Activism

from AnnieLaurie Erickson, Associate Professor of Photography:

NEW ART/SERVICE LEARNING COURSE - SPRING 2020
Art & Activism: Rights of Nature
ARST 3040 Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-3:20pm

Explore art making as a tool for change. The discussion of text and visual material will be supplemented by visits with local activists and field trips to artist studios and exhibitions. The service learning component of the course imvolves working with an artist/activist community partner on social or environmental projects.

For more information: email professor AnnieLaurie Erickson: aerickso@tulane.edu

New course: Troy: Beyond the Myth

CLAS-2811: Troy: Beyond the Myth
Prof. Emilia Oddo, Dept. of Classical Studies

The Trojan War, famous heroes against each other, astute decoys, tragic deaths, plotting, intrigue, and the gods in the midst of it. All these stories were celebrated in the poetry of Homer, forever remembered as one of the pillars of Greek literature, and were represented on pots and temples. Was it all fiction? Or did something really happen between the city of Troy and the ancient Greek world? Come and find out what archaeologists have discovered, who were the real Agamemnon and Menelaus, and how Homer saved the day.

New course: The Orléans Collection

The Orléans Collection:
Early modern collecting, the art market and the first museums
Spring 2018. M 3:30- 5:45        Professor Stephanie Porras and Vanessa Schmid, NOMA

This seminar investigates the formation, organization, display and dispersal of early modern art collections, using the magnificent art collection amassed by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1690-1723) as a paradigmatic example. The Orléans collection will be the subject of a landmark 2018 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art to celebrate the city’s tri-centennial, curated by Vanessa Schmid, who will co-teach this course with Professor Porras. The seminar will study the formation and organization of early modern European aristocratic collections, most notably Italian aristocratic and merchant collections such as those amassed by the Medici and Gonzaga families; ambitious royal collectors like Rudolph II and Charles I; and French noble collections from the Valois courts onwards. Students will study the social networks of early modern collectors, reading inventories, travellers’ accounts and theoretical texts to analyze why patrons amassed art collections. The seminar also aims to help students develop an understanding of the increasing professionalism of the early modern art market, the rise of specialist art dealers and connoisseurial practices – particularly in the cities of Paris, Amsterdam and London. The sale of the Orléans collection intersected with the foundation of James Christies’ London auction house and the formation of the first public art museums in Europe. Finally, students will analyze and compare the politics of display and various levels of access to different aristocratic collections, with particular focus on the formation of the Western art historical canon, artists’ use of early modern collections, and the origins of the public museum in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Questions?         Email Stephanie Porras (sporras@tulane.edu)

New Course: Spring 2018

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.

Environmental Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Approach
A New 360-Degree Course
CIRC 3600 - Spring 2018
Professors Michelle Foa, Tom Sherry, Rich Campanella, and Laura McKinney
 
In this introductory class, we will examine how people in different times and places have viewed their relationship to their environment and how a better understanding of this relationship can help us address current and future environmental challenges.  The course is co-taught by four professors in the Departments of Art History, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sociology, and a Geographer in the School of Architecture in order to address environmental questions and challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective.  No previous course work in any of these disciplines is required.  The art history portion of the class will explore the history of artists’ engagement with the environment and how their work reflects broader economic, political, and social developments underway.  The part of the course taught by the biologist will analyze the threats to biological diversity arising from climate change and a variety of solutions that humans are devising to address these challenges, while the sociology portion of the class will evaluate the complex connections between nature and social systems.  The section taught by the geographer will consist entirely of field trips to sites throughout the city and region in order to examine the complex environmental past, present, and future of New Orleans.  This course, then, offers students a unique and exciting opportunity to explore our relationship to the environment from a variety of disciplinary points of view.

For more information, please contact Prof. Michelle Foa (mfoa@tulane.edu).