Topics vary semester to semester. Specific topics may satisfy different Core Program requirements.
Photography and Surrealism
This course engages with the history and theory of both photography and surrealism in the early to mid 20th century. Surrealist art and literature emerged out of the wake of avant-garde movements in the 1920s, yet have had a dramatic impact on the artistic practices and visual cultures of the 20th century. Self-consciously "avant-garde" practices of the 1920s and 1930s are one aspect that we will explore. But we will also attempt to understand how surrealist photographers also mined the visual tropes of advertising and publicity; fashion photography; modes of documentary and political work; film; and erotic photography to produce images that would arrest viewers' attention in new and complex ways. We will begin by exploring the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the US, but then open onto a more global approach to our understanding of surrealism and its legacy in the later 20th and 21st centuries. Additional Core Requirement Met: Global Connections (CPGC).
Seeing Asian American Art
Since it emerged on college campuses as a political term in the late 1960s, Asian American has described a group that is extremely heterogenous with as many differences as similarities among its members. Starting with questions that explore the uses (and abuses) of the rubric “Asian American Art,” this class will consider different contexts for work by Asian American artists and the ways that they can illuminate conversations about race in the U.S., the role that art can play in coalescing complex notions of community, the confluence of art and activism at crucial junctures over the past 50 years, and the nexus of art and its public reception both historically and at our contemporary moment. We will also chart intersections and parallels with contemporaneous African American, LatinX/ChicanX, and Feminist art movements. Additional Core Requirement Met: United States Diversity (CPUD).
Encoding Equity: Art, AI, and the Aesthetics of Algorithmic Justice
Algorithms—and the human agents who train them—increasingly encode the structure of our world and lived experience. To inhabit an algorithmic present is to inhabit a space saturated with “engineered inequity” (Ruha Benjamin) and “algorithms of oppression” (Safiya Noble). Today, algorithms make determinations about housing, hiring, policing, incarceration, and the distribution of state social benefits. Despite their purported neutrality, AI systems have repeatedly been proven to exhibit biases that entrench and exacerbate structural inequalities. These models don’t merely make predictions about the world: they actively produce it.
Yet, algorithmic decision-making unfolds in the opacity of the “black box,” and engineers themselves can struggle to articulate the logic of its outcomes. This poses a quandary: on the one hand, AI generates far-reaching, material effects that impact individuals and communities on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, algorithmic operations are concealed within a “black box,” hidden from view and made invisible.
Over the last ten years, a growing cadre of artists has begun to confront this phenomenon in their practice. Their works stage interventions into AI systems, and envision how those systems might function otherwise. This class will attend to work by artists including Joy Buolamwini, Kate Crawford, Stephanie Dinkins, Mandy Harris Williams, Jennifer Moon, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Suzanne Kite. Their pieces will be paired with work in media studies and critical race studies by Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, Cathy O’Neill, Virginia Eubanks, Timnit Gebru, and others. Reading across these coordinates, the class will consider how contemporary artists render algorithmic bias visible and imagine speculative futures optimized for equitable outcomes.
Japanese Art and Visual Culture in the Americas
In 2001, respected art historian Yoshiaki Shimizu contributed an article entitled “Japan in the American Museums: But Which Japan?” (Art Bulletin, 83:1 [March 2001], 123-134). The article questions what defines Japan and Japanese art by examining exhibitions of Japanese art at American museums as well as concordances and contradictions over the art of Japan among agents and players of art. The questions that the article posed are invigorating and valid nearly twenty years after its publication, but they deserve some updates. Inspired by Shimizu’s thematic approach, this course will consider Japanese art and visual representations of Japan in the Americas and expand the scope of the art of this day. The class looks at Japanese art and artists in Mexico, engages more actively with Japanese and Japanese American art in Los Angeles, and critically embraces popular culture and subculture. Other topics to be examined include Japonisme, new and creative woodblock prints, folk craft and modern design, abstract painting and performance, and women artists in New York as well as dealers, collections, and collectors of Japanese art in Los Angeles. Additional Core Requirement Met: Regional Focus (CPRF).
Materials and Materiality in Japanese Design
This course explores key materials and materiality in Japanese art and design. Each class is structured around a different type of material or a combination of materials, such as rock, paper, wood, metal, earth, silk, and food. We will look at these materials or uses of them cross-historically rather than chronologically—as an embodiment of spiritual/religious practice, representation of social class, identity of local community and environment, and/or artistic methodology, in addition to examining them simply as mediums and respective production techniques. Additional Core Requirement Met: Regional Focus (CPRF).
Art and Nuclear Technology, Destruction, and Contamination
This course explores art and its relationship to nuclear technology, destruction, and contamination. The primary focus will be on postwar Japan but we will also investigate Disneyland and its link to the Atoms for Peace campaign, visual projects regarding nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima in addition to the impacts of unclear technology, test sites, and nuclear waste isolation sites on image-making. Themes to be examined include Cold War culture and politics, art and disaster, trauma and memory studies, documentary art and art of witness, censorship, invisibility, activism, and dark tourism. Over the course of the semester, we will look at a variety of artistic genres and mediums, such as paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, performances, animations and films, comics and picture books, designs, and public monuments as well as exhibitions and world expositions. Additional Core Requirement Met: Regional Focus (CPRF).