Surverys the amazing art in Holland and Flanders that revolutionized all media. We will see how paintings, sculpture, and architecture formed the historical environment of life in the 17th-century Netherlands. The work of such artists as Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Vermeer is presented as part of this history of art in a "golden age." Weekly one-hour conference required.

This course examines fine art in the US from roughly 1900 through the 1970s, with special attention to modernism and the rise of modern art. Through slide presentations and group discussion, most major figures of the period—Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol among them—will be placed in historical and cultural context. Key events, institutions, and critics of these decades will also be considered. We will look at the role of cultural episodes like the Harlem Renaissance, and the increasing prevalence of women in the art world, as markers of increasing diversity and changing values. Readings by leading scholars will allow a wide-ranging introduction to art historical methods of interpretation. Discussion in sections will help place this art within the context of social history, the invention of national identity, and parallel developments in popular visual culture.

This undergraduate lecture course focuses on one building type, the house, through time in Mesopotamia, China, Japan, the Islamic world, the African diaspora, India, Britain, Rhode Island, and Germany and France. Houses can be minute or monumental, vernacular or high art, provide minimal shelter or afford the material and psychic satisfaction of home. By studying houses, we can bypass some of architectural history’s biases, and explore some of the major debates in the discipline: What is architecture? Who determines what is included/excluded in this category? And on what basis do they make these claims? A

Introduces students to basic tools and strategies in architectural design. A number of exercises will introduce students to questions about form, function and structure and teach them to learn from close observation of the built environment. The second half of the semester is devoted to the design of a small house by each student, which will be presented in a scale model and a full set of drawings at the end of the semester. A jury of invited architects and professors will conduct a discussion of each project. Enrollment limited to 14. Course is intended for first and second year students.

This course will consider issues related to architecture, urban design, and public space. Using the city of Providence as a field of exploration we will examine the cultural, environmental, and political forces which shape the relationships between buildings and urban landscapes. We will utilize various two and three dimensional graphic techniques to analyze and reimagine public spaces, and their constituent sites, buildings, and programs. Our work will help you gain greater fluency with the designer's "tools", e.g. models and drawings and the iterative processes through which designers represent conditions of site, program, tectonics, and materiality to create architectural form and urban space.

These studios, three of which are required for graduation, are offered by individual instructors to students who have successfully completed the core curriculum.
The goal for the studio is to design a more complex, public building in a specific urban context. Working with large-scale physical models, drawings, digital productions, materials and construction details, the students are tasked to finding a rigorous, conceptual clarity in their architectural and urban responses to the design problems at hand.
The studios are assigned by lottery on the first day of classes. Once assigned to an advanced studio, a student may not drop studio.

This course juxtaposes artists such as Titian and Velázquez alongside frequently unnamed indigenous craftsmen living under Spanish rule across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We will track bi-directional artistic exchange and mobility during imperial expansion to ask: how did navigation, religion, natural resources, and trade shape the art of Spain and its colonies as preColombian visual traditions persisted and were exported to Europe? Considering how the power structures of the world’s first global empire continue to shape our understanding of the past, we will propose ways to begin decolonizing the study and display of objects produced under imperial rule.

The "classic" period of European and American modern architecture from the turn of the century to the 1950s. Presents both the established canon of masterpieces by among many others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and LeCorbusier, and counterbalances this approach with information about new building materials, changing conditions of architectural production, and the "mechanisms of fame." A

This seminar investigates the intersection of politics and spectacles in the artistic production of ancient Rome. We will explore a variety of public monuments to reveal how they codify essential aspects of Roman culture. Topics include the architecture of entertainment spaces such as theaters, amphitheaters, and circuses, as well as the social functions of spectacles such as gladiatorial games and triumphal processions. We will look at expressions of imperial propaganda in monuments such as tombs and honorific arches. The class also considers how these ideas entered the private realm in the form of domestic wall paintings, mosaics, and sculpture gardens. A

How did people in the medieval world ‘do’ devotion? What role did objects and architectural spaces have in engaging with the divine? This seminar explores the liminal role objects and spaces had as mediators, as foci, and even the metaphysical embodiment of saints in the Middle Ages. We will study the legacy of attitudes toward icons, relics, and martyrdom in Late Antiquity in the early and high European Middle Ages. We examine the medieval approach to materials and the meditative and performative use of devotional art. Topics to be explored include relics and bodily remains, architecture, pilgrimage, gendered devotion art, iconoclasm, and modern museum practices exhibiting devotional art. Students will have the opportunity to engage in-depth with devotional from the Hay Library and the RISD Museum.

How did arts and visual objects of all kinds mediate between Europe and regions of the world opened to contact through trade, conquest, religious conversion, and the exchange of knowledge? This seminar will search for the major contexts of these exchanges and for the best methods to understand their histories. What conditions enabled or prevented mutual recognition? How were foreign materials imported and integrated, as with Chinese porcelain in the Netherlands or European glass in China? What balances of power determined exchanges, from the colonial extinction of Pre-Columbian art to the adaptation of western perspective in Japanese prints?

This seminar will examine the experimental practices of Dada and Surrealism with a focus on the historical conditions, theoretical influences, and political ambitions that shaped them: the trauma of war; experiences of exile and displacement; uses and abuses of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and political theory; Communist allegiances; as well as anti-colonial projects and counterparts in the Caribbean, Latin America, and North Africa. We will consider a range of artistic practices (performance, assemblage, the “readymade,” photomontage, poetry, painting, sculpture, exhibitions) with the aim of complicating our understanding of these movements and assessing the relevance of their subversive project today.

Reading and reports on an approved topic, supervised by a member of the staff. Project proposals must be submitted and approved no later than the first week of the semester. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

The subject of the thesis and program of study will be determined by the needs of the individual student. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

This graduate seminar will explore the role of viewers in the creation of meanings for ancient art and architecture. We will be looking at a wide variety of artistic forms including architecture, sculpture, wall painting, and mosaics, asking, who were the viewers who encountered these works in ancient settings and how did they respond to their messages? In order to contextualize our case studies, we will engage with primary sources, archaeological data, and theories of ancient viewership and reception. A

From the moment of its arrival in Western culture, the photograph has been characterized as the product of a machine, of optics and chemistry. The mechanical nature of the medium seemed to guarantee it a special relation to its subject: the photograph showed something real, through an analog technology that was essentially objective. This graduate level seminar will investigate the notion of objectivity, as it has been analyzed in the history of science and other fields, and as it has been discussed in relation to photography. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.

This graduate seminar will explore race--- a concept of human difference that established hierarchies of power and domination between Europe and Europe's 'others--and architecture from its earliest appearance to the present. Architecture has long reinforced the hierarchies embedded in western epistemology and present narrow visions of the world, reproducing cultural assumptions about space, place, city, comfort, etc., while assimilating race without acknowledging its impact. For its part, architectural history has largely uncritically conveyed the culture, norms, and values of architecture

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Single credit. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Double credit. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Single Credit. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.

For graduate students who are preparing a dissertation and who have met the tuition requirement and are paying the registration fee to continue active enrollment.

For students preparing a terminal MA thesis, may be repeated in the following semester. Sign up for sections according to individual primary advisor.