Fall 2023

9500 Master’s Research Methods and Practices

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history and curatorial studies. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians. The course is compulsory for all Master’s students.

9540/9543 Graduate Studio Seminar

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique at the end of the year. The course is compulsory for MFA students and optional for PhD students in the Studio Stream.

9555 Modern Art: If it ain’t Baroque, then fix it’: 17th-Century Tips for Survival in a Post-Modern Age
(Cross-Listed with Art History 4692F)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Baroque, a once forgotten period in Western history and culture, became more and more prominent for a variety of historical reasons; it found itself referenced in an increasing number of 20th-century art works and architecture. Its importance grew with the emergence of Post-Structuralism and its sibling, Post-Modernism, as scholars began to recognize commonalities between these contemporary theories and the Baroque. By the turn of the 21st century, the term “neo-baroque” was coined in media studies and it has emerged alongside other more recent theoretical trends such as digimodernism, hypermodernism, etc., that are now viewed as part of the more general trend known as “metamodernism.” This course proposes to examine the history of this revival of the Baroque focusing on its use and relevance to our contemporary times. In other words, what is the Neo-Baroque and why should you care.

9566 Selected Topics: London's Religious Arts
(Cross-Listed with AH 4690F)

Often when we discuss the topic of religious art, we recall many of the grand monuments of ancient and pre-modern Europe, and not the art of our local places of worship. With the significant increase in societal secularism, coupled with news of atrocities carried out under the auspices of religious oversight to the visceral reactions to white religious nationalism, the religious art created in North America since the late nineteenth century is frequently overlooked despite its undeniable impact on our visual culture and in shaping the careers of many artists. Informed by this context, we explore the production of religious art in London since the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing we will work in local religious archives, visit local religious sites, and contextualize the religious art of the London area within the broader artistic trends of the modern era. We do so to explore how religious commissions shaped local artists careers but also to uncover the engagements among religious officials, artists, and designers engaged with one another.

9600 PhD Seminar: Theory and Research Methods

This seminar is the foundational course for the PhD program in Art and Visual Culture. The theoretical component of the course aims to develop proficiency in critical theory. It prepares students for the comprehensive exams and helps them establish the theoretical framework for their thesis prospectus. The research methods module of the course examines a variety of methodologies for studying art and visual culture. Students learn to situate their research within their field of study and begin work on a literature review for their thesis prospectus. The course also addresses professional practices, such as grant writing and pedagogy. The course is compulsory for all Doctoral students.

Winter 2024 

9522 Studio Elective: Writing as a Practice and as an Art Form

This course is open to Studio, Art History, and Museum & Curatorial Studies students.

A course exploring the word and its materiality; its negotiations between the formal and the formless; its various embodiments, its lawfulness and its unruliness; its potentialities and its failures, its scientific fiction and its fictionalized science, its spatiality and its timeliness, its precision and its slippages. Particular attention will be paid to artist statements and strategies to subvert the formulaic and didactic. Techniques of intuition and improvisation will be explored in order to devise and deploy writing as an experimental incitation and invocation, or, as Nicole Brossard asserts, a "wager of presence semantic, imaginary and symbolic space." We will focus on the voice of the word (and its attendant specter, the unword) for its power to manifest the pervasiveness, persistence and proliferation of the performative. Along with forays into the historical avant-garde (from Pataphysics to Lettrism to Oulipo) and conceptual approaches (Barry, Weiner, Cage, Acconci, Piper, Goldsmith, Lozano, Sturtevant, Thurston), we will read (and work with) texts by Maggie Nelson, Clarice Lispector, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Marguerite Duras, Octavia Butler, Maria Fusco, Edouard Glissant, Lisa Roberston, Daniela Cascella, Sheila Heti, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Moten, Georges Didi-Huberman, amongst others. This course will go beyond the facile polemics of disciplinary boundaries and explore writing as speculative agent and nimble material that can intertwine generatively with any studio practice.

9541/9544 Graduate Studio Seminar

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique at the end of the year. The course is compulsory for MFA students and optional for PhD students in the Studio Stream.

9581 Special Topics: Seminar in Film and the Moving Image: Paracinema
(Cross-listed with Art History 4694G)

“Paracinema” refers to works that attempt to generate the effects of cinema without using the traditional materials or physical support of film. Art historically, the term has been used to describe sculpture, installation, and video works from the 1960s and 1970s (including, for example, Anthony McCall’s “Line Describing A Cone” [1973]) that encourage analysis of “cinema” as an idea or concept by recreating its aesthetic, spectatorial and technological dimensions through a variety of creative strategies. This course will begin with a brief survey of paracinema’s early twentieth-century precedents, followed by a more in-depth exploration of its post-1960s manifestations. It will also consider the extent to which the term facilitates productive engagements with a variety of practices since the “cinematic turn” in contemporary art.

9582 Issues in Contemporary Art: Artists as Historians
(Cross-listed with Art History 4640G)

This seminar focuses on contemporary art in dialogue with the past. In the popular imagination, history is often thought of as what you get when a historian uncovers the truth about the past. But if instead we approach histories as interpretations of the past, then we can consider how events are described and interpreted differently depending on who is telling the story. This seminar explores how contemporary artists have embraced the role of historian by working against conventional frameworks to tell stories at the limits of the archive. Drawing on concepts of counter history from Black studies and decolonial theory, we consider how some artists have investigated lesser-known events to shed light on marginalized histories, while others have created fictional and speculative histories that offer new perspectives on the past and the future. Students will develop their own research projects in relation to the course theme.

Fall 2022

9500A Master’s Research Methods and Practices

In-Person: Tuesday 10:00-1:00, VAC 249
Prof. Patrick Mahon

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9521A/9621A Graduate Studio Elective: Inside/Outside: Examining the studio as site of material, intuitive and critical exploration
(Cross-Listed with SA 4690A)

In-Person: Thursday 10:30-1:30, VAC 249
Prof. Sky Glabush

The idea of the studio conjures up images of the lone artist in a garret suffering for their creation. Critics like Rosalind Kraus have long since destabilized this idea and questioned the materially specific language of painting and sculpture in favour of broader definitions characterized by the “expanded field.” But recently many artists are returning to notions of the studio and materially specific languages in favour of an approach that embraces the métier of the studio, the history of art and reimagining and revisioning traditions.

The purpose of this seminar will be to define and explore each student’s relationship to their studio practice by closely examining their own processes but also engaging in a dialogue with professional artists through site visits, studio visits lectures and seminars. This course will alternate between seminars designed by the students and conducted inside the department with travelling outside the university and engaging with artists, curators, and others in the field. During our field work and discussions engendered in the studio, this course will provide a weekly forum of engagement with the ongoing material production and research of MFA students. The course will be structured around seminars of each student’s artistic production and a close analysis of ideas related to contemporary art.

9540A/9543A MFA Studio Seminar

In-Person: Friday 9:30-12:30, VAC 247
Prof. Soheila Esfahani

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9566A/9666A Special Topics: Painting in Hispanic America
(Cross-Listed with AH 4636F)

In-Person: Thursday 2:30-5:30, VAC 249
Prof. Cody Barteet

This course considers the development of painting in select regions of Hispanic America from the 1500s to the early 1800s. Our approach to this approximately 300-year period will evolve around the following nine themes over the course’s term: 1) European representations of the Americas; 2) Iberian and monarchial pictorial claims to supremacy; 3) the role of print culture; 4) Indigenous engagements with European religious art; 5) Indigenous representations of the Americas; 6) the evolution of guilds and the academies; 7) the picturing of class and race; 8) the various roles of portraiture; and 9) the role of Marian cult imagery. Through these topic areas we will develop critical understandings of how the pictorial arts in Hispanic America developed over the colonial era through dynamic and continued negotiations between peoples of European and Indigenous descent to create a uniquely American artistic culture. In so doing we will consider issues of religion, race, gender, and identity broadly defined.

9567A/9667A Selected Topics: Art and Food
(Cross-Listed with AH 4692F/MCS 4690F/SA 4693A)

In-Person: Wednesday 2:30-5:30, VAC 247
Instructor Amanda White

In this two-part class, which can be taken separately or as a whole, students will be engaged in creative responses to contemporary issues around food and agriculture. From the personal-relational to the global-social scale we will examine food systems and agriculture through the lens of the arts and research-creation. This course is interdisciplinary in focus and foregrounds experiential learning in local and international settings.

The first half of the course will focus on critical artistic approaches to food and agriculture from a relational, personal perspective. Drawing on theory from the environmental humanities, critical plant studies, feminist perspectives, science-fictional ecologies and biological arts, we will examine personal and physical relationships with the world through the food that we eat. Students will be introduced to these ideas using interdisciplinary and research-creation approaches and examples (studio, kitchen, field trips, art historical texts, etc.) with a particular focus on edible plants, and plants in agriculture. This half of the course will provide the foundation and theoretical basis that will be built upon in the second half, as well as rooting the course in a regional context.

9571A Museology, History, and Practice - Museum/Decay

In-Person: Tuesday 2:30-5:30, VAC 249
Prof. Kirsty Robertson

This class begins with a provocation: the museum, as an idea, tries to avoid the passage of time, through processes of conservation, through the creation of artificial climates, and through both embracing and sidestepping linearity in being simultaneously of its time/ahead of its time/behind the times. But time always catches up, often through slow processes of decay. Ranging from deep time through to the present moment, and pausing to consider plastics, fungi, jellyfish, ice, outer space, and colour (among other objects, topics, beings, and kin), this experimental class examines museums, time, and collections from the perspective of a world that is constantly in motion.

Winter 2023 

9522B/9622B Studio Elective: On The Purposeful Imagination

In-Person: Tuesday 2:30-5:30, VAC 249
Prof. Patrick Mahon

A course exploring the work of the imagination in artistic expression and through addressing a series of pressing questions about the imagination’s role in contemporary critique and change. In the modern Western art tradition, conventionally centring on or emanating from the practices of the Avant-garde, imagination was the driver of projects (i.e., Dada, Surrealism etc.) that sought to unmake the strictures of academic art and its progeny. Postmodern discourses and connected conversations later fostered the breadths of feminist critique, post/decolonial theory, and other critical trajectories, harnessing the imagination in the direction of more explicit goals. Nonetheless, the necessary and more globally engaged discussions of the twenty-first century (i.e., Moten; Ahmed; Todd, etc.) not only point towards the Euro-centrism of certain conceptions of the artistic imagination, but also highlight the limitations of the philosophical traditions upon which the values of art are often founded. Tracing the intellectual and cultural lineages that underpin such operative queries as: “Whose imagination?” and “Imagining what?” (i.e., Burger; Adorno; Krauss; De Duve; Fielding; Todd), we will establish a context within which to examine, observe, play, and experiment in relation to recent art projects and exhibitions. Case-studies (i.e.Whitney Biennial 2022; GardenShip and State, 2022; Philip Guston Exhibitions, 22/23; Immune Nations,19/22; Tim Whiten Exhibitions, 22/23; Toronto Biennial of Art 19/22), and artists’ & curators’ practices (i.e., Adrian Stimson; Natalie Loveless; Pamela Edmonds, Susan Schuppli;, Brendan Fernandes) will be engaged to develop a field of experience and inquiry that will ultimately inform our own imaginative projects in materials and writing. This course will be less invested in analyzing the theoretical efficacy of the work of the imagination than in harnessing it as a tool to play, probe, and think the world – with an ‘as if’ mind committed to the productively unimagined.

9541B/9544B MFA Studio Seminar

In-Person: Friday 9:30-12:30, VAC 247
Prof. Kelly Wood

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9586B/9686B Writing for the Arts

Blended: Tuesday 11:30-1:30, VAC 247
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

This seminar is for MA, MFA, and PhD students who hope to contribute to public discourse on the visual arts. We consider different forms of evaluative, expository, and narrative writing in relation to recent exhibitions and other events in the world of visual art. Concentrating on op-eds, exhibition reviews, and catalogue essays, we discuss how to write for various kinds of publications and a range of audiences. We apply techniques to improve aspects of writing such as structure, style, argumentation, and narrative. Students also learn how to offer constructive feedback to peers. This seminar will be held in person with additional asynchronous course content and activities.

9581B/9681B Special Topics: Art and Food
(Cross-listed with Art History 4694G/MCS 4692G/SA 4692B)

Online
Instructor Zoë Heyn-Jones

In this two-part class, which can be taken separately or as a whole, students will be engaged in creative responses to contemporary issues around food and agriculture. From the personal-relational to the global-social scale we will examine food systems and agriculture through the lens of the arts and research-creation. This course is interdisciplinary in focus and foregrounds experiential learning in local and international settings.

In part two we will take a wider lens, moving from personal sustenance and community sovereignty to connections across the Americas and issues of labour, migration and the climate emergency more broadly. Looking at the relationship between Mexico and Canada we will connect the local to the global, exploring flows of plants, produce, and people. Students will have the opportunity to visit Mexico City for 10 days over reading week in order to gain invaluable first-hand experience with precolonial cuisines and agricultural techniques, innovative urban agriculture projects, and the scale of industrial food systems that feed the hemisphere’s largest city and beyond.

The urgent problems we face connected to global food systems—from hunger and food insecurity to greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation—demand creative and innovative solutions. For this reason, food is a natural and vital topic to explore through the arts. This course asks: how can artistic and curatorial practices engage meaningfully with issues of food security, sovereignty and justice across the hemisphere?

Fall 2021

9500A Master’s Research Methods and Practices

In-Person: Monday 9:00-11:30, VAC 247
Prof. Cody Barteet

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9522A/9622A Graduate Studio Elective: Viva Vita

In-Person: Thursday 10:30-1:30, VAC 249
Prof. Christof Migone

A course exploring the notion of the word as a sign of life, a viva vita, a wager of presence (Brossard). The word and its materiality; its negotiations between the formal and the formless; its various embodiments, its lawfulness and its unruliness; its potentialities and its failures, its scientific fiction and its fictionalized science, its spatiality and its timeliness, its precision and its slippages. We will focus on the voice of the word (and its attendant specter, the unword) as it manifests the pervasiveness, persistence and proliferation of the performative. Particular attention will also be paid to techniques of intuition and improvisation. Along with forays into the historical avant-garde (from Pataphysics to Lettrism to Oulipo) and conceptual approaches (Barry, Weiner, Cage, Acconci, Piper, Goldsmith, Thurston) we will read (and play with) works by Maggie Nelson, Clarice Lispector, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Marguerite Duras, Octavia Butler, Maria Fusco, Lisa Roberston, Caroline Bergvall, Chris Kraus, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacob Wren, Georges Didi-Huberman, amongst others. William S. Burroughs developed the cut-up technique after Brion Gysin provocatively declared to him that writing was 50 years behind painting. Could it be that now painting is 50 years behind writing? This course will go beyond this facile polemic and explore writing as speculative agent and nimble material that can intertwine generatively with any artistic practice.

9540A/9543A MFA Studio Seminar

In-Person: Friday 9:30-12:30, VAC 247
Prof. Sky Glabush

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9600A PhD Seminar

In-Person: Tuesday 11:30-1:30, VAC 247
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

This seminar is the foundation course for the PhD program in Art and Visual Culture. The theoretical component of the course aims to develop proficiency in critical theory. It prepares students for the comprehensive exams and helps them establish the theoretical framework for their thesis prospectus. The research methods module of the course examines a variety of methodologies for studying art and visual culture. Students learn to situate their research within their field of study and begin work on a literature review for their thesis prospectus. The course also addresses professional practices, such as grant writing and pedagogy.

Winter 2022 

9521B/9621B Studio Elective: Where is diaspora? Questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives in contemporary art

In-Person: Monday 8:30-11:30, VAC 247
Prof. Soheila Esfahani

This course aims to locate diaspora through diverse perspectives. We will investigate cultural production, cross-cultural issues, cultural translation, and the role of the artists within the diasporic art discourse. The class will examine the work of contemporary artists as well as recent exhibitions through the theoretical frameworks of cultural theorist such as Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, amongst others. We will explore whether the question of “Where are you from?” is relevant within the contemporary Canadian art world.

9541B/9544B MFA Studio Seminar

In-Person: Friday 2:30-5:30, VAC 247
Prof. Christof Migone

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9567B Monuments and the Act of Remembering

In-Person: Thursday 9:00-11:30, VAC 247
Prof. Cody Barteet

The course will explore the monument from antiquity to the present. We will examine historical objects, buildings, sculptures, squares, etc. and the agendas of the individual(s) and/or community, religious, institutional, and state groups that commissioned these objects. We will establish a historical understanding of monuments primarily in the Western world, but we will interrogate these monuments through post-colonial, racial, gender, and other theoretical frameworks to understand to deconstruct their so-called universal commonalities of monuments like the Column of Trajan to Stone Mountain (GA).

9582B Issues in Contemporary Art: Artists as Historians
(Cross-listed with Art History 4640G)

Blended: Tuesday 11:30-1:30, VAC 247
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

This seminar is about contemporary art in dialogue with the past. It is based on the understanding that histories are interpretations of the past, and events are described and interpreted differently depending on who is telling the story. Over the last several decades, many contemporary artists have embraced historical research and have taken up the role of historian. While some have investigated lesser-known events to shed light on marginalized histories, others have created fictional histories that offer new perspectives on the past. Students in the course will develop their own research projects in relation to the course theme.

Fall 2020

9500A Master’s Research Methods and Practices

Prof. Cody Barteet
Thursday, 10:30 am - 11:30 am; Online Synchronous

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9540A/9543A MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. Kelly Wood
Friday, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm; Online Synchronous

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9581A Special Topic: Making Art with Environmental Awareness
(Cross-listed with undergraduate course Art History 4690F/Studio Art 4690A)

Prof. Kelly Wood
Online Asynchronous 

Organized as a creative research intensive, Making Art with Environmental Awareness explores artistic responses to ecology, sustainability and related social issues in various global/local contexts. The course examines select themes in environmental discourse—paying particular attention to how artists have engaged with them. Some examples of themes are: Extinctions; Petrocultures; Accelerationism and Food. Each week, a new theme is introduced and students will view online material, engage in critical writing and/or other online activities in response to these themes. Throughout the course students will simultaneously develop: a) a research paper, or, b) an imaginary curatorial project; or, c) an imaginary artistic project in any media. Students will be encouraged to THINK BIG and imagine an ideal kind of project that you likely could not accomplish other than in a virtual state. Students are expected to make a serious, sustained commitment to individual research and develop a personal project over the course of the entire semester. This upper-level course is structured to be responsive to students’ backgrounds, interests, and existing creative practices and/or curatorial goals or historical research.

The course will be delivered online and conducted in an asynchronous manner, so that students can access the course material at any time; however, weekly deadlines will be in place for shorter, student assignments. The instructor will act as a resource person, respondent, and creative facilitator for student work and can be accessed online during an office hour session or virtual meeting.

9582A At Large in the World: Art in Times of Crisis

Prof. Joy James
Wednesday, 11:30 am - 2:30 pm; Online Synchronous 

The first decades of this century have seen a concerted bid for recognition of a critical productive aesthetics oriented toward the external eventfulness of life itself rather than circumscribed by historical limitations of disciplinary concern. An aesthetics that asks not “What is art?” but “What is this art doing?” This shift in focus defines an aesthetic that necessarily disrupts disciplinary certainty.

The course offers an opportunity to conduct an in-depth investigation into the transdisciplinary work of this emergent aesthetic. We will study significant events in the production, exhibition and circulation of art in times of crisis. As is fitting in the midst of a global pandemic, we will focus our exploration of art’s engagement with and impact on crises concerned with the world at large.

Winter 2021

9521B/9621B Studio Elective – In-between Cultures: Cultural Translation in Contemporary Art

Prof. Soheila Esfahani  
Thursday, 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm; Online Synchronous

This course investigates the notion of living between cultures brought about by the act of migration and displacement. In multicultural societies such as Canada, many people occupy a liminal space between cultures, which results in the act of cultural translation. This course applies theories of cultural translation to the realm of visual arts practice, with a focus on the translational activities that occur in the art practices of culturally diverse contemporary artists within the context of Western society. We will explore Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space as a negotiated space of “in-betweeness” and navigate the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation. This course also investigates displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture in the works of contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Shirin Neshat, Brian Jungen. 

9541B/9544B MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. David Merritt
Friday, 9:30-12:30; Online Synchronous

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9566B Seminar in Early Modern Art - Portraiture Then and Now

Prof. Cody Barteet
Online Asynchronous

This course explores the uses and forms of portraiture from the Early Modern era to contemporary times. We first explore the idea of portraiture as a mode of individual and group self-representation as peoples of various races and genders attempted to situate themselves in the increasingly global world of the sixteenth century to today. Although focusing on the pre-Modern era, the course also considers the relationships between historical portraiture on the contemporary world; from Beyonce’s play on Botticelli to Kim Kardashian’s so-called Venus photos, contemporary portraiture both pays homage to historical imagery as well as breaking, or even perpetuating racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes.

9571B Museology, History, and Practice - Museum/Decay

Prof. Kirsty Robertson
Tuesday, 2:30 – 5:30 pm; Online Synchronous 

This class begins with a provocation: the museum, as an idea, tries to avoid the passage of time, through processes of conservation, through the creation of artificial climates, and through both embracing and sidestepping linearity in being simultaneously of its time/ahead of its time/behind the times. But time always catches up, often through slow processes of decay. Ranging from deep time through to the present moment, and pausing to consider plastics, fungi, jellyfish, ice, outer space, and colour (among other objects, topics, beings, and kin), this experimental class examines museums, time, and collections from the perspective of a world that is constantly in motion.

9586B/9686B Writing for the Art World

Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesday, 11:30 – 12:30 pm; Online Synchronous 

This seminar is for MA, MFA, and PhD students who hope to contribute to public discourse on the visual arts. We consider different forms of evaluative, expository, and narrative writing in relation to recent exhibitions and other events in the world of visual art. Concentrating on op-eds, exhibition reviews, and catalogue essays, we discuss how to write for various kinds of publications and a range of audiences. We apply techniques to improve aspects of writing such as structure, style, argumentation, and narrative. Students also learn how to offer constructive feedback to peers. This seminar will be held online with one hour weekly of synchronous learning in addition to asynchronous course content and activities.

Fall 2019

9500A Master’s Research Methods and Practices

Prof. John Hatch
Tuesday 9:00 – 11:30 am; VAC 247

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9540A/9543A MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. Patrick Mahon
Thursday 2:30-5:30 ; VAC 247 

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9581A/9681A Special Topic: Film and the Moving Image
(Cross-listed with undergraduate course VAH4660F)

Prof. Christine Sprengler
Wednesday 2:30 pm – 5:30 pm; VAC 247 

This seminar explores a range of contemporary art practices that engage with the cinema. We begin with “paracinema,” artworks that attempt to generate the effects of cinema without using the traditional materials or physical support of film. Art historically, the term has been used to describe sculpture, installation, and video works from the 1960s and 1970s that encourage analysis of “cinema” as an idea or concept by recreating its aesthetic, spectatorial, and technological dimensions through a variety of creative strategies. From here, we shift to more recent work, produced since the 1990s and often described as part of the “cinematic turn” in contemporary art. These practices contend with a range of issues including memory, intermediality, remediation, cinephelia, epistemophilia, and the creative possibilities of new technologies, including AI.

9600A Theory and Methods
Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Thursday, 11:30 – 2:30 pm: VAC 148 

This seminar is the foundation course for the PhD program in Art and Visual Culture. The theoretical component of the course aims to develop proficiency in critical theory. It prepares students for the comprehensive exams and helps them establish the theoretical framework for their thesis prospectus. The research methods module of the course examines a variety of methodologies for studying art and visual culture. Students learn to situate their research within their field of study and begin work on a literature review for their thesis prospectus. The course also addresses professional practices, such as grant writing and pedagogy.

CTC 9501 (Fall) - Writing Aloud: Theories of Sound and Silence

Prof. Christof Migone
Friday, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM (location to be determined)
More information: Please note, students must register through the Centre for Theory and Criticism.

A course tracking the sonic in and through writing as it is invoked and deployed by writers, artists, and theorists. The sonic functions as an amplification of the word in its role as a wager of presence. The word and its rhythmic materiality; its negotiations between the formal and the formless; its exponential xeno-embodiments; its lawfulness and its unruliness; its precision and its poetic slippages—all examined through the filter of the sonic word (including the unspoken, or as Beckett put it, the unword—its attendant specter) and in particular how it functions as a paradigmatic manifestation of the pervasiveness, persistence and proliferation of the performative. Silence as experienced by John Cage, passivity as activated by Maurice Blanchot, nonperformance as articulated by Fred Moten will all come into play via the expanded notion of the sonic that will be explored in this course. Noise, voice, orality, glossolalia, listening, mutism, mistranslations, stutterance, soundfullessness, non-cochlear sound (Kim-Cohen), parasitology (Serres), syncope (Clément)—an incipient list of known terms and neologisms that exemplify the range of connected divagations the course will attempt to trace. Daniella Cascella in En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing considers "writing as the other side of sound. Instead of looking for answers it echoes questions with questions, riddles with riddles, it adds complexity to complexity. Writing sound traces the shifting in the tuning of my words, of my questions, of sounds drifting." Questions will undoubtedly abound, and we will be posing them aloud: How does one approach a writing that includes sound within its core constituency? What does such a writing sound like? What are the social and sensorial stakes of such sonophiliac theories and practices?

Winter 2020

9521B/9621B Studio Elective – May You Live in Interesting Times: Pivotal Exhibitions and Artworks that Changed Everything

Prof. Kelly Wood  
Thursday 2:30 – 5:30 pm; VAC 247

This course will begin with a study of the most recent Venice Biennale entitled "May You Live in Interesting Times" curated by Ralph Rugoff. The class will be introduced to various significant artworks in the exhibition, and, study the nature and challenges of the new trends in art production. Our objective will be to deeply comprehend how artworks relate to the "interesting times' in which they exist, and, from which they emerge—in other words, form and context. The class will investigate other important recent, and historical, exhibitions—world-wide—to identify pivotal themes and shifts in art discourse and curatorship that are still resonating today. The class will study the ideas and philosophies that have informed these movements in order to more thoroughly understand why certain artworks have become so prominent. 

Music 9535B, Special Topics in Musicology: On the Concept of Genius in Art Historiography

Prof. Ed Goehring
Thursday 9:30 - 12:30

The concept of artistic genius, which came to prominence in the late eighteenth century, has drawn searching revisions in musicology and the  wider academic and popular culture over the last decades. The main articles of such critiques are as follows: Genius encourages idolatry and scorns the needs of daily life. Genius is unreliable because it is a concept. Genius is fed by an outdated view of art works and authorship. Genius acts as a screen over ruder impulses like vanity or avarice. Genius pertains only to physical or social cause and not immaterial reason, in which case its questions must be referred to the scientist quantifying the brain’s mechanisms or the sociologist recording culture’s processes, and not the humanist contemplating the mind’s activity. 

This seminar will evaluate these claims from various angles—conceptual, historiographical, exegetical, biographical, analytical—with Mozart reception as a spring-board. At the same time, participants are welcome to explore any related item, from any number of eras or perspectives, especially from the area of art history.

9541B/9544B MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. Christof Migone
Friday 9:30 – 12:30 pm; VAC 247

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9555B/9655B Seminar in Modern/Contemporary Art - Artistic Moments at the Center of the Void: Milan, January 2, 1957
(Cross-listed with Undergrad course 4640G)

Prof. John Hatch
Wednesday, 9:00 am – 11:30 am; VAC 247

On January 2nd, 1957, an exhibition opened at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan that featured blue monochrome paintings by the French artist Yves Klein.  This was essentially the starting point of Klein’s mercurial career which involved a journey or quest to capture the void as described in a variety of sources ranging from Zen Buddhism and Grail mythology to the work of Gaston Bachelard and Marcel Duchamp.  The exhibition was visited notably by two artists, the Argentinian-born Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni.  For the former, Klein’s work re-affirmed the direction Fontana’s own paintings and sculptures were taking; with the latter, the exhibition marked the beginning of an intense rivalry, with Manzoni echoing in his own, very unique fashion, some of the innovative visual experiments Klein produced.  Yet, and this is something Klein failed to understand, the three artists approached the idea of the void from markedly different perspectives.  Klein took a spiritualist tact, Manzoni a far more empiricist approach, while Fontana represented a perfect blend of the two ends of the spectrum represented by the younger artists.  The works that resulted represented the most daring of artistic gestures that paved the way for the art of generations that followed.  In France, most immediately with the New Realists, and in Italy, Arte Povera. This course will examine the work of these three seminal artists, what influenced them (everything from Phenomenology and Existentialism to Jungian psychoanalysis to Japanese avant-garde art), and who they influenced.

9594B/9694B Special Topic- Seminar in Photography - Photography & Social Change
(Cross-listed with Undergrad Course 4478G)

Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesday, 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 247 

Many of the social and political upheavals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are familiar to us through photographs: the Vietnam War, the civil rights protests of the 1960s, 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq, the war on terror, and global migration. Focusing on modern conflict, social movements, and changes brought about by globalization, this seminar explores the diverse ways photography has been used to negotiate social transformation. In the process, we look at different practices of photography – from portraiture and photojournalism to contemporary art. We discuss recent scholarship on issues such as spectatorship and the ethics of witnessing, photography as a form of encounter, and the role of iconic images in public memory. Seminar participants will develop their own research on some aspect of photography and social change, the results of which will be presented in the form of a conference paper

Fall 2018

9500A Master’s Research Methods and Practices

Prof. John Hatch
Wednesday 8:30am-11:30am; VAC 247

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9540A/9543A MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. Kelly Wood
Friday 10:00 – 1:00 pm; VAC 247 

This course will provide a weekly forum for the critical engagement of the ongoing material production and research of MFA students.  The course will be structured around presentations of student thesis-related research and the close analysis of contemporary artworks. Over the term these presentations will be complemented by both formal critiques and less formal studio discussions.  Critique sessions will be directed to sustain discussion and debate concerning students’ developing material, conceptual and theoretical engagements.  

9566A/9666A Special Topics: Painted Skies/Cosmic Sightings

Prof. John Hatch
Monday 8:30 – 11:30 am; VAC 249

Our understanding and representation of the heavens dates back to the beginning of human history with the depiction of the Pleiades at Lascaux and persists to the present day. The nature of this interest has obviously changed over time, as has our interpretation of it in art and architecture. This course examines the representation of the celestial, looking as far back as the Neolithic period, but with the bulk of its attention focused on Western Art from the 19th century to the present. Artists of particular interest will include Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Cornell, Nancy Holt, Max Ernst, James Turrell, Paterson Ewen, Anselm Kiefer, Shi Zhiying, Katie Paterson, Thomas Ruff, Ai Weiwei, and Olafur Eliasson. Each provides a unique vision that moves beyond simple representations of the celestial objects that populate the universe. Adopting a variety of approaches that include alchemy, Christian science, mythology, Jewish mysticism, psychology, music, information theory, let alone a simple interest in astronomy, most of the works produced map on the night sky some of our greatest fears and aspirations, saying much more about us than the celestial bodies they depict.

9581A Special Topic: Mobility in Architecture

(Cross-listed with undergraduate course VAH4477F)

Prof. Cody Barteet
Thursday 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 247

Movement through architectural and urban spaces has long been common place for people. Over the millennia theories and practices have developed to allow for the easy movement of supplies, peoples, and other commodities the build form as well as provide sites for elaborate displays of state and spectacle. In modern and contemporary society, these practices have continued as people commute to and from work, school, errands, and leisure (whether going to a movie or traveling). Added to this, the large migration of peoples due to war, natural disaster, and the like, thus contributing to our continuous and evolving understanding of movement through architecture. So too are the means by which we observe the movements of peoples through architectural spaces as overarching ideas of safety and security come to the fore. In this course we will examine various topics related to the observation and movement of peoples through permanent and temporary architectural spaces. Specific consideration will be given to ideas of surveillance, defense, terrorism, migration, and memory. We cover these range of topics by drawing upon theoretical texts and case studies as well as through guest lectures.

Winter 2019

9521B/9621B Studio Elective – Dissecting Stories in Narrative Art

Prof. Kim Moodie  
Thursday 2:30 – 5:30 pm; VAC 247

This course primarily examines both historical and current narrative structures and methodologies and how they are employed in the conceptions of images in paintings and photography. It will focus on the interrelationships between figures, symbols, settings, illusionistic space, and historical, economic, moral, and social/political references. The course may also likely discuss information /considerations relative to the following: a-historicism, deconstruction and possible alternative storytelling practices.   

9541B/9544B MFA Studio Seminar 

Prof. David Merritt
Friday 10:00 – 1:00 pm; VAC 247

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9582B/9682B Contemporary Art and the Process of Witnessing

Prof. Joy James
Wednesday, 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 148

This graduate seminar will address specific exhibitions and works of art in relation to historical and contemporary ideas regarding 1) processes of witnessing, 2) notions of subjectivity, and 3) an ethics of difference. The capacity of art to bear witness, as this pertains to rapidly changing conceptions of human subjectivity, has been an important discussion in emerging aesthetic models. Moving from art’s engagements with radical crises of witnessing in the 20thC to recent re-conceptualizations of the relation between art, science, technology and the production of cultures, we will work with wonderfully challenging and provocative texts, art objects and exhibitions in an effort to understand the shape and significance of current concepts of witnessing. Questions of witness and the constitution of subjective states will allow us to delve deeply into a practical ethics of creative practice. A course bibliography and outline will be available at the beginning of the 2018-19 academic year. 

9594B Special Topic- Art: Globalization and After
(Cross-listed with Undergrad Course 4478G)

Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesday, 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 247

This seminar examines themes in art since 1980 through the lens of globalization. Globalization has been described as one of the most important changes in human history, and although difficult to define, it is typically associated with an increase in the movement and connectedness of people, goods, information, and knowledge, along with new systems and networks to regulate or expedite their flow. In this course, we focus on the work of artists who have explored issues connected to globalization and after. This includes themes such as: migration and cultural displacement, human rights, inter-cultural exchange, surveillance capitalism, and the Anthropocene. We also consider how artists are responding to the current wave of authoritarian populism and state protectionism. Students will develop their own research projects in relation to the course theme.

9585B/9685B Museum in 21^st Century: A Museum for Future Fossils: Curating the Anthropocene

Prof. Kirsty Robertson
Tuesday, 2:30 – 5:30 pm; VAC 247

A more detailed description of this course will follow as it develops over the next few months.

This special, condensed course focuses on museums, contemporary art, the Anthropocene, and climate change. The overarching question is: what does it mean to think curatorially about human impact on the environment? As co-organizer Dr. Eugenia Kisin writes, “In this class, we will explore how the Anthropocene is pictured as more than a geologic era through visual, literary, and ethnographic works that convey the implications of human impact on the world. What are the points of intersection between geophysical and artistic models of climate change? How are experiences of Indigeneity and difference articulated in these future imaginaries? What does it mean to foreground humans in a geologic epoch, and who is excluded from this category of humanness?” Bringing together students Western, NYU, and other universities, the class will take place in three locations: London (ON), Toronto, and New York City. Field trips, classes taught by world experts brought in specially, and hands-on-learning will result in a catalogue and exhibition put together by all participants in the class.

 This is a special one-time only opportunity, and entry will be through application. No expertise in the course topic is required for application, although interest should be demonstrated. Some funding will be available to offset the cost of travel and accommodation. Part of the class will take place through three workshops in Winter semester, 2019, and the rest in condensed form in late May-early June over approximately two weeks. Please follow www.museumforfuturefossils.com for updates and details (the site will be launched in late July, 2018). 

FALL 2017

9500A – Research Methods and Practices (MA & MFA)
Prof. Kelly Jazvac
Wednesday 2:30 – 5:30pm; VAC 247

The Master’s seminar in research methods is the foundational course for the MFA in studio and the MA in art history. The course is an integrated context for reading, analysis of art works, and engagement with relevant practices by studio and art history students, in a shared context. It combines a theoretical component involving a survey of some key movements in contemporary critical theory with a methods component focusing respectively on the development of tools for art making, related writing, and the use of professional skills by artists; and on art historical research methods and the development of critical writing skills, and the use of professional tools by art historians.

9540A/9543A – MFA Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Wood
Friday 10:00 – 1:00 pm; VAC 247

This course is designed to provide an opportunity for MFA students to participate in an exchange dedicated to the research and development of their studio practice. Students will be asked to participate by contributing to informal studio reviews that will be scheduled throughout the term. These group meetings may review work-in-progress; access ongoing technical concerns; assist with immediate needs of a project’s concept and execution; develop an appropriate language for evaluation and critique; and involve discussion on related issues. Each student will be required to submit a detailed dossier that will provide information about studio visits with faculty as well as meetings with visiting speakers. Students will be required to present their work for critique to a committee at the end of the year.

9561A/9661A – Race & Gender in the Americas
Prof. Cody Barteet
Tuesday 11:30 – 2:30pm; VAC 148

Overview: This course explores how the visual arts were used to document and present racial and gender concerns during the pre-modern era in North and South America. We begin by establishing a theoretical framework for exploring gender and race. Next, we examine specific studies, beginning with conceptions of gender and race among some pre-contact Indigenous cultures in comparison to select European cultural traditions. From, here shift our focus to the colonial era by considering the cultural conceptions and stereotypes developed about colonial peoples, whether European, Indigenous, or African. As such we will be considering how women, Amerindians, and African peoples were represented in and how they affected pre-modern art production in the Colonial Americas, whether as subjects, creators, patrons, etc.

9551A – Seminar in Medieval Art
(Cross-listed with undergraduate course VAH4451F)
Prof. Kathy Brush
Thursday 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 247

This seminar explores the collecting, display, and representation of medieval art in the USA and Canada during the past century. In 1914, less than a year after the Armory Show introduced North Americans to the art of the European avant-garde, Europe’s Middle Ages “arrived” in New York in a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition that featured the collection of the banker-philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan. In Manhattan that same year the sculptor George Gray Barnard opened his “Cloisters,” an evocatively staged collection of medieval architectural and sculptural fragments which the artist believed would demonstrate “the power of the medieval chisel” to Americans. These early public displays of medieval objects did much to promote the appreciation, collecting, and study of medieval art and visual culture on this side of the Atlantic.

The seminar analyzes a wide range of ideologies and tensions that have animated the display and representation of displaced objects from medieval Europe in North American contexts. In addition to evaluating the idiosyncracies of collecting at individual institutions, the seminar will focus on issues of cultural transfer, reappropriation, and reinterpretation. How, for example, has the public (visual) consumption of medieval art been valued and positioned in relation to objects and ideas from other historical eras and geographies, including those of non-Western cultures and the modern age? How and why have collections of medieval art been employed in the past and present to articulate distinctly American and/or Canadian concerns and identities, whether public, private, individual, or collective? Strategies of arrangement and display, both historical and contemporary, at selected institutions will be given critical consideration. In 2017 the Middle Ages continue to figure prominently in the North American popular imagination: in what ways might exhibitions of “authentic” medieval objects build on and complicate such popular culture projections? How can museums and educational institutions employ new technologies to help interpret medieval visual culture in more accessible and “experienceable” ways? A field trip to relevant collections in Toronto will offer seminar participants real-life insight into current debates about the collecting, display, and representation of medieval visual culture.

9600A – PhD Research Methods
Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Wednesday, 11:30 – 2:30 pm; VAC 148

This seminar is the foundation course for the PhD program in Art and Visual Culture. The theoretical component of the course aims to develop proficiency in critical theory. It prepares students for the comprehensive exams and helps them establish the theoretical framework for their thesis prospectus. The research methods module of the course examines a variety of methodologies for studying art and visual culture. Students learn to situate their research within their field of study and begin work on a literature review for their thesis prospectus. The course also addresses professional practices, such as grant writing and pedagogy.

Winter 2018

9521B/9621B – Studio Elective: Art Practices and the Environment
Prof. Kim Moodie
, Thursday 2:30 – 5:30 pm; VAC 247

This course examines both historical, and current depictions of natural and industrial scenes in which the use of material resources is clearly visible. It further investigates how art productions interact with the environment, both positively and negatively, while also addressing respective economic and social correlations. Ultimately, the course focuses on examinations of the practices of contemporary artists whose work attempts to address ecological concerns.

9582B/9682B – Contemporary Art and the Process of Witnessing
(Cross-listed with Womens’ Studies & Feminist Research)
Prof. Joy James
Monday, 2:30 – 5:30 pm; VAC 247

This graduate seminar will address specific exhibitions and works of art in relation to historical and contemporary ideas regarding 1) processes of witnessing, 2) notions of subjectivity, and 3) an ethics of difference. The capacity of art to bear witness, as this pertains to rapidly changing conceptions of human subjectivity, has been an important discussion in emerging aesthetic models. Moving from art’s engagements with radical crises of witnessing in the 20thC to recent re-conceptualizations of the relation between art, science, technology and the production of cultures, we will work with wonderfully challenging and provocative texts, art objects and exhibitions in an effort to understand the shape and significance of current concepts of witnessing. Questions of witness and the constitution of subjective states will allow us to delve deeply into a practical ethics of creative practice. A course bibliography and outline will be available at the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year.

9586B/9686B – Writing for the Arts
Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesdays 11:30 to 2:30 pm; VAC 247

This is a practical course focusing on forms of writing common in the art world. We consider evaluative, expository, and narrative writing, with specific attention to exhibition reviews and catalogue essays. Concentrating on recent exhibitions and other art world events, we discuss how to write for various kinds of publications and different audiences. Students will learn about and apply techniques to improve aspects of writing such as structure, style, and narrative. Suitable for MA, MFA, and PhD students, the seminar format allows for group activities, discussion, and writing workshops.

Prof. Patrick Mahon

Prof. Kim Moodie

Prof. David Merritt

Prof. Christof Migone

Sarah  Bassnett

Prof. Cody Barteet

Prof. Christine Sprengler

Prof. Kirsty Robertson

Prof. Patrick Mahon

9600A PhD Seminar – Research Methods & Professional Practices
Prof. Patrick Mahon

9521B/9621B Graduate Studio Elective: LIVE (Improvise)
Prof. Christof Migone

9540A/9543A Studio Seminar
Prof. Sky Glabush

9541B/9544B Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Wood

9551A/9651A Graduate Seminar: Cathedrals, Castles, Cloisters, and UNESCO World Heritage:  The Fabled Cultural Landscape of the Middle Rhine
Prof. Kathy Brush

9578B/9678B  Graduate Seminar: Paracinema
Prof. Christine Sprengler

9582A/9682A Graduate Seminar- Contemporary Art and the Archive
Prof. Joy James

9585B/9685B Graduate Seminar:  Radical Museum
Prof. Kirsty Robertson

9586B/9686B Graduate Seminar: Writing for the Art World
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

9500A MA/MFA Seminar – Research Methods
Prof. Patrick Mahon
Wednesdays, 2:30 pm – 5:30 pm; Room 148

9540A/9543A Studio Seminar
Prof. Kim Moodie
Fridays 10:00 to 1:00 pm – Room VAC 247

9541B/9544B Studio Seminar
Prof. Sky Glabush
Fridays 10:00 am to 1:00 pm – Room VAC 135

9551A/9651A Graduate Seminar: The Monument in Early Modern and Modern Art
Prof. Cody Barteet
Tuesdays 2:30 to 5:30 pm – Room VAC 148

9551B/9651B Graduate Seminar: Medieval Art in North American Contexts: Collecting, Display, Representation, 1914-2014
Prof. Kathy Brush
Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:30 pm; Room VAC 247

9578A/9678A Graduate Seminar: Writing Without Words: The Critical and Curatorial Challenges of Arte Povera and Its Allies
Prof. John Hatch
Mondays, 8:30 am - 11:30 am; Room VAC 249

9582B/9682B Graduate Seminar- That Thinking Feeling: Engaging the Affective Capacities of Art
Prof. Joy James
Thursdays 11:30 am – 2:30 pm; Room 247

9586B/9686B Graduate Seminar: Writing for the Art World
Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesdays from 11:30 to 2:30 pm in Room VAC 247

9500B/9600B MA/PhD Seminar – Theory and Methods
Instructor: Marielle Aylen
Tuesdays 2:30-5:30 pm – Room VAC 148

9521B Studio Elective – Research Methods
Prof. Kelly Jazvac
Thursdays 2:30 to 5:30 pm – Room VAC 148

9540A/9543A Studio Seminar
Prof. David Merritt
Fridays 10:00 to 1:00 pm – Room VAC 148

9541B/9544B Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Wood
Fridays 10:00 am to 1:00 pm – Room VAC 135

9551B/9651B Women in Renaissance and Baroque Art
Prof. Cody Barteet
Mondays 2:30 to 5:30 pm – Room VAC 247

9554A/9654A Graduate Seminar: The Work of Photography
Prof. Sarah Bassnett
Tuesdays 11:30 am to 2:30 pm – Room VAC 247

VISARTS 9555B Seminar in 20th Century Art
Prof. Bridget Elliott
Wednesdays 11:30 – 2:30 pm – Room VAC 249

9569 McIntosh Curatorial Internship

9578A/9678A Paracinema
Prof. Christine Sprengler
Wednesdays 8:30 to 11:30 am – Room VAC 247

9580 / 9680 McIntosh Artist in the Community

9500A Art Theory and Criticism
Prof. Joy James

9600A PhD Seminar: Theory and Methods
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

VAS 9521B/9621B – Recycler: Revision and Re-use in the Visual Arts
Prof. Kelly Wood

9540A/9543A – Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Patrick Mahon

9541B/9544B – Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Jazvac

9551A/9651A – Medieval/Modern: The Middle ages in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture
Prof. Kathryn Brush

 9554B/9654B – Documentary, Mockumentary, Forgery and Hoax
Prof. Bridget Elliott

 9555A/9655A – Echoes of the Baroque in the Last Century
Prof. John Hatch

9566B/9666B – The Archive in Contemporary Culture
Prof. Anthony Purdy

9500: Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Prof. Patrick Mahon

9600: PhD Seminar: Art Theory and Criticism
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

9540A/9543A - Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Kim Moodie

9541B/9544B Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. David Merritt

9551/9651 Visualizing Race and Class in the New World
Prof. Cody Barteet

9554/9654 Museums, Marginality and the Mainstream
Prof. Kirsty Robertson

9555/9655 That Thinking Feeling: Engaging the Affective Capacities of Art
Prof. Joy James

9581/9681 The Turn to the Object
Prof. Anthony Purdy

VAH/S 9500B: Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Prof. Kirsty Robertson

9600B: PhD Seminar: Art Theory and Criticism
Prof. Bridget Elliott

9540A/9543A - Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. David Merritt

9541B/9544B/9641B - Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Wood

9521A/9621A - Studio Elective - Work Ethic: Looking Like You’re Not Trying and Looking Like You Mean It
Prof. Kelly Jazvac

9551G/9651G - Graduate Seminar - Monuments
Prof. Cody Barteet

9555G/9655G - Art in Time and Space as Seen through a Telescope: Artistic Journeys through Modern Science
Prof. John Hatch

VAH 9578F/9678F - Modern - The Animal in Modernism
Prof. Marielle Aylen

9579F/9679F - Phenomenology and Art
Prof. Helen Fielding

9554F/9654F Seminar - Paper Politics: Printed Matter, Political Engagement and Avant-garde Practices
Prof. Patrick Mahon

9566G/9666G - Cultures of Memory
Prof. Anthony Purdy

VAH/S 9500A/9600A: Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Prof. Christine Sprengler

VAS 9521B/9621B Studio Elective Course: Why make pictures?
Prof. Sky Glabush

VAS 9540A/9543A/96640A Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Patrick Mahon

VAS 9541B/9544B Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. David Merritt

VAH 9551G/9651G Medieval Art- Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier
Prof. Kathy Brush

VAH 9554/9654F Modern Art – A Stitch in Time Saves . . . Textiles, Technology and Contemporary Art
Prof. Kirsty Robertson

VAH 9555G/9655G Modern Art – Photography’s Discursive Spaces
Prof. Sarah Bassnett

VAH 9566F/9666F The Archive in Contemporary Culture
Prof. Anthony Purdy

VAH 9578F/9678F Modern – The maison d’artiste, 1880-2009
Prof. Bridget Elliott

VAH 9579G//9679G The Forensic Imagination: Evidence, Testimony, and the Material Witness
Prof. Susan Schuppli

VAH/S 9500A / 9600A Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Prof. Christine Sprengler

VAS 9521B / 9621B Studio Elective Course: Extemporal
Professor David Merritt

VAS 9540A / 9543A / 96640A Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Susan Schuppli

VAS 9541B / 9544B Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Patrick Mahon

VAH 9551G / 9651G Medieval Art and Its Modern Interpreters
Professor Kathryn Brush

VAH 9554 / 9654G Modern Art – Economizing Culture: Globalization, Art and the Creative Industries
Professor Kirsty Robertson

VAH 9556G / 9656G The Palace in Latin America
Prof. Cody Barteet

VAH 9578F / 9678F: Modern Art - Rediscovering Nature andthe Body in a Post Industrial World: The Adventures of Arte Povera
Prof. John Hatch

VAH 9579F / 9679F
Modern Art - Photography and Social Crisis 
Professor Sarah Bassnett

VAH 9551F / VAH 9651F Transformations: the impact of the Women’s Movement on art and art history
Professor Madeline Lennon

VAH 9594F / 9694F Survey of Chinese Visual Art
Professor James Flath

VAH/S 500A/600A Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Prof. Bridget Elliott

VAS 521A/621A Sonic Fictions
Prof. Susan Schuppli

526B/626B Studio Special Topic: Adaptation Nation: Modernism, Canadian Design and the Artist Multiple
Prof. P. Mahon

540A/543A/640A Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Sky Glabush

541B/544B/641B Graduate Studio Seminar
Prof. Kelly Wood

VAH 561F/661F Baroque Constructions: representation in the 17th century
Prof. Madeline Lennon

567B/667B Special Projects in Studio
Course title: “Advanced Seminar In Painting and Drawing”
Prof. Sky Glabush

VAH 584B/684B - After Images: Photography and Literature
Prof: Janelle Blankenship

VAH587A/687A Collecting Cultures
Prof. Tony Purdy

VAH 594B/694B Special Topic: Embodied Information: Researching the Sensuous and the Immaterial
Prof. Joy Parr

VAH/S 500A Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Professor John Hatch

VAS 521B Studio Elective – Cultivators of Culture
Professor Colette Urban

VAS 540a/543a Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor David Merritt

VAS 541b/544b Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Kelly Wood

VAH 551G - Seminar in Medieval Art
Topic: Medieval Art in North American Contexts
Professor Kathryn Brush

VAH 566B – Nineteenth Century Art History Seminar
Professor Lorenzo Buj

VAH 577G – Modern – Icon/Fetish
Professor Kajri Jain

VAH 578F - Modern - Paracinema
Professor Christine Sprengler

VAH/S 500A Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Professor Sarah Bassnett

521B New Studio Elective - Vampire Picnic: A Reference Manual
Professor Kelly Wood

VAS 540a/543a Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Patrick Mahon

VAS 541b/544b Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Colette Urban

VAH 551G/ VAH 451G (Seminar in Medieval Art)
Topic: Patronage, Audience, and Engagement in Medieval Art
Professor Kathryn Brush

VAH 554b Modern - Ars Memoria
Professor Lorenzo Buj

VAH561F Baroque Art: Baroque Constructions
Professor Madeline Lennon

VAH 587G La Maison d'Artiste
Professor Bridget Elliott

500a Art Theory and Criticism in Western Culture
Professor John G. Hatch

526b Graduate Special Topics Course: Creative Critters Commune
Professor Colette Urban

540a/543a MFA Graduate Studio Seminar 2004
Professor Ben Reeves

541b/544b Graduate Studio Seminar
Professor Daniela Sneppova

551G Reading Medieval Art
Professor Kathryn Brush

577F A is for Art, H is for Heterotopia
Professor Bridget J. Elliott