Summer
Overview
The UCLA Department of Art History offers in-person and online summer study opportunities that span a variety of topics, geographies, and epochs. These courses are designed to appeal to a variety of learners with extensive or minimal exposure to this discipline. Whether you are interested in exploring fresh artists, diving deeper into your favorite art movement, or accelerating your time-to-degree, our summer courses can provide a meaningful academic experience that will enrich your time at UCLA.
SESSION A: JUNE 23 – AUGUST 1 (6 WEEKS)
ART HIS C126: Venice – Making Space in Most Serene Republic
Remarking in 1438, the converted Catholic Cardinal Bessarion described Venice as “almost Byzantium.” Born in Trebizond and having lived and traveled throughout the Byzantine empire, Bessarion’s comments give the impression that the city of Venice strove but could not rival its eastern neighbor. This course examines how the city on the lagoon emerged from Byzantium’s shadow to become a major center of artistic production in the Renaissance. It will demonstrate how artists and architects utilized the space of the city to realize their artistic endeavors. Beginning in the thirteenth century at the Church of San Marco, this course weaves the artistic narrative of the city with its expanding maritime empire and its emergence at the “Most Serene Republic.” It will consider how Venetian self-consciousness coalesced in pictorial space. Art pervaded every aspect of Venetian life. In this lecture, students will encounter artworks such as public murals, private portraits, and public piazzas. They will develop an understanding of the trajectory of Venetian art and be able to distinguish between different genres, spaces, and time periods. Considering both medieval and Renaissance art and architecture, this course examines artistic production within different spaces of the Venetian city. The last day of the course will analyze how the city impacted the look of her colonies in Greece.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 8:30 am – 10:35 pm / online
ART HIS 130, Sec. 1: Twentieth Century German Art and Otherness
This course will provide a survey of twentieth-century art in Germany by focusing on ideas and representations of “Otherness.” First and second week of the course will introduce the students to the cultural and intellectual background of the subject, in addition to key approaches from the field of postcolonial theory and criticism. From this point onwards, each session will present case studies of major avant-garde movements and artists, as well as their relationship to various—often intertwined—forms of Otherness, in a roughly chronological order. The class material will be supplemented by a study trip to LACMA’s Modern Art galleries and the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist studies, as well as by in-class screenings. This course will ultimately argue that instantiations of Otherness—formal, conceptual, mnemonic or otherwise—were and remain a structuring force in German art and culture.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 10:45 am – 12:50 pm / Dodd Hall 275
ART HIS 130, Sec. 2: Introduction to Global Modernism
What does a global approach (or approaches) to art history entail? What are the goals and methodologies that undergird such an impulse to delineate art history, a traditionally demarcated discipline that uphold regionalized subfields, such as “African art,” “Chinese art,” and periodized subfields, such as “Medieval art” and “Renaissance art,” not to mention the ambiguous “Islamic art”? By taking the global as the leading method of dismantling art history’s canonical structure, this course guides students away from the inherently Eurocentric structure of thoughts that sustains such subdivisions. Beginning with foundational discussions on the concepts of “global” and “modernism,” the course examines how artists, movements, and exhibitions engage with postcolonial and decolonial methods and offers new models of cultural hybridity and solidarity. Through case studies on movements such as calligraphic abstraction and global surrealism, models of art education such as the Casablanca Art School and Rabindranath Tagore’s Institute of Fine Arts in Santiniketan, international exhibitions, and the theme of portraiture, students will analyze how the multifaceted expressions of global modern art negotiate with cultural identities, national allegiances, and visual expressions.
Lecture, three hours; MW/ 10:45 am – 12:50 pm /online
ART HIS 132, Sec. 1: Good Art/Bad Art
Lecture, three hours. This course is a wide-ranging introduction to the controversial ideas of quality and taste in late modern/contemporary art in the United States and around the world. By reflecting on how certain kinds of artworks are deemed “good/bad” and deconstructing the assumptions that we unconsciously bring to make such a judgment, students will be able to reassess their own aesthetic preferences and reconsider how art history is written by artists, critics, scholars, and museums. We will explore the related concepts of high/low culture, anti-art, visual/sonic culture, relativism, irony, difficulty, authorship, simulation, populism, and identity politics. Above all, the course will encourage diverse methods of looking and listening in order to and expand our notions of what art has been and will become, during an uncertain moment when algorithms and artificial intelligence have become major players in determining what cultural products we like to consume.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 1:00 pm – 3:05 pm / Dodd 220
ART HIS C136A Selected Topics in African American Art: Black Arts in a Global Field
This course introduces students to the foundations of Black Internationalism in 20th-century art history, focusing on the intersections of art, activism, and global movements for Black liberation. Students will explore key debates, exhibitions, and artists that have shaped Black diasporic and pan-African art practices, positioning these histories alongside dominant modernist narratives that center Eurocentric myths of linear progress, universality, and originality. Through lectures and seminars, the course covers topics such as the Harlem Renaissance and its transatlantic influence, surrealism and revolutionary politics in the Caribbean, the Black Panthers and Third-World solidarity movements, and contemporary conceptions of Afro-Asia. Students will engage with questions of artistic solidarity, resistance, and revolution, asking: What does it mean to create art “in solidarity”? How can we envision a “global art history” from the perspective of liberatory and decolonial politics? And how do transnational encounters and interconnected struggles for freedom reshape our understanding of modern art? Students will end the course by designing their own exhibition placing Black arts in a global field, critically intervening in these debates and developing their own orientation.
Lecture, three hours; MW/ 1:00 pm – 3:05 pm / online
SESSION C : AUGUST 4 – SEPTEMBER 12 (6 WEEKS)
ART HIS C114D: Ancient Art and Its Afterlives
Lecture, three hours. In this class, we will examine classical art and the important political role it has played in both ancient and modern contexts. Each week, lecture and discussion will focus on a particular case study, where students will learn about an example of ancient art as well as the ways it has been received and/or appropriated historically. The course proceeds roughly chronologically, beginning with antiquarianism and early archaeology, before exploring themes of nationalism, colonialism, and dictatorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the end of the course, we will examine the role of classical art and archaeology in the modern world, considering such topics as cultural heritage, the antiquities market, and activism. At the end of this course, students are expected to produce a final paper or project analyzing a particular object or theme related to ancient art and its afterlives, developed in close consultation with the instructor.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 10:45 am – 12:50 pm / online
ART HIS 130, Sec. 3: Arab Avant-Gardes
This course introduces students to formations of the avant-garde across the Arab world, from roughly the 1870s-1970s. Sessions are organized thematically, beginning with a critical examination of the two concepts appearing in the course’s title: what is meant by the terms “Arab” and “avant-garde,” and how have they been contested? Each week brings together case studies from different regions and time periods ito consider the following topics: the “Arab Awakening” or “Nahda” as an integrated cultural movement of visual artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries; Surrealism, not as a European invention or import but as a movement born out of its internationalism, exemplified in the work of the Art et Liberté group in Cairo; craft revivals, material experimentations, and reclamations of the vernacular as artists negotiated transitions from colonial to postcolonial conditions; diverse practices of calligraphic abstraction and their connections to nationalist, pan-Arab, pan-Islamic, and Indigenous movements and discourses, as well as one of the most contested terms in Arab art history, hurufiyya; and Social(ist) Realisms, especially within the context of nation building, Third World solidarity, and debates on the role of art within the state. Arab avant-gardes emerge as movements engaged in radical aesthetic and conceptual experimentation while also being situated within – not outside – their specific historical moments and socio-political dynamics, during a period of rapid change and transformation not only in the Arab world but globally.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 8:30 am – 10:35 am / online
ART HIS 132, Sec. 2: Diaspora in Modern and Contemporary Art
Lecture, three hours. Diaspora–and related concepts like the global and transnational–has reshaped art history, prompting scholars to rethink nation-based narratives and question binaries such as center/periphery and modern/traditional. This course explores diaspora in art history, distinguishing it from other types of migration as a condition marked by dislocation from and affinity to a real or imagined homeland. A primary goal is to critically assess diaspora as a concept in art history, examining both its potentials and limitations. While diaspora studies can offer historical perspectives and highlight artistic resistance to universality, some histories of diaspora risk implanting overly stable notions of home and nation, or prioritize certain diasporic histories over others. Although this course dedicates considerable focus to Jewish diasporic practices, it does so without asserting Jewish diaspora’s centrality or primacy. Instead, it reexamines Jewish history within broader diasporic frameworks in art history, drawing comparisons with diverse diasporic histories in modern and contemporary art. Additionally, we will consider how insights from queer, trans, and Indigenous studies complicate or expand our understanding of diaspora. Key artists include Allan Sekula, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Ai Weiwei, Mona Hatoum, Kara Walker, R. B. Kitaj, Solomon Iudovin, Jean Mohr, Emily Jacir, Edgar Heap-of-Birds, among others, alongside both named and unnamed collectives and exhibitions. By the end of this course, students will be able to apply art historical methods of visual and formal analysis and historical contextualization to analyze works of art, compare different diasporic formations, critique diaspora as an analytic framework for art history, and conduct original art historical research on diaspora or related topics.
Lecture, three hours; MW / 1:00 pm – 3:05 pm / Dodd Hall 220
ART HIS C140: Art Out of Ores: Metalworking in Indigenous Americas
Lecture, three hours. This course explores the materiality of metalworks in the ancient Indigenous Americas to understand their meanings and functions. Metal objects from the ancient Indigenous Americas have long fascinated the public. Proof of this is the numerous blockbuster museum exhibitions that have been developed around this topic. Nevertheless, the sheer allure of metalworks from this region is not a modern development. Authors writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dedicated numerous pages to discussing the gold and silver they encountered in their invasion of Indigenous communities. Focusing on a selection of cultural groups, including the Hopewell, Mississippians, and Mexica in North America; the Muisca and Tairona in the Isthmus Region; and the Lambayeque and the Inca in South America, we will discuss the technical skills Indigenous peoples mastered to transform raw materials into finished objects that would be used within particular social, political, and religious contexts. This foundation will help us understand what metals meant for the Indigenous communities who first extracted and worked these materials and how these understandings shifted upon colonial occupation. We will approach these questions through the analysis of objects found today in museum collections around the world as well as archaeological specimens. Additionally, we will consider the information provided in documentary sources on metallurgical practices and metal objects that no longer survive. Given the fascination that this artistic corpus triggers among the public and scholars alike, we will consider the research challenges associated with these objects (e.g. what has survived and why?); the troubling narratives that surround metalworks in the media and cultural institutions; and how we might find scholarly alternatives to approach the study of this material in line with their context of cultural origin.
Lecture, three hours; TR / 1:00 pm – 3:05 pm / online
ART HIS C153 Selected Topics in Korean Art: Understanding Korean Art in East Asian Context
Lecture, three hours. Throughout its history, the experience of encountering foreign cultures has served as a catalyst for change in the Korean art world. After coming face to face with foreign art, Korean artists adapted
their motifs or styles in response, thus enabling audiences to experience Korean art anew. Such moments have been variously explained as acts of “imitation,” “influence,” and “acceptance,” keywords that imply a passive reception of outside influences. This course aims to challenge this notion by tracing the evolution of Korean art from ancient times to the early twentieth century, engaging with contemporary scholarship that recognizes the subtle complexities of cross-cultural interactions and moving beyond oversimplified narratives of unilateral influence between nations. We begin in an era that precedes the modern “nation-state,” a time characterized by internal strife among various political factions within the peninsula and alliances across the oceans. Our journey will uncover how Korean art, through continuous and multifaceted interactions, evolved in response to the diverse visual, material, political, and cultural dynamics at play. By examining these intricate historical contexts, we seek to broaden the discourse of East Asian art history, which traditionally focuses on China and Japan, offering a more enriched understanding of Korean and East Asian visual cultures. This exploration not only illuminates the unique trajectory of Korean art but also contributes to a more nuanced appreciation of the broader East Asian artistic landscape.
Lecture, three hours; MW / 3:15 pm – 5:20 pm / online
Funding Sources
The Department encourages prospective students to explore sources of funding for which they may be eligible. Here are some to consider:
Funding for Continuing Students
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