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The Visual Culture Studies specialization (VCS) is where students interested in art history, museum studies, and the humanities will find their passion. Students in VCS learn to think about art, media and culture in a variety contexts and historical periods—from the museum to the screen; from the street to ritual spaces. Students learn to analyze, discuss and write about visual culture and the history of art using Seattle’s museums, galleries and urban spaces in order to integrate these encounters into their critical study of scholarship from a variety of perspectives.
The 70-credit major specialization includes the required 3-course, 2-quarter Foundations sequence in the first year, 9 electives (including 2 Visual Art & Design electives) and a 2-course, 2-quarter Capstone sequence in the final year.
Ancient Art’s Contexts; Modernism and the Wider World; New World Baroque; The Contemporary Art World; Histories of Photography; Art and Place in the US West; Dandies and Dangerous Women; Space & Site in Contemporary Art; Trauma, Image, Text; and Robots, Machines and the Body.
The specialization also allows students to take major electives in the areas of Film, Photography, Design, Anthropology, History and other fields.
This course focuses on the role that the American West has played in the popular imagination from the 19th century to the present by examining landscape paintings, indigenous art, Hollywood films, photography, public art and site-specific sculpture. We will ask how visual art can provide us access to the meaning of place in ways that reveal particular spaces, regions, landscapes and environments, cities, and nations to be terrains of competing interests, complicated senses of belonging and records of human impact on the environment. Our discussions will focus on issues such as ecocriticism and art history, visual representation and myth, history and authenticity, settler colonialism, technology and innovation, artistic responses to urban development.
This seminar focuses on radical vanguard art, artists and movements from 1900 until about 1939. We will approach this tumultuous historical moment by foregrounding fantasies and fears about the intersection between machines and human beings. Students will discuss issues such as: the history of the automaton, utopian visions of machines, modern notions of the body beautiful, the “new woman” and the “new man” of the 1920s, the bodily impact of war, prosthetics, the menacing machine, and the robot as fantasy and nightmare. We will engage with works of art, literature and scholarly readings on these themes as well as films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.
This course explores European representations of gender at the end of the 19th century. We consider how codes of gender reinforce Western society’s traditional power relations through images and how artists played with gender representation to undermine traditional power structures. How did visual images at the time refer to, reinforce, or produce insecurities about gender and identity? We will consider how the colorful figures of the Dandy and the femme fatale challenged traditional gender roles and how they were cast as signs of society’s decay.
Does art matter in a world full of political conflict, human suffering, and social and economic inequality? Can works of art adequately portray the traumatic reality of history? After the cataclysm of world war and the Holocaust is making art even a responsible thing to do? How have writers, artists and scholars responded to the ongoing effects of the Atlantic slave trade on contemporary Black lives? These questions faced artists and intellectuals in the latter half of the 20th century and still challenge us today. This interdisciplinary course considers the relationship between history, identity, race, power and representation through contemporary literature and visual art.
Fine Art Graduates