FYS: Courses
 

 
Contact FYS
 
 

300 Steele Building
CB# 3504
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
27599-3504

email: fys@unc.edu
phone: (919)843-7773

 
 


Course Descriptions

Art

ART 054: Art, War and Revolution
North Atlantic World (NA); Visual and Performing Arts (VP)
Daniel Sherman
Focusing on one or at most two works of art per week, this seminar will explore the complex relationship between war and conflict.  At the heart of the course lie the tensions between glorifying war and violence and memorializing their victims, between official justification and moral outrage, between political programs (many of the works represent a particular view of war) and the malleability of meaning.  The focus on single works in a variety of media – painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, graphic arts, and film – will offer the students the opportunity to study them in depth while also gaining exposure to a range of interpretive methods and the richness of the historical context.  Although we will begin with a work from classical antiquity, the Arch of Titus in Rome, and consider an influential series of prints from 17th-century Europe, Jacques Callot’s Disasters of War, the seminar will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining works related to the French Revolution, the U.S. and Spanish Civil Wars, the Russian Revolution, and the two World Wars.  The course will culminate in an exhibition at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum organized by students in the seminar.

ART 057 [006K]: Narrative Sight/Site
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Beth Grabowski

What is a story? How is a story told visually? Students will learn basic art-making concepts and skills: two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, design elements, color, and how to manage materials. They will use these skills to create their own art works based on diaries, dreams, fairy tales, master narratives, and lies or trickery.

ART 058 [006K]: Book Art
Communication Intensive (CI); Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Beth Grabowski
Take one piece of paper and a pair of scissors and you have the tools to create a book. This studio art course explores the book as a structure for creative expression. The course begins with learning basic bookbinding skills. Subsequently, we will create works of art that explore structural and expressive potentials the book form. A fundamental focus will be on the visual aspects of the book, both in terms of the design of individual pages and the book as a sculptural and performative object. We will also consider the special relationship of books with words/language. Ideas such as sequence, progression, inside/outside, physicality, intimacy, memory, history, document, and storytelling will inform much of the work done.

ART 059 [006K]: Time: A Doorway to Visual Expression
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Jim Hirschfield

Visual artists, not unlike writers, communicate through complex structures of elements and principles (e.g., form, space, line, texture, color, light, rhythm, balance, and proportion.) Analyzing any one of these components will help illustrate the nuances of visual language. This class will study one of the lesser considered, but most intriguing, visual components: the element of Time. From subtle illusionary movement to clearly defined sequences of change, artists have manipulated this element to strengthen their work. This class will examine this enigmatic element of time through readings and class discussions of Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, as well as other selected essays. We will also look at films, listen to music, and most importantly express our personal view through the art making process. As a freshman seminar, the course presumes no previous art experience, and students may carry out their projects through a variety of mediums. The projects will be evaluated through class critiques and discussions about the work. Ultimately, our intention will be to immerse ourselves in the subject, and to create personal works of art motivated and inspired by our enhanced understanding of time.

ART 061 [006K]: Introduction to African American Art
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts & Cultural Diversity]
Michael Harris

The purpose of this class is to examine African American art and some of the historical considerations that affected the nature of its developments. We will survey the topic and supplement it with the detailed critical examination of particular works or issues relative to the representation of African Americans by whites or by their own artists. Slides, video tapes, and trips to museums and/or galleries will be an important part of the class. Each student will be asked to find a local artist or a particular work represented in a local museum and do intensive investigation of that person's work. Interviews will be conducted with living artists. For museum work, the student will contact museum staff and gather accession and background information about the work and then pursue detailed inquiry about the artist and where the work fits into his or her career.

ART 064 [006K]: Picturing Nature: Visual Images and Scientific Knowledge, 1600-1850
Communication Intensive (CI); North Atlantic World (NA); Visual and Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Mary Sheriff

This seminar explores the relation between works of art and scientific artifacts (for example: natural history specimens, technological inventions, biological or anthropological illustrations) in Europe and America. It focuses on how the collecting and study of natural and aesthetic wonders shaped ideas about knowledge in the arts and sciences. Although the course is centered in the early modern period (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) we will also consider the prior history of the relation between wonder, art, science, and knowledge, as well as contemporary versions of wonder cabinets. Other topics to be considered include: the history of museums, the development of anthropological illustration in travel literature, the relation of science and art to European conquest, the role of religion in defining the marvelous, the relation of "fact" to fiction.

ART 071 [006K]: Contemporary Native North American Art Practice
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Kimowan McLain

This seminar will provide a survey of Native North American art beginning in the late 1800s to the present. In addition to readings, lectures, slides and discussions, students will be asked to produce art studio projects. Each studio assignment will relate to trends found in the Indian art world. For example, students may be asked to make a creative document outlining personal histories.

ART/ENG/HIST 077 [006K]: Seeing the Past
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
James Thompson, Lloyd Kramer, Mary Sheriff

This seminar will introduce students to practices of critical analysis that inform academic work in all the core humanistic disciplines: how do we ask analytical questions about texts, artwork, and other cultural artifacts that come down to us from the past or circulate in our own culture? "Seeing the Past" will be taught in conjunction with the Ackland Art Museum's project, "Witnesses to an Age of Transformation," for which the Ackland has received a grant to mount an exhibition, with attendant programs, including this seminar. The exhibition revolves around three unusual paintings in their collection: Amigoni's Venus Disarming Cupid; Francois-Xavier's portrait of Henry Richard Vassall Fox; and Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos, a work of the English romantic school. Each of these paintings presents an array of problems and questions, including attribution, provenance, subject, and iconography. The three faculty members who will teach this seminar represent different disciplines-Mary Sheriff is an eighteenth-century French art historian, Lloyd Kramer is an eighteenth-century French intellectual historian, and James Thompson is an eighteenth-century English literary historian. The central question that "Seeing the Past" asks is this: What do you need to know in order to understand these paintings? What constitutes necessary and accurate information? How do you find it; and how do you evaluate it?

ART 078 [006K]: The Visual Culture of Photography
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Jeff Whetstone & Tammy Rae Carland

This course will investigate how photography is inextricably entwined in our lives and histories. America and photography grew up together, and we will examine the historical importance of 19th century landscape photography in the expansion of the West, how photographers like Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange helped define The Great Depression, and how contemporary photographers reflect and influence our current culture. We will investigate how the family archive, the personal snapshot, and the school senior portrait describe both reality and fantasy. Above all, we will take pictures. We will become technically proficient with the 35 mm camera and in the darkroom. Our class discussions and presentations will enhance our ability to "read" the language of photography and think conceptually about the medium. In this class we will call upon artistic instinct, intellectual curiosity, and skill with the camera to learn a new and profound way to look at the world we live in.

ART 079 [006K]: Meaning and the Visual Arts
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Mary Pardo

Can works of art from different times and places speak to us directly? What does it mean to take a work out of its original context, and warehouse it in a museum? Is the art museum a mausoleum, or an enchanted castle in which other cultures come to life? Is the work of art's value something assigned to it by art "experts" and financiers? Or is it something that arises from our personal pleasure in beautiful things; or from our personal effort to find meaning in human creativity? How can a knowledge of history improve our understanding of art? Our First Year Seminar will be concerned with these questions, and most especially with the role each of us can play as an informed art-viewer. In the course of the semester, each of us will learn to become an art historian. We will undertake a series of viewing, and research and writing exercises, which will culminate in the production of an exhibition catalogue on world art, titled "In the Eye of the Beholder." Each student will sign personal contributions to the catalogue, and identify her or his intervention in the introductory essay.

ART 080 [006K]: Representing the City of Lights: Paris 1600-2000
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Mary Sheriff
This seminar is built around an exhibition at the Ackland Museum of Art. The central theme of this exhibition is the city of Paris--its
planning, monuments, building, people, site, natural features, and "image"--from about 1600 to the present day. Seminar meetings will alternate between reading and discussion of material pertaining to the city of Paris and its representation in painting, the graphic arts, photography, film, literature and the media, and the hands-on work of preparing the exhibition. Students will assist with all aspects of planning and researching the exhibition, including the selection of objects to be shown, the researching of those objects, and the writing of informative labels and catalogues. The seminar will also create a web page for the exhibition. The goals of this seminar are to explore
how the city of Paris has been understood historically not only as an urban space, but also as a visual image and a conceptual idea, and to introduce students to museum practices of display, education, and public outreach.

ART 082 [006K]: Please Save This: Exploring Personal Histories Through Visual Language
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Juan Logan

We must always remember that we cannot move forward without bringing our past with us. This class will investigate the idea of personal histories in visual art. As a studio class, the course will be organized around several art-making projects. As a catalyst to our own art-making, we will explore the idea of personal history and memory through readings, as well as looking at contemporary artists whose work functions in an autobiographical framework. We will consider issues such as time, memory, secrets, history, spirituality, and how to use these to create a personal visual language.

ART 084 [006K]: Society of the Spectacle: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
Carol Mavor
Students in this seminar will take an in-depth look at Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. Students will pay special attention to recent historical and theoretical studies of the subject, as well as selected French novels of the period. This course examines much of the corpus of these movements including the works of Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cassatt, Cezanne, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh.

ART 006K: Art of Tibet
GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts
Pika Ghosh
This course is an introduction to Tibetan art and culture and to Buddhism and its ritual arts more generally. It thereby explores art historical methods of analyzing art in relation to culture. It will also introduce students to the process of organizing an art exhibition and raise issues of interpretation in the museum context. Finally, the concrete experience of writing catalog entries will provide students the opportunity to direct their writing toward a real audience. By limiting the quantity of writing to a single polished piece of prose of limited length, I hope to concentrate on organizational issues of structuring an argument and stylistic issues of writing such as tone, audience, establishing writing conventions, and attaining uniformity within a larger work. The lessons of drafting and making decisions about the final product realized through this process will provide first year students an introduction to college writing and provide a valuable and transferable skill to students who will not become art history majors.



Course Information
Current Courses
Upcoming Courses
Course Descriptions