ART AND MUSEUM STUDIES M.A. PROGRAM – COURSES FOR FALL 2018
This listing is intended for general guidance in course selection for fall 2018. Course availability and classroom location may change.
Museum Studies
AMUS 500
Museum Studies Foundations
W 9:30-12:00, Walsh 397
ProfessorLisa Strong
Museum Studies Foundations is the core course for the MA Program in Art and Museum Studies.The course will provide an overview of museum theory and practice by examining the history of museums and their collections, their functions and professional standards, and current debates about museum ethics, the role and authority of museums, audience, mission, and management. Our focus will be on art museums, but selected topics in historic and ethnographic museums will also be considered.
Note: All AMUS students are automatically registered for this required course. However, you have the option of enrolling either for three credits (the default) or for no credit (the course will be listed on your transcript but will not count toward your total number of credits or affect your grade point average). This would allow you to take an additional elective in the fall. We recommend this choice only for those with a previous museum studies course or comparable experience, and only after consultation with the program Director during fall registration.
AMUS 506
Museum Practice Workshop
M 2:00-4:30, Walsh 495
Professor Mike Lesperance, Professor Carma Fauntleroy, and Professor Anne Kingery-Schwartz (and guest lecturers)
Designed to expand upon the program's core course through concentrated study of museum specializations that are introduced in AMUS 500, this is a practice-based, team-taught course. Professionals in the areas of exhibition development and design, conservation studies, and institutional leadership direct three-session units, and we will have a special session on the ethics of collection and display. Students' projects will emphasize the collaborative nature of museum work.
AMUS 510
Collections Management
W 2:00-4:30, Meets at Dumbarton House, 2715 Q Street, NW
Professor Jerry Foust
The course focuses on general museum concepts and procedures as they relate to collections (objects and their documentation) and their management (e.g., preparation, preventive maintenance & conservation, housing, problem solving) as a whole. The course objectives are to introduce the participants to basic care and preservation of collections as well as a basic understanding of the history and current status of the governance of cultural materials.
By the end of the course, participants should understand the definition and role of collections within a museum context; understand the philosophy of cultural preservation and the meaning of cultural patrimony; understand the importance of collection ethics and the role of collections within museum accountability and accreditation programs; be familiar with museum policy development and the relationship between a collecting plan, a collections management policy, and a collections management plan; understand the importance of a collections management policy, its development, content, and application; and how such a policy governs the daily activities within a museum’s collections.
AMUS 520
Museum Education Interpretation
T 9:30-12:00, Walsh 397
ProfessorHarriet McNamee
Students will be active participants in learning about museum education theories and practice. This course situates the functions of museum education and interpretation within the broader context of a changing paradigm in museums. During site visits to area art museums, educators will discuss aspects of interpretation, programming, and research that are unique to their museum. Class discussion will include such topics as how visitors learn in an art museum, new approaches to interpretation, education programming for varied audiences, building audiences and community, and the relationship of mission to education and interpretation.
AMUS 526
Controversial Exhibitions
T 2:00-4:30, Walsh 397
Professor Jayme McLellan
This course will examine museum exhibitions that have created public controversy in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Through case studies, we will analyze recent exhibitions at major American museums including Harlem on My Mind (1969) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Perfect Moment (1989)at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The West as America(1992) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Sensation(1999) at the Brooklyn Museum, and Hide/Seek(2010) at the and National Portrait Gallery. In addition to exploring these exhibitions, the class will investigate recent controversial exhibitions and art actions from the perspective of the curator and the visitor. The course will include field trips and independent study at the Archives of American Art as well as meetings with those involved in several of the case study exhibitions. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of cultural insensitivities from the perspective of an institution while exploring the responsibilities of museums to the public.
AMUS 535
Curating Art Museums Galleries
TH 2:00-4:30, Walsh 397
Professor Albey Miner, Founding Director and Chief Curator, the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery
Curators are at the heart of the art world yet their role is a notoriously fluid one. This course will encourage participants to think critically about the discipline as it exists today, and will provide an extensive inquiry into curatorial practice. The class will address such issues as working with living artists, curating permanent collections, the place of biennials and art fairs, and strategies for engaging the public. Through readings and site visits to art museums around the city, students will have the opportunity to learn directly from practitioners in the field and gain an understanding of the ideas and practical concerns that shape how art is presented. Class projects will involve in-depth analyses of current exhibitions well as developing proposals for museum projects.
AMUS 530
Museum Internship
Meetings and location specific to internship
ProfessorLisa Strong
Schedule determined by student and museum supervisor; 15–20 hours/wk.
Museum internships, required for the MA program, provide concentrated practical experience within selected museum departments as well as an overview of the operations of a museum. Some of our internships include a staff-directed seminar; most involve a linked research project as well as an internship journal. Expectations and placement will be discussed during the orientation session.
Art History
ARTH 354-01
African American Art History
T-TH 12::30-1:45
Professor Shana Klein
This course surveys American artists of African descent within the wider framework of U.S. art and culture. The class will begin in the eighteenth century and extend into the twenty-first century. Throughout the semester, students will explore how the complex and contested concept of ―raceintersects with the production and patronage of art. Students will also contemplate the label, ―African American art,and consider its benefits and pitfalls. This course will cover a wide range of media—including painting, print, photography, performance art, and ceramics—to understand the broader role of visual representation in the construction of race, gender, and nationhood. Students will also analyze how art historians, critics, and curators have treated African-American art, culminating in two class visits to the Phillips Collection and the groundbreaking National Museum of African American History and Culture opening on the National Mall this fall. By the end of this course, students will gain the intellectual tools to critically interpret and engage with objects that fall under the umbrella term, African-American art.
ARTH 355-01
Global Contemporary Art
M-W 11:00-12:15, Walsh 490
Professor Ian Bourland
This survey course provides a general introduction to global contemporary art. After providing a brief grounding in 20th-century modernism and socio-political events of recent decades, this course considers a broad thematic range: pop and conceptual art; the emergence of performance, installation, and new media; earth works and site specificity; identity-based and institution-critical art; relational aesthetics and new modes of spectacle and digital consumerism; and the emergence of the global biennial and gallery system.This course assumes no prior knowledge and introduces students to a constellation of artists from around the world—from Cindy Sherman to Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, Lygia Clark to Kara Walker and Walid Raad, and many more.
Please note that graduate students must register for the graduate section (02) of Art History seminars.
ARTH 402-02
On Painting
T 2:00-4:30
Professor Al Acres
This seminar wonders why and how arrangements of pigment on a surface have been woven so intimately—and often urgently—into human experience and thought since antiquity. Rather than concentrating on any single period or style, we will examine the very phenomenon of painting as an idea, a cultural force, a physical fact, and more. Each week introduces a single broad angle of approach, which we will pursue with close analysis of individual paintings and a variety of readings. Several of our meetings will be in Washington museums.
ARTH 444-02
Art & Poetry
W 2:00-4:30
Professor Liz Prelinger
This seminar examines the relationship between art and poetry. Departing from the Greek poet Horace’s observation, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” the seminar focuses on ways in which poets have attempted to devise verbal equivalents to works of visual art. The class will study the philosophy of this phenomenon of ekphrasis, considering ideas about the relationship between text and image. Secondary literature complements the analysis of selected poems. We will visit the National Gallery of Art Print and Drawing Study Room, as well as the galleries, to study original works of art from this perspective. Students will compose their own poems on works of art of their choice, culminating in a little book that they will design and print.
ARTH 420-02
Portraiture & Race
TH 2:00-4:30
Professor Shana Klein
In the past few decades, several contemporary artists have struggled with the under- and misrepresentation of minorities in American portraiture. They have invented several strategies to correct these injustices—reinventing, transforming, defacing and vandalizing historic works of art. This course will study the ways in which artists have revisited the history of American art and used portraiture to claim greater agency and visibility for people of color in American art and museums. This class will highlight portraits of and by people of color in local museums such as the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of Art.
ART 432-02
Globalization, Terror, and Art
M 2:00-4:30
Professor Ian Bourland
The idea of Europe changed considerably in the years after WWII: postwar reconstruction, the rise of postcolonial movements, the re-emergence of radical factions and terrorism, the specter and denouement of the Cold War, the integration of the EU and the rise of London, Berlin, and beyond as art capitals and, more recently, mass migration and crisis in the European project.This advanced survey tracks crucial social and political moments and their mediation through contemporary art.Key artists include: Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Harun Farocki, Yinka Shonibare, Mona Hatoum, Steve McQueen, Komar and Melamid, Marina Abramowicz, Yto Barrada, Daniel Buren, Francis Alys, Julie Mehretu, Hito Steyerl, John Akomfrah, and more.
Cross-listed Courses:
GERM 421
The Postcolonial Museum
W 3:30-6:00,Reiss 284
Professor Katrin Sieg
Museums arose as public institutions in the age of imperialism. Implementing scientific insights and methods, European museums mapped out the world for their visitors, who came to understand, by walking and looking, their place in relation to places and cultures far away.The museum was key to producing cognitive maps that were nationalist, imperialist, and implicitly supportive of colonial rule.Decolonization prompted museums to redefine their mission.The transformation of museums into institutions supportive of indigenous people and ethnic minorities as authors of their own, long-suppressed stories, was a result of fierce struggles that occurred differently in the former colonies than they did in the former metropolitan centers.But in the last few years, museums in the global North have begun to respond to demands of repatriating parts of their collections, to serve more demographically diverse constituencies, and perform new civic functions. The course will critically examine attempts to “decolonize” the museum.We will follow debates about the museum’s changing social role, engagement with more diverse users, and efforts to change curatorial protocols along with the contents of display. What technological developments and economic factors constrain or aid the reimagining of the museum?What do artists have to offer to museums as they imagine postcolonial futures? Several of the case studies will include German and Austrian museums, which are now addressing the colonial past. In addition,we will discuss representations of violent colonial pasts at museums in the region. Students will attend the international conference Decolonizing the Museum: Transnational ComparisonsNovember 9-10, 2018.
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