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Special Topics Courses

Fall 2022 Special Topics Courses

ARTH 279-01 Korean Art and Culture

Taught by Najung Kim, Ph.D.
This course explores the art and culture of Korea from the first century CE through the present. Students examine important historical monuments of painting, architecture, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, and lacquerware, as well as contemporary Korean culture, including, but not limited to, K-pop, TV dramas, and films. With the successful completion of this course, students will be able to understand important historical moments that helped shape Korean contemporary culture and how Korea’s cultural identity has also been influenced by new elements adopted from the world outside.

 

ARTH 279-02 Art as Political Action

Taught by Mia Reinoso Genoni, Ph.D. Dean of Westhampton College & Associate Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences
Art has served as a pivotal and powerful element of politics for centuries, across time, space, ideas, and media. Whether we look at the socio-political battles that raged in Renaissance Florence, as families and rival governmental factions fought a propaganda war using the stage of the city itself–its streets, homes, and civic buildings, or at the socio-cultural and political battles of contemporary America, in which artists and activists create works whose messages are seen on the streets and in institutions of power (governmental, artistic, academic), art has long been political action–meant to sway, provoke, and mold public opinion, to express, argue, and create individual and institutional identities. This course focuses on a series of fascinating examples in art and architecture throughout the centuries, in which art is persuasion, propaganda, narrative, counter-narrative, activist act, protest, counter-protest, revolution, and more, enacted on individual and civic bodies and the body politic alike.