Undergraduate Academics
Art History
The art history curriculum at Sarah Lawrence College covers a broad territory historically, culturally, and methodologically. Students interested in art theory, social art history, or material culture have considerable flexibility in designing a program of study and in choosing conference projects that link artistic, literary, historical, social, philosophical, and other interests. Courses often include field trips to major museums, auction houses, and art galleries in New York City and the broader regional area, as well as to relevant screenings, performances, and architectural sites. Many students have extended their classroom work in art history through internships at museums and galleries, at nonprofit arts organizations, or with studio artists; through their own studio projects; or through advanced-level senior thesis work.
Sarah Lawrence students have gone on to graduate programs in art history at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Bard, Williams, Yale, University of Chicago, Oxford University, and University of London, among others. Many of their classmates have pursued museum and curatorial work at organizations such as the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago; others have entered the art business by working at auction houses such as Sotheby’s or by starting their own galleries; and still others have entered professions such as nonprofit arts management and advocacy, media production, and publishing.
Art History 2026-2027 Courses
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
ARTH 1023
In modern terms, myth has come to be commonly understood as the antithesis of history. Whereas history is taken as a reasoned, factual account of the past and how things came to be, myth appears to operate in the realm of fiction or fantasy. Myths may have the claim of venerable tradition, but they are no longer accepted as an accurate record of events. The ancient world, however, made no such black-and-white distinctions. In antiquity, myth was accepted as early history. Its heroes were real, and their actions were thought to exemplify essential paradigms of political order and morality. Consequently, this course will apply a different approach in which myth is distinguished from history not by a truth test but, rather, by virtue of its function as a means of cultural self-representation. We shall examine the myths of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—both in their literary form and in various media of visual art. Throughout, our goal will be to understand the potency of these narratives as vehicles of social or cultural values and as tools of power legitimizing and justifying closely entwined notions of religious and political authority. The course will close by considering how, in Late Antiquity, Christian narratives and ideologies in the literary and visual arts developed from the mythic traditions that preceded them. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
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Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
ARTH 2240
In The Ontology of the Photographic Image (1945), the film critic André Bazin argues that artists active before the invention of photography were “obsessed” with the accurate replication of reality. He charts an evolution from the 15th century, when perspective was harnessed to form “complete imitations” of the natural world, to the 17th century, when “realist” painters were “tortured” by the “immobility” of their images. Bazin’s timeline of artistic practice mirrors a widely held perspective on the character of early modern European art: “naturalism”—an approach to representation concerned with the faithful reproduction of nature—is commonly taken for granted as an inherent quality of painting and sculpture of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, something which marked a linear transition from the pre-modern into the early modern. In this course, we will think beyond this conception of periodization and stylistic evolution. We will consider the many faces of naturalism in European painting and sculpture from the late 14th century through the 17th century, asking: To what extent did early modern artists use nature as a model in their works? What expressive, rhetorical, or practical ends did embracing naturalism (or abandoning it) serve? And how did spectators of the time react to naturalism in art? Lectures will harness case studies from both northern and southern Europe, and put the works of canonical artists (e.g. Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Diego Velázquez) alongside lesser known figures. Major topics will include: the manipulation of technologies like perspective and oil paint; “scientific” representations of the nature by Italian and Netherlandish painters; approaches to rendering the human body; still-lifes and portraits by women painters; discourse on imitation in 17th-century art theory and practice; the relationship between naturalism and conceptions of foreignness; the study of “unseen” nature through microscopes, telescopes, and navigation; and the creation of “alternate realities” in churches, theaters, and Wunderkammern.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ARTH 3227
Note: Same as RLGN 3227.
From its beginnings as a loose-knit group of wandering ascetics in ancient India, Buddhism developed into a monastic religion that diversified and spread across Asia, producing great buildings and monuments of wood and stone and furnishing them with a rich array of paintings and sculptures. This course will focus on the Buddhist art and architecture of South, Central, and East Asia, seeking to understand and interpret it within the specific social, institutional, mythical, and ritual contexts in which it was produced and used. Thus, for example, when examining the ground plans and architectural features of Buddhist monasteries in different parts of Asia, we will also study the internal organization and operation of those institutions, reading the rules of individual and group discipline that regulated them and learning about the various religious practices and ceremonial observances that took place in them. The aim is to explore the complex connections that exist between architectural forms and social and religious functions and meanings. By the same token, when looking at works of Buddhist art, we will not only concern ourselves with matters of iconography, style, provenance, and dating. We will also learn about the various iconic and non–iconic functions that Buddhist art has had in a wide range of cultic and social settings, and will study the religious doctrines, ideology, mythology, and folklore that has informed its production and use at different times and places.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
ARTH 2044
What was modern art? How did artists respond to a changing world—one altered by fascism, colonization and anti-colonial protest, war and mass migration, the legacies of enslavement, and rationalized forms of labor? What representational strategies did artists use to respond to modernity, to remake the world anew? This course will move in and out of canonical accounts of modernism (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Mexican Muralism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.) to tell the story of modernism through the work of underrepresented artists—artists of the Black Atlantic and Latin America, queer and trans artists, artists of color, women artists, and artists seen as “outside” the canon. We will look to discourses of leftist politics and collectivity, feminist struggle, abolitionism and antiracist discourse. The emphasis of this course will be on the global plurality of modernism, shifting our understanding of where modernism was produced, when, and by whom. This course will serve as an introduction to art history in the sense that it will equip students with the basic tools of close, slow looking and of descriptive writing about art, art historical research, and practices of curatorial display while also introducing students to broad and diverse histories of modern art. The course will also include field trips to New York City museums. This course is a lecture with weekly seminars. One lecture a week will introduce you to the broader movements, while weekly seminars will look at specific case studies and scholarly approaches to writing about contemporary art.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ARTH 3104
Although 19th-century art in the United States encompassed a wide range of stylistic movements––Impressionism, Realism, Romanticism, Tonalism, the Hudson River School, and Folk Art, among them––many artists shared a common fascination: water. Dangerous oceans, seductive shorelines, and industrial man-made waterways emerged as recurring subjects. While artists used images of maritime scenes to negotiate new understandings of the bounds of a new nation, water also offered possibilities for visualizing a fluid, borderless world that could connect regions, religions, ecosystems, and temporalities. Drawing on the emerging field of the Blue Humanities—an interdisciplinary approach that explores the cultural and historical significance of water—this seminar will examine how artists represented seas, rivers, ports, and coastal environments. Adding to traditional narratives of American art, we will explore how artists used waterways to examine the US’ relationship to Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America. Topics will include painted waterscapes, port scenes, and ship portraits, including Childe Hassam’s impressionist dedication to fixing the “moment” long-traveling waters touched New England shores, Winslow Homer’s realist interpretation of transoceanic migration and inequity, and Fitz H. Lane’s romantic rendering of US ships triumphing over perilous, international seas. Our discussions will be augmented by attending to diverse makers working outside of traditional fine art, including within the material cultures of maritime trade, from pearls to shell souvenirs and carved whalebone; folk depictions of mariners and their relationship to constructions of race, gender, and sexuality at sea; popular visual cultures of enslavement, migration, and displacement across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds; military representations of naval warfare, imperialism, and resistance; and print illustrations of technologies that transformed global mobility, including steamships, canals, and underwater telegraph cables. Through artworks, readings, and museum visits in New York City and the Hudson River Valley, students will engage with historical and contemporary scholarship on water, fluidity, mobility, and interconnectedness. Together, we will investigate the history of 19th-century art from the perspective of the oceans, rivers, and waterways that linked artists to the wider world.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
ARTH 2038
This course will pose questions about the ontology of architecture and our role in engaging its global expressions. Focusing on provocative case studies in a lecture-discussion format, this survey of architectural history will draw material from antiquity to the present, from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. Students will learn how to describe architectural material properties, siting, function, and experience, and how to interpret them through larger dynamics of subsistence practices, trade, conquest, and ideological implementation. Subverting previous canonical approaches to architectural history, the goal of this course is not to identify and memorize a series of period styles, but to explore the social realities of architecture, and what it means to grapple with a culture that is different from your own. Through challenging analytical comparisons, primary texts, and hands-on exercises, students will learn that our categorization and interpretation of the other cultures is often heavily laden with assumptions. We will ask difficult questions. As we free ourselves from linear, binary, and anachronistic conceptions of nature, divinity, time, and purpose, we will become well-situated to imagine and respect other spatial realities, and of course, to reshape our own.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
ARTH 3012
Given their geographical setting at the northwestern extreme of Europe, the arts and cultures of “Albion,” or Britain and Ireland, have often been described by the term “insular” in the sense of isolated, discrete, or peripheral—yet nothing could be further from the truth. No less than six Roman emperors spent time in Britain, and four came to power there. To a great extent, Irish clerics were responsible for the survival of classical learning during the Dark Ages. Indeed, throughout history, cultural developments in the British Isles were intimately related to ideas and events on the European Continent and the Mediterranean. Following this basic premise, in the fall semester the course will examine civilization in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age or Megalithic period, through the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, to the coming of the Celts and the Roman conquest. In the spring, we will focus on later Roman Britain, Irish monasticism, and the emergence of Anglo-Saxon culture down to the arrival of the Vikings. At every turn, we will consider interactions with the urban civilizations to the south and west—the early Aegean, Greece, Rome, and the early medieval Continent—to discover that Albion was an integral part of the political, religious, and economic forces that shaped the art and history of Europe up to the present time.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
ARTH 3115
How did Baroque viewers engage with and view Baroque art? Often, these interactions were substantially shaped by the environment where the spectatorial encounter took place. This seminar will contextualize a wide range of aesthetic objects in the social spaces where they would have been viewed and/or used in 17th-century Europe. Classes will explore topics including: the interaction between altarpieces, church architecture, and Christian rituals of devotion; the experience of decorations and furnishings in specialized areas of palaces and villas (e.g. audience chambers, grand halls, studioli, gardens, grottoes); the display of collectables in cabinets of curiosity and the provocation of “marvel”; and the staging of public sculptures, monuments, and festivals in court cities. Consideration will also be given to technology (e.g. telescopes, microscopes), images (e.g. maps, globes ), and texts (e.g. travelogues) which afforded Baroque people access to distant or foreign worlds. Together, we will adopt a mode of interpreting artworks and objects that not only takes into account readily apparent elements of form and design, but also attends to matters of space, embodiment, and cultural practice. We will meditate on the difficulties of representing these historically-contingent and site-specific conditions of spectatorship in the present, addressing modern scholarly and museological practices with a critical eye. Throughout the semester, students will work towards developing their own exhibition revolving around a particular “Baroque space" and its objects. The course will also involve visits to nearby museums and galleries.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
ARTH 2039
This course will explore the art and architecture of Spain and of Latin America as its lands emerged from colonialism to forge strong independent identities. We will focus on selected topics, including extraordinary artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Cabrera, and Aleijadinho, as well as on complex issues surrounding art and identity in contested and textured lands—in particular, Casta painting, colonialism, and arts of revolution and national identity.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
ARTH 2250
Taking a global approach, this course will look at how artists redefined the mediums, materials, and hierarchies of modernism in the postwar period. We will look closely at how artists embraced radicality, by protesting for civil rights, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and claiming an antiwar politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This radicality shifted in the 1990s with the rise of neoliberalism and the global art market, and we will investigate changes in contemporary art and its display after 1990. Movements this course will explore include: Gutai, Neoconcretism, Happenings, Pop Art, Fluxus, minimalism, global conceptualism, site-specificity, Earthworks, the Chicano Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, feminism, video art, institutional critique, installation, activist art, participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, Craft, new media, biennials, and the global art museum. Throughout, we will focus on specific artworks and gain a vocabulary for close looking, while also attending to primary sources (manifestos, letters, statements, poems) and secondary, art historical, and theoretical accounts. Assignments will include papers (based on works in New York City museums and galleries), peer reviews, presentations, reading responses, a contextual research essay, and a group curatorial assignment. This course will be taught in a lecture-seminar hybrid style. One lecture a week will be presented to introduce students to the broader movements. Weekly group conferences will look at case studies of artists and representational issues.
Faculty