History of Art & Architecture

The History of Art & Architecture concentration offers training in the interpretation and critical analysis of art and architecture. It develops skills in visual discrimination and verbal expression which are of fundamental value to your life at Harvard and beyond. Undergraduates may pursue a Concentration with a Track in HAA or Architecture Studies, or a Secondary Field. To learn more about the undergraduate courses, please visit the department website. Architecture Studies track students can find a list of recommended GSD courses here.

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Jennifer Roberts
Undergraduate Program Coordinator: Marcus Mayo

Gateway Courses

Spring 2024

GENED 1022 Vision & Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship
Sarah Lewis

How does culture—from images of racial violence to Confederate monuments—determine who counts and who belongs in the United States?

This course is organized around a guiding question: How has visual representation both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Today, as we are awash with images, and as social media has allowed us to witness racially motivated injustices with a speed unimaginable until recently, we have had to call upon skills of visual literacy to remain engaged global citizens. This course will allow us to understand the understudied historic roots and contemporary outgrowth of this crucial function of visual literacy for justice in American civic life.

Sequenced chronologically, the lectures are organized into three parts, examining the role of visual representation as Civic Evidence, as Civic Critique, and as Civic Engagement (i.e. movement building and solidarity). Exploring these three categories in turn, topics include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, narratives supporting and critiquing Native American “removal,” the abolition of transatlantic slavery, immigration, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the New Negro Movement, Japanese Internment, and the long Civil Rights movement. Each lecture centers on case studies to show the historic roots of the contemporary interplay between visual representation and justice at these inflection points in the contestation for citizenship in America.

We are fortunate to have invaluable holdings at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Peabody Museum and via Cooper Gallery exhibitions that vividly showcase this contested relationship between art, justice, race, and culture over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Lectures will incorporate material from these holdings and sections will meet at these locations to facilitate object-based study. This course will also include guest lectures from architect Michael Murphy and artist Theaster Gates. Students will leave the course having developed rigorous skills of visual literacy and critical analysis foundational to be engaged global citizens regardless of their concentration or future field of study.

GENED 1083 Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments
Jinah Kim, Eugene Wang

Why do Buddhists build monuments despite the core teaching of ephemerality, and what can we learn from this paradox about our own conception of time and space?

Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences. Ironically, however, many of these same communities have attempted to express these teachings in the form of monumental structures meant to stand the test of time. Some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage sites are a legacy of this seeming contradiction between the impermanence that is a central presupposition of Buddhist thought and the permanence to which these same monuments seem to aspire. If the world is characterized by emptiness and the Self is illusory, how does one account for the prodigious volume of art and architecture created by Buddhists throughout history? This Gen Ed course takes a multicultural and reflective engagement with the challenges presented by this conundrum through a study of Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space. Pertinent topics such as cosmology, pilgrimage, materiality, relics, meditation, and world-making will be explored. Through these Buddhist monuments in South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.

GENED 1156 Modern Art & Modernity
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Maria Gough, David Joselit

What role do artistic practices play in the formation of modern culture and society, and how does art foster critical reflection and debate?

How has modernity—understood as a socio-economic reality, technological condition, cultural discourse, and set of aesthetic practices—redefined the purpose and function of art over the past three hundred years or so?  What role has modern art played in the constitution of the modern experience of subjectivity?  Beginning in the early 18thC and concluding in the early 21stC, the course traces art’s transformation from a tool of power elites into an instrument also of broad public instruction and civic debate on controversial topics.  By learning about the diversity of ways in which modern artists have contributed to the production and critique of cultural and social life you will acquire the skills to make the most of your experience of art exhibitions and museums.  This knowledge of the long history of modern art will help you better navigate a cultural present characterized by the ever-greater importance in everyday life of the production and consumption of images. It will also enable you to gain a deeper awareness of how art participates in critical dissent and aesthetic speculation in today's troubled world.  

FYSEMR 63W Vegetal Humanities
Carrie Lambert-Beatty

This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones. Suddenly, we have plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and botany-based forms of philosophy, architecture, music and more. Following the lead of these culture-makers and their work, we will draw on the new science of plant communication and learning in this class; uncover plant-based histories and renew ancient understandings of human-plant relations. But plants themselves will also be primary sources, as each student follows a sequence of exercises to deepen understanding of a plant "interviewee"—one they'll grow at home from an unidentified seed. At the same time, we will ask critical questions: with climate crisis upon us, in a time of social inequity, poisonous politics, and mass dislocations, why this attraction to plants? Is the vegetal turn a diversion from tough human problems? Or is there reason to think a cultural change could, even now, change the fate of nature?

HAA 11 Landmarks of World Architecture
Patricio del Real, team-taught

Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various historical periods and diverse cultures across the world. Weekly discussion sections will develop thematically, expanding on the given examples to focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.

HAA 13 Introduction to Greek Art and Archaeology
Seth Estrin

This course provides an introduction to the art and archaeology of ancient Greece between ca. 1000 BCE and 200 BCE, from the early settlements of the Geometric period to the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms. To modern eyes, Greek art can appear at once familiar and foreign, its imagery and artistic forms both instantly recognizable and difficult to parse. Over the course of the semester, we will gain the cultural knowledge necessary to look at ancient artifacts and monuments as their original makers and viewers might have seen them. We will develop the art-historical skills necessary to investigate a range of materials and techniques, stories and myths, practices and ideologies, all of which informed the way Greek art was produced and experienced. Participants will learn how to describe Greek art in ways that are both sensitive to historical context and informed by the scholarly practices that transform archaeological discoveries into history.  

HAA 15 Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art
Shawon Kinew

What is known as the Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformation, and it is a history whose legacy we have inherited. From the construction of the liberal arts to the Doctrine of Discovery (only rejected by the Vatican in 2023), we live with the traditions of this period and its repercussions. Artists reached an unprecedented stature creating some of the most powerful works of art in Europe. This course traces an artistic narrative that moves from Giotto to Caravaggio as it coincided with Columbus’ disastrous voyages, the Sack of Rome and the Catholic Reformation. We will look closely at the art of Masaccio, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael and their contemporaries. We will be attentive to meaning and interpretation, both the ways artists made meaning and the ways we find it the Italian Renaissance, in its beauty and in its power.

HAA 17G Australian First Nations Art and Culture: We have survived
Brenda Croft

Australian First Nations’ arts and cultural practices and cosmological beliefs span 60,000+ years, with Australian First Nations' Peoples standing firm in the belief that they have been here since deep time associated with Australian First Nations' Ancestral Beings, creation stories and cosmologies. This course explores the diversity of pre-contact, post-contact Australian First Nations' arts and cultural manifestations, from customary to contemporary representations, incorporating diverse media and trans-disciplinary platforms. Critical Australian First Nations Performance, Collaborative Autoethnography and Storywork will be represented through communal, individual, personal and political manifestations.

The course in Australian First Nations’ visual arts and culture has three main aims:
1. Provide students with basic geographical, historical and contextual frameworks for the study of Australian First Nations’ visual arts and culture in mainland Australia, Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islands.
2. Familiarize students with concepts that are fundamental to Australian First Nations’ understandings of the interconnected relationships between art, culture and life, both historically (pre- and early post-contact, up to the early 20th century) and in a contemporary (early 20th - present-day) context.
3. Assist students in developing ideas about how contemporary Australian First Peoples’ visual arts and cultures contribute to cross-cultural critical theory, representation and identity, and trans-disciplinary practice and research.

Wherever possible collections and exhibitions at national arts, cultural, social history and archival institutions are used as part of the teaching and learning experience. Upon successful completion, students will have the knowledge and skills to:
1. identify historical and geographical origins of Australian First Nations’ Arts, Culture and Cultural Practices.
2. conduct culturally relevant critical appreciation of Australian First Nations’ Arts, Culture and Cultural Practices.
3. develop cross-cultural awareness in the processes of interpretation of Australian First Nations’ Arts, Culture and Cultural Practices.
4. research and access culturally appropriate and, whenever possible, scholarly information on Australian First Nations’ Arts, Culture and Cultural Practices; and
5. speak and write with appropriate cultural sensitivity and awareness on Australian First Nations’ Arts, Culture and Cultural Practices.

Cultural institutions and collections at Harvard will be actively engaged with throughout the course: the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology collection, specifically Australian First Nations cultural material, and the Harvard Film Archive. Guest lectures will be part of this course and possible site visits (TBC). This course will also reference international First Nations/Indigenous and Native American content/context where applicable.

HAA 18P Introduction to Japanese Woodblock Prints
Yukio Lippit

This course provides an introduction to Japanese art and cultural history through a survey of the Japanese woodblock print from its emergence in the mid-17th century to the modern era. Technical developments, major genres, and master designers are explored within the context of Japan's pictorial traditions and evolving urban culture. Topics for consideration include aesthetic discourse, censorship, erotica, Japonisme, the construction of social identity, print culture, and the representation of war.

HAA 79 Indigenous Art History of the Great Lakes: From the Pictograph to the Beaded Medallion 
Alan Corbiere

This class focuses on Indigenous art from the pre-contact era to the modern day, concentrating on the Great Lakes area and its peripheries. The course will explore enduring iconic symbols used by Indigenous people through time and space to communicate stories, teachings, and information. Attention will be paid to the transference of symbols from one medium to another, such as rock faces to birchbark, quillwork to beadwork, leather to cloth, vermillion to acrylic paints. The art will be viewed from an Indigenous perspective, employing a decolonial methodology to explore issues of identity, artistic movements, inspiration, influence, commodity, art as critique, art as response, and art as survivance (survival and resistance). Some of the artists to be featured include pipemakers, rock painters, scroll creators, mapmakers, weavers, quillworkers, beadworkers, wampum belt makers, Pwaaganiked, Abonwaishkum, Dennis Cusick, Ernest Smith, Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau, Robert Houle, Isaac Murdoch, Michael Belmore, Shelly Niro, Sam Thomas and others. Art, symbols, techniques, forms, icons, archetypes, stories, motifs, and media will be analyzed and situated diachronically and synchronically within an Indigenous cultural and knowledge revitalization paradigm.