Art History and Architecture   

A continuation of the spring course,  this class will resume the exploration of some of the best art collections and eclectic art collectors in the United States. Returning to New York City, we will see some of the earliest art on display at The Cloisters and return to the Met to see its renown Annenberg Collection among other highlights. Following stops at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, we will continue to cross the country looking at the foundations of some of America's most notable art museums, such as The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AK, and The Getty and Norton Simon of Los Angeles.

This class examines the history and cultural importance of Chinese and Japanese gardens. The first two weeks focus on Chinese gardens, beginning with the earliest gardens, evolution of different garden styles, and ending with a focus on the scholar gardens of Suzhou. The next three classes focus on the history and evolution of Japanese gardens, including the different categories of Japanese gardens, with a primary focus on gardens in Kyoto.

This course will continue a series on architectural masterworks of the 20th  century, by examining five more houses built in the middle of the century, at the height of the Modern movement. Each lecture will focus on one house and its architect, examining the architect’s schematic strategies, theoretic postulates, and material executions. The five houses reviewed will be the Schroder house by Grerrit Rietveld (1925), Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier (1928-1931), Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright (1935-1937), Farnsworth house by Mies van der Rohe (1945-1951), and the Glass House by Philip Johnson (1948-1949).

This course explores the art and architecture of ancient Greece, from temples and tombs to pottery and paintings. Structured chronologically, illustrated lectures explore the visual arts of ancient Greece by period, from its beginning in the Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1200 BCE) to the end of the Hellenistic Period (ca. 323-31 BCE). The focus is key monuments and works of art and the artistic and technological developments that gave rise to them, an archaeological approach that considers the social function of Greek art in its wider Mediterranean context.

This course is about the roles of women in and around photography from the 1830s to the 1980s. The history of photography is often framed in terms of the work of well-known individual photographers. This class will have plenty of those, from cornerstone figures like Julia Margaret Cameron in the 1860s, to Dorothea Lange in the 1930s and Diane Arbus in the 1960s. Many more women photographers have received increasing attention in recent years, such as pictorialist Anne Brigman and documentarian Jill Freedman. Beyond the work of prominent individuals, members will widen their field of vision to other roles women have played—as photographic subjects, as bridge-builders, as targeted consumers, and as thinkers who have steered the ongoing conversation about photography in culture.