Taking a diverse, global view of art making from the Ancient to the Modern world, ARHT1001 will introduce students to key philosophical and methodological approaches in the field of Art History. As our experiences are increasingly mediated through a variety of visual platforms, this course will help students develop critical perspectives on visual communication. The development of professional skill sets will be a key focus. As such, the course serves as an essential introduction to Art History for those considering a career in the arts, education, or the museum and design sectors.

Art shapes our cities, streets, galleries, phones and minds. It is now made with every conceivable material, and sometimes none at all. It shocks, challenges, soothes, entertains, engrosses and overwhelms us. This unit charts the history of Modern and Contemporary Art across the world, as it is shaped by and shapes society, politics and environment. It shows current concerns in art , with materials, landscape, self-image, politics, and the body are grounded in a century of global experiment

This unit explores Romantic Art in Europe from 1780-1830, emphasizing the relationship of this art with wider social, cultural, philosophical and literary currents. We explore the most compelling Romantic art and architecture, including works by Caspar David Friedrich, Blake, Turner, and Delacroix.

This unit explores the flowering of artistic achievement in Renaissance Italy. We investigate the visual culture of republics (Florence, Venice) and princely courts (Urbino, Ferrara, Rimini, Mantua and Milan). Artists studied include Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero, Mantegna and Bellini.

At the great courts of the seventeenth century, artists painted, sculpted and built vast programs of works to completely overwhelm the senses. Grand pavilions and gardens, sumptuous clothes and décor, and extravagant spectacles drew audiences into a world shaped by artifice and etiquette. This course will consider why the artist was an essential ally for those with absolutist ambitions.

This unit studies the interplay between high art and popular culture in America from the 1950s onwards. Pop Art, Minimalism and Performance formed alongside emerging youth cultures of political protest, drugs and rock music. We examine the interactions of high art, youth culture and mass media.

The Unit of Study will explore a range of alternative approaches to some of the most famous works of art in the Western tradition, including works by Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. Topics to be investigated include: problems of definition in High Renaissance and Mannerist art; Rome under Julius II and the creation of an imperial capital; Venetian visual poesie; art and dynastic display in Medicean Florence; civic ritual and public space; eroticism and mythology at princely courts; portraiture and gender.

This unit treats French Art in terms of the cultural structures that allowed academic art, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to emerge. Mainstream art is studied alongside emerging avant-gardes. Other topics include nationalism, exoticism, and peripheral versus metropolitan modernism.

What is contemporary art? Today we encounter art on our phones, in the street, at festivals, in the natural environment as well as in galleries. We explore art's expanded field from a global perspective. Themes include the art of de-colonisation, globalization, art and environment, feminism and queer art, traditional and new media, art as spectacle, art curating, aesthetic value, art and the everyday. We spend time at the Biennale of Sydney, explore university collections and city galleries, adding our voices to current art debate.

This unit examines Australian art, cinema and popular imagery from 1880-1940, situating them within the global history of modernism and modernity. Themes include the landscape tradition, national identity, war, gender, and indigenous issues, with special focus on the Australian film industry.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait art is the major Australian movement of the last 50 years. Surveying its development from Papunya Tula to the present, the unit focuses on critical issues like appropriation and copyright, art and native title, women artists, the market and curatorial practices.

This unit explores contemporary art from across Asia since World War II. The unit places artistic developments, curatorial practice, and artworks within the context of rapid geo-political and socio-cultural change, particularly exploring the effects of nationalism and globalisation.

This unit explores the art, architecture and material culture of dynastic China (ca. 3000 BCE-1900), contextualizing works within the region's diverse social, political and cultural histories. The unit foregrounds focused interpretation of individual works through visual and material analysis.

This unit examines art and the culture of travel from a post-colonial perspective. The work of European Orientalists will be analysed alongside work by North African, Persian and Ottoman artists and in conjunction with photography, international exhibitions, travel literature and film

This unit offers an introduction to the study of dress through the discussion of major theories and methodologies that inform current scholarship in the field. With a focus on designers, wearers, and cultural practices of dressing the body, the unit will question how dress communicates as a form of visual expression.

Working in partnership with leading museums, this unit introduces students to object-based learning, and the study of artworks in situ. Driven by hands-on learning experiences, students will develop a core set of analytical and professional skills through the close examination of artworks as material and physical objects.

This unit studies contemporary and historical artists in relation to today's environmental crisis. Students
engage with how art objects and artmaking relate to issues pertaining to nature, ecology, and the
environment. Through visual and textual analysis, students gain interdisciplinary perspectives on art's place within contemporary posthumanist theories, the significance of ecological thinking to contemporary aesthetics, art's historical response to the impact of science and technology, and art's recognition of the importance of Indigenous knowledges to planetary ethics.

Students study contemporary and historical art in relation to collective or public memory, as well as personal memory. Memory as a subject, and memory as a tool, are considered in relation to the making of art objects and their reading. The unit looks at art's connection with the past, with history, trauma, loss and remembrance, as well as art's connection with identity, dreams, and childhood. Students gain informed perspectives on how memory is theorised as a phenomenon both real and imaginary, and why it memory often judged as more important to art than history.

We survey the complex arts, architecture and material culture of the Islamic world and explore critical debates that help us relate different traditions that encompass this broad category of visual culture. We introduce important global, transcultural, and transregional currents in art history through an object-oriented approach to teaching that includes the on-site study of gallery and museum collections.

Examining cinema as a manifestation of modernity, this unit of study contextualizes early film as art, commodity, industry, institution and mass production of the senses. It introduces students to the study of the history and aesthetics of silent cinema, including major genres such as melodrama and slapstick, and the impacts of the transition to sound.

This unit investigates art produced in Italy during the 14th century for a range of patrons, from bankers and merchants to kings, princes, city states and new religious orders like the Franciscans. Traditional narratives are critiqued and alternative interpretations encouraged.

This unit critically analyses the role of the visual arts in mediating the experience of urbanism in 19th-century Britain and its function across a global Empire. We undertake an in-depth study of the rich holdings of this art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

What are the current debates and issues driving Australian art and film? We explore contemporary studio practices through screenings, on-site gallery visits and the study of works in university and other local art and film collections.

This unit explores the diversity of Indigenous art practice and its inclusion within the fields of contemporary art. Through in-death visual analysis of individual artists and art producing communities, the unit will consider distinct Indigenous art practices and relate them to issues of cultural and political sovereignty, colonisation, land rights and representation. Problematising the historical and contemporary reception of Indigenous art, we aim to understand the Indigenous systems of value that shape the creation and circulation of Indigenous art.

This unit investigates key debates about the visual culture of East Asia in the early modern and modern eras. The impact of profound political and social changes on cultural identity will be explored in depth. We also consider the role of art in addressing evolving identities and increasing globalisation in the region.

This unit will draw on a wide range of photographic material, including university and museum collections, to examine the pivotal role of photography in recording and shaping our image-culture across diverse global contexts. The unit will engage with key debates to examine the social, cultural, theoretical, historical and art practice contexts of the photograph as an image and as an object. Key theories from Walter Benjamin to Hito Steyerl will be used to interrogate themes of memory, documentary and the real, witnessing, conflict, gender and sexuality, decolonisation, and the digital.

This unit investigates issues of gender and sexuality in art, visual culture and art history in modern and contemporary Asia from the 19th century to the present. Students will explore women- and/or queer-centred histories of the production and reception of art, and the rise of feminist and queer art and art history in parts of Asia.

This Senior Fieldwork unit takes students out of the classrooms and into major world cities to explore not only the history of architecture and public space but also the galleries, collections and artworks housed in the city. It offers a vital opportunity for students to learn with and from artworks, buildings, spaces and monuments in situ.

Students study contemporary and historical art made in response to the ebb and flow of daily life and the material conditions of the street, the city, and the home. They study key texts of the art and politics of the everyday and topics related to the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century theory and practice. Students will focus on artists who heighten awareness of the banal and mundane, of the detritus of life, of gendered distinctions between home and city, and the paradoxical revelation of the marvelous in the everyday.

This unit explores the art of Old Regime Europe, C. 1600-1789, through intensive study of objects from the period in local collections. Students will use their encounter with artworks in situ and up close to examine how art engages the power structures, ideologies, habits and daily lives of the courts and cities of eighteenth-century Europe.

This unit brings students into sustained contact with objects in the CCW Museum and challenges students to research and curate them. It is designed to build and test the key skills of art historians 'in the world' -from basic analysis of materials and techniques to complex questions of cultural meaning- by analyzing objects and the challenges they pose.

This course provides a thematic chronological survey of Islamic book arts, drawing on both visual traditions and key texts. Starting with early Qur'ans, we move to illustrated manuscripts, portraiture, and albums in the medieval and early modern periods, including several examples from Sydney's collections, and end with the shift to print cultures in the 19th century. Throughout this chronological overview, we explore themes and questions such as patronage, authorship, workshop practices, word-image relations, sensory experience, audience, transmission, connections with other media and manuscript cultures, as well as the collecting and display of works-on-paper in museums.

Explore digital technologies in the visual and performing arts, film and popular culture to analyse how new media transform the ways art is made and experienced. Discuss and evaluate their technologies, aesthetics, and how audiences interact with, and even produce them.

What is cinema in the twenty-first century? Where do we locate the essence of a medium that has undergone such a radical transformation? This course examines the intersection of film, digital cinema, and new media platforms such as YouTube, mobile cinemas, and virtual reality technologies. Where many have spoken of the death of cinema in a digital era, we will conceptualise the complexity of cinema's evolution from its earliest celluloid incarnation to the technologies of digital simulation.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

This unit is designed for third year students to undertake a project that allows them to work with one of the University's industry and community partners. Students will work in teams on a real-world problem provided by the partner. This experience will allow students to apply their academic skills and disciplinary knowledge to a real-world issue in an authentic and meaningful way.