We covered a lot during our session around Urban Space! If you want to see the all 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series online, there’s a nice presentation of it on the Phillips Collection website. James Van Der Zee’s whole collection is now going to be co-managed by the Met Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem — about 20,000 prints and 30,000 negatives! Here’s hoping we get to see a lot more of his photos soon. You can watch a little video about that below:
Lehman ARH 141: Intro To Modern Art (2)
19th and 20th Centuries in Europe and the United States
Author Archives: Jessica Bal
Land Art, Architecture, Sculpture, Landscape!
It was great to see your takes and diagrams in respond to Rosalind Krauss’s dilemma: defining landscape, architecture, sculpture and Land Art (which also overlap!) I’ve attached photos below to document what you all came up with. Safe to say it can be hard to differentiate these four once we really start to think about them philosophically! If you are interested in seeing a contemporary Land Artist in action, I highly recommend watching either of the documentaries about Andy Goldsworthy mentioned in class: Rivers and Tides (2001) and Leaning Into the Wind (2018).
Describe & Draw, and Defining Terms
Great first session! Your drawings and instructive descriptions for your drawings were great (and creative!) We’ll come back to your definitions of “art history” and what makes something “modern” by the end of class to see if our ideas around these big concepts have changed over the course of the semester.
Welcome!
Welcome to Intro to Modern Art! I’m excited to get started and get to know you. We’ll be covering a lot (but not nearly everything, because that’s impossible!) over this semester, from Land Art to Surrealism, photography to installation art and sculpture. I encourage you to take a look at the SYLLABUS page for general information about the class, the SCHEDULE page for a detailed breakdown of each week and the themes we’ll be exploring in modern art, and finally the ASSIGNMENTS page for what to expect in terms of grading and work for the course. Under RESOURCES, I’ve provided a list of museums and galleries (and how to get free or discounted admission!), plus some handy campus resources to be aware of. If you haven’t yet, please fill out this short survey to give me a better sense of who you are and what you’re looking to get out of this class.
Finally, a little about me: I’m a current PhD student in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and my research is focused on the history of photography. I worked for about a decade as a photojournalist before coming back to school, and spent a while doing different kinds of work within the photo industry (helping to produce a public photo festival in NYC, supporting an award-winning documentary photographer, teaching high schoolers at NYU, and lots more). I’m passionate about how visual language and images impact our understanding of the world. Outside of work I love rock climbing, gaming, gardening (with mixed results), and attempting to sew my own clothes (also mixed results).
