Visual Culture courses - Winter 2024

Poster for Vcult 101 with the text that is on the website decorated with an image of a person wrapped in red ribbon and an image of a polluted industrial landscape.

VCULT 101 | FINE 101: Art History & Visual Culture: It’s about how we see our world

This course explores visual culture as a vital form of communication throughout world cultures and histories. By looking at visual media – painting, sculpture, monuments, architecture, textiles, photography, film, digital platforms, etc. – we consider how contemporary and historical examples communicate and reflect cultural currents from where they were made and by whom, and, as importantly, how they inform and often shape our lives. The primary goal is to recognize and analyze the powerful role visual culture plays in human histories and societies. 

This course fulfills the Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts Breadth Requirement. No prereq required.

This is a hybrid course, consisting of once-a-week in-class lectures/discussions and a series of mini-projects and larger research project completed outside of class time.  

Course times: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:20. Attendance is required at only one class per week.   

Poster for FINE 282 with the text that is on the website decorated with an Emily Carr painting of a totem pole figure holding a smaller figure to its chest and a William Hind painting of a settler encampment on the prairies.

FINE 282: Canadian Art, 17th century to c. 1940 (Encounters)

This course explores imperial and settler perceptions of ‘Canada’ from the late 17th century to about 1940. The theme is encounters: European explorers and settlers brought socio-economic systems and cultural and aesthetic ‘baggage’ with them and this fundamentally informed how they perceived the Indigenous peoples, the land, and the spaces in the country they would call Canada. Through case studies, we will analyze some of these visual ‘systems’ – painting, photography, architecture, monuments, etc. – and consider their impact both when they were created and into our own time.  

This course fulfills the Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts Breadth Requirement. No prereq required.

Course times: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:50.  

Poster for Approaches to Ancient Art course ANTH 489 in Winter 2024 with an image of cave painting of animals from Chauvet Cave

ANTH 489 Approaches to Ancient Art (Special Topics Seminar)

The course will take a topical or thematic approach that looks at things like representation and presence, ekphrasis, gesture, spectatorship, connoisseurship, replicas/fakes, and futurisms through a variety of case studies. The case studies would feature archaeological materials from a number of settings and time periods.

For information contact professor Christopher Watts (c3watts@uwaterloo.ca)