MUSE 600:
Museum Studies: History and Theory (4)
(Core).
This foundational seminar provides an interdisciplinary survey of major
approaches, theories, issues, and debates in the field of Museum Studies. (Offered fall)
MUSE 601: Cultural and Financial Management (4)
(Core).
This seminar provides tools
for managing and running cultural institutions in the 21st century,
including units on financial management, budgeting, fundraising, the visitor
experience, human resources and strategic planning. (Offered fall)
MUSE 602: Museums and Social Justice (4) (Core).
In
this seminar, students assess why museums should be engaged in social justice
issues and then deeply explore three core issues and how three San Francisco Bay
Area institutions are addressing them in order to propose appropriate
institutional interventions and programs. The course exposes students to how
museums are addressing the shifting politics of identity and equality at
global, national and local levels. By working with three local institutions on
the representation of diversity and human rights issues, students realize the
potential of museums to contribute to more equitable, fair and just societies. (Offered spring)
MUSE 603: Collections Management and
Preservation (4) (Core).
This course provides an introduction to collection stewardship and the
fundamentals of preservation in the museum environment. Issues covered include
documentation, materials, agents of deterioration, preventive care methodologies,
terminology, legal framework, and related technology. The course frames
preservation today as one of many co-existing mandates within a museum and
analyzes preservation strategies using a holistic approach. (Offered
spring)
MUSE 605: Curatorial Studies Practicum (4) (Elective).
In
this course, students develop a historical and theoretical basis and direct,
professional practice in fundamental areas of curatorial/museum studies. Topics
include the evolving definitions and responsibilities of a museum curator, the
'objects’ and interpretative approaches of curatorial purview, best curatorial practices
and a variety of issues related to the building, research and display of a
coherent collection. Students participate in numerous, hands-on, curatorial
workshops, and curate a professional, public exhibition using USF’s
Thacher Gallery, Donohue Rare Book Room or other local venue. (Offered
every other fall, beginning fall 2014)
MUSE 606 (cross-listed with ART 345):
Exhibition Design Practicum (4) (Elective).
This course provides students with hands-on experience in the planning, design,
and installation of a public exhibition for the university’s Thacher Gallery.
Coursework will include independent student research, sustained project work,
and critiques, placing equal emphasis on concepts (content development) and
craft (signage production and artifact installation). Lectures, readings, and
guided discussions that pertain to the exhibition theme supplement project
work. To successfully complete this course, students will be expected to
understand and emulate the wide range of interpretive strategies that
distinguish the artifact-based museums of the early 20th century to
the experience-based museums of today. (Offered
every other spring, beginning spring 2015)
MUSE 607: Museums and the Law Practicum (4) (Elective).
Students explore the application
of legal principles to museum practices through case studies and discussions.
Areas covered include accessioning and de-accessioning policies, stolen work
and cultural patrimony issues, tax and intellectual property concerns and the
legal impact of technology and new fundraising strategies on museums. (Offered every
other fall, beginning fall 2013)
MUSE 608: Museums and Technology Practicum
(4) (Elective).
In this course, students explore the impact and use of
social media and Internet technology on the museum, including a thorough
examination of the current uses and effects of digitization, the Internet and
commercial wireless technologies in the museum setting. Students will survey
relevant technologies, engage with guest lectures by technology and museum
professionals and develop an innovative technology project for a museum. (Offered every other spring, beginning
spring 2014)
MUSE 610: Graduate Internship (4) (Core).
This full-time internship (35
hours per week completed over 12 weeks) places students in a museum setting
where they complete a major project under the guidance of an on-site museum
supervisor and a museum studies faculty member (project areas might include:
collections management, project management, technology, research, community
outreach, visitor services, educational programming, fund raising, public
relations, curating of exhibitions, among other fields). This is an on-line
course and may be completed remotely in a location of the student’s
choice. For those wishing to intern in the San Francisco Bay Area, partner
organizations include: the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (De Young Museum
and Legion of Honor), the San Francisco Museum of Modern art (SFMOMA), the
California Academy of Sciences, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the
Exploratorium, the Museum of Craft and Design, the National Japanese-American
Historical Society, the Walt Disney Family Museum, the SFO Museum and many others. Students
design and execute a project relating theory to practice as part of their
internship experience and craft a Final Report and digital portfolio to share
and analyze their findings. (Offered summer).
MUSE 630: Museum Project Management: Capstone
(4) (Core).
This final capstone professional practice course covers both
the tools and techniques of project management as it applies to several kinds
of museum activities such as collections digitization and inventory, exhibition
development and participatory exhibition design, special events, capital
campaigns and so on. Students examine various components and pitfalls of
project management. They will then apply this model to design a specific
project typically undertaken in a museum. The M.A. program concludes with
graduating students’ public presentations of their capstone projects in tandem
with this course just prior to the December
graduation ceremony. (Offered fall).
Elective Courses Cross-Listed with the B.A. program in Art
History/Arts Management:
MUSE 652/ART 302 - Renaissance Art (4)
This upper-division seminar explores issues and moments in
European art and visual culture, circa 1400-1600, with an emphasis on the early
modern visual traditions in Italy and the Lowlands. Weekly class meetings focus
on individual topics such as: Humanist Art and Republican Values in Early
Renaissance Florence, the Medici and the Age of Lorenzo the Magnificent,
Botticelli as Visual Poet, Leonardo da Vinci: Drawing and Visual Knowledge,
Papal Power and Visual Propaganda in Early 16th-Century Rome, Michelangelo
and the Robust Male Nude, Gender, Virtue(s) and Social Status in Renaissance
Portraiture and Courtly Art in the Burgundian Netherlands.
MUSE 653/ART 303 – Baroque Art: From Rome to Versailles (4)
This upper-division seminar examines topics in Baroque
painting, sculpture and architecture, with special attention to the varied
visual, cultural and religious traditions that flourished in and around some of
the major urban areas of 17th-century Europe, including Rome,
Antwerp, Amsterdam and Paris. Focusing on the works of Caravaggio, the
Carracci, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Poussin, the course trains a
special eye on issues such as the rise of the famed, international artist in
the 17th-century, church and court patronage in the post-Tridentine
period, the impact of the devastating Thirty Years’ War and the expansion of
global exploration and trade on European artistic practice, and shifting
conceptions of painting in the new Dutch Republic and the French court of Louis
XIV.
MUSE 655/ART 305 – Modern & Contemporary Art (4)
This upper-division seminar takes into account new
approaches to the study of visual culture—including painting, sculpture,
photography, performance, video, architecture—from 1945 to the present. Through
thematic and monographic case studies, students investigate questions about artistic
identity, the status and function of art in the post-World War II period, and
the changing nature of avant-garde practices in the wake of the social,
cultural, and economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Moving along a clear
timeline, the course looks at key movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop
Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Feminist Art, Postmodernism, performance and
video art to explore the political, theoretical and issue-based debates that
have inspired the art and criticism since 1945. Throughout the course, students
examine the political and social context for contemporary art practice and
criticism, including the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, the
anti-war movement, postmodernism and globalization.
MUSE 656/ART 306 – Women & Art (4)
This course examines the history of female artists from the
Middle Ages to the present, with an emphasis on artists working in Europe and
the United States for the first half of the course, and a global perspective on
modern and contemporary art for the second. Students explore how the identity
of the “woman artist” has been socially constructed over time, with particular
emphasis upon how gender and sexual-identity, social class, race, and ethnicity
have informed both artistic creation and reception. The course addresses how
art history and institutions (educational and exhibition forums) have accounted
for—or failed to account for—women's artistic production in a global context.
MUSE 657/ART 307 – Asian Art (4)
This lecture course examines periods and monuments of Asian
art from India, China, and Japan, and offers an introduction to the methods of
art-historical analysis. Emphasis will be placed on the understanding of works
of art in their original religious, intellectual, political, and social
contexts, with particular attention to the ways each developed characteristics
appropriate to these contexts. Among the topics to be explored are ritual arts,
Buddhist art (painting, sculpture, and architecture), secular painting, and
garden architecture.
MUSE 658/ART 308 – African Art (4)
This introductory class helps students gain knowledge and
appreciation of the plastic and kinetic arts of sub-Saharan Africa. Mythology,
masking traditions, ritual and spirituality, gender and cultural issues of
traditional and contemporary African cultures are examined through slide
lectures, videos, and museum visits.
MUSE 659/ART 309 – Art of the Americas (4)
This course surveys the arts of the
Americas from pre-Columbian North and South America through the present. The course emphasizes the native arts of
the Americas in the broadest sense by examining the work of native cultures,
immigrant cultures with special attention to Latino art.
MUSE 661/ART 311 - Medieval Art & Society (4)
Contemporary thinking about the art of the Middle Ages is
often dominated by a long-standing prejudice and propensity to see it as
somehow "backward," “simplistic,” or lacking in intrinsic interest or
value. However, a wealth of art historical scholarship over the past few
decades has begun to recapture the ways a vast array of medieval art and
architecture reflects the unique cultural and intellectual concerns, compelling
religious, economic and political circumstances, and complex social challenges
of a lengthy and fascinating stretch of European history. This seminar
highlights significant “moments” and monuments of the long Middle Ages, with an
eye to underscoring some of the incredible richness and sophistication of
medieval artistic production from the beginnings of Christian art through the
late Gothic period.
MUSE 690/ART 390 – Special Topics in Art History (4)
One-time offerings of special interest courses in art
history.
