Object Lab Spring 2025

Africana Studies 323
Comic Lives: Graphic Novels & Dangerous Histories of the African Diaspora
Professor Rashida Braggs

The graphic novel has provided a provocative medium for representing histories of the African diaspora. In Bayou, Jeremy Love references Dorothea Lange’s Plantation Owner photograph, shown here, but changes the power dynamic. The prominent white man and his car remain, but Love replaces the African American sharecroppers with an African American girl walking up the steps toward a group of white men who are standing by a Sheriff sign. Making connections with art here, students explore how the graphic novel uses word and image to deepen understandings of ethnic traumas.

Art History 108
Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous South America and the Caribbean
Professor Trenton Barnes

This introductory Art History and American Studies course covers the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native South America, focusing on the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures. Students learn not only about the cultures, but also the methods and sources scholars use to try to understand cultural complexity. In Object Lab, students work with a selection of ceramics to hone their skills of observation and close looking. Formal analysis is key to Art History, and the students write short essays to interpret the visual forms they observe.

Art History 321
Rebirth of Adam/Eve: Michelangelo’s Renaissance Ceiling as an Invitation to Connection and Creation
Professor Stefanie Solum

Exploring Michelangelo’s late 15th-century painted ceiling in the Sistine Chapel as well as broader art and history of the Italian Renaissance, students bring their current perspectives to the project of historical study. The two paintings here help them compare stylistic choices in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. The contemporary selections, as well as the photographs by Mendieta on display for Latina/o Studies 360, help them bring a present-day lens to the course themes, including Christian worldbuilding and paradoxes, symbolic immortality and legacy building, gender and sexuality, and childbirth.

Computer Science 334
Principles of Programming Languages
Professor Dan Barowy

A programming language is a distinct vocabulary and set of rules used to communicate with a computer and to achieve a desired result. Students learn to use precise, nuanced words to describe something and how to combine those words effectively. They practice this careful mode of description by writing about compositional elements they observe here, including shape, color, size, and texture. As a related project, each student designs a programming language capable of generating artwork in the style of an artist selected from Object Lab.

English 208
Designer Genes
Professor Bethany Hicok

Students explore cultural texts that attempt to come to terms with—or exploit—the revolution in contemporary genetics with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality. The two photographic portraits spark questions about agency, collaboration, gaze, and identity. Muholi works closely with the people they photograph and includes the person’s full name, place, and year in the title; Zheng includes the place in the title but classifies people by their profession and calls out disability. Students closely examine the text, organs, and mapping in the Dennis print, considering it as a corporeal interpretation of what it means to be human.

Geosciences 304
Mineralogy and Petrology
Professor Mike Hudak

Minerals, Earth’s building blocks, form only under certain conditions. By analyzing aggregates of different minerals, geologists can interpret how and where rocks formed. Students hone these skills to understand the dynamic processes that shape our planet. For example, jade is found in very specific settings and reflects the plate tectonics of its original environment. Students compare jade objects in Object Lab originally from China and Mexico, considering cross-cultural uses and geologic environments. They also help WCMA to identify the specific stones used for the Egyptian scarabs and Aztec sculpture based on the material properties and chemistry.

History 224
Introduction to Medieval Europe
Professor Joel Pattison

Focusing on Europe from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century through the 15th century, this course encounters the medieval world through the people who lived in it. Here students learn about broader networks of connections through portable objects, considering the provenance and use of specific materials as well as the cultural significance of the finished works. Books like the Psalter were often used in monasteries, while the Book of Hours shows changes in devotional practice, as these books were often owned by women and used for private prayer in domestic settings. Students use digital imaging to look closely at the objects and discuss process, materiality, and representation.

Latina/o Studies 360
Latinx Sculpture Art: From Altares to Sonic Monuments
Professor Kevin Cruz Amaya

Sculpture offers a new means to expand the study of Latinx identity, politics, and aesthetics using frameworks from the disciplines of Latinx Studies, Chicana/o and Central American Studies, art history, museum studies, and urban studies. Thinking critically about what defines a sculpture, the class studies these photographs by Mendieta of the artist’s earth-body works. Students begin with what they can and can’t see in the photographs, and then consider scale, materiality, the relationship of the body to the art, and whether these works can be categorized as sculpture.

Religion 276
Gnosis, Gnostics, Gnosticism
Professor Denise Buell

Gnostics understood knowledge, gnosis, to be the key to salvation and a way to reframe their understanding of what it means to be human in the world. Students learn ancient Gnostic ideas and consider how those affect modern forms of esoterism and spirituality, including in the art here. William Blake’s (1757–1827) interest in themes that arose from Gnosticism permeates his art and poetry, which in turn inspire how artists Pierre and Anuszkiewicz transcend physical representation of the material world. Pierre references Blake’s art as inspiration for her sinuous forms and layers of translucent color. Anuszkiewicz uses titles that quote Blake in the Inward Eye portfolio—including the print here—and also incorporates excerpts from Blake’s poetry into the portfolio.

Theatre 312
Dressed for Diplomacy: Global Fashion in Early Modern Europe
Professor Sydney Maresca

Focusing on the 16th to 18th centuries, students examine the cultural messaging transmitted by portraits of people from around the globe visiting—or brought without consent to—western Europe. Though these images are often read as “authentic” depictions of regional dress, the clothes worn by the people in these images represent a hybridization of foreign and European garments as recorded by European hands. Looking critically at these portraits, students learn to “read” the clothing as “speaking” for the person depicted in terms of self-representation, agency, and diplomatic intentions.