To Professor Katharine Burnett, study of the art object is no less than the sun in the solar system of learning.Last summer, she took students to China to directly experience Chinese art and architecture.In her upper-division course this spring (AHI 163A, Chinese Art) she sent students to study from the excellent collections of The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.But she begins our story because of her commitment that students learn from objects at the very start, in her introductory course, where each year they understand Chinese art by seeing and practicing how it is made.Each year her lower-division course (AHI 1DV, Arts of Asia) features a brush workshop on the materials, techniques, and problems involved in painting and calligraphy. This year, Professor Burnett organized an exhibition on campus to bring her students face to face with that process of creation. She invited internationally recognized calligrapher Lampo Leong to give a guest lecture and calligraphy demonstration on campus, in conjunction with the Nelson Gallery’s exhibition, The Calligraphy of Lampo Leong (October 8-December 12, 2010) for which she served as guest curator. For the fall-quarter students in Professor Burnett’s lower-division course, witnessing at close range a master calligrapher at work was indeed a special opportunity.

Since 2008, Professor Jeffrey Ruda has been teaching an undergraduate seminar focused on the varieties of art-historical investigation. He did so again this spring (AHI 100, Art History Methods). Nick Nabas, now a graduating M.A. student, still remembers his experience as an undergraduate in that seminar. “Professor Ruda would bring in various objects each week—ranging from an African sculpture to a framed family photograph—that we had to analyze by writing impromptu essays. Sometimes we were asked for a detailed formal analysis; other times we were asked to infer the significance of the object based on deduction and previous art-historical knowledge.” The pedagogical kick, of course, is that no two student analyses ever turn out alike, a fact that drives home the point that to fully comprehend any object is impossible. As Nick put it, “Professor Ruda’s emphasis on the object made me realize that writing about art critically and academically is no easy task after all.”

In her graduate methods course this fall (AHI 200B, Research and Writing Methods in Art History), Professor Diana Strazdes asked her students to select a work from Shields Library’s Department of Special Collections and develop a research problem using it. “I love the Special Collections at Shields,” says Professor Strazdes. “They are such an asset to the study of cultural history here.” The collections include publicity photographs, special-edition books, advertising art, and posters—the types of objects that are not strictly “fine art” but that instead occupy that interesting intermediary point between personal creativity and pragmatic communication. Professor Strazdes believes that such objects encourage students to think more broadly and imaginatively about their task as art historians. Graduate student Geoff Wildanger took an interest in the extensive holdings of psychedelic placards announcing rock concerts and various other “happenings” in the San Francisco area during the 1960s and 1970s. At once intricately detailed and nearly illegible, they prompted Geoff to wonder about the complex means by which these placards communicated with their reader-viewers.

Professor Simon Sadler often describes architecture as the one unavoidable art form. To take advantage of the October opening of the Crocker Art Museum’s new 125,000 square-foot wing designed by Gwathmey Siegel Associates, Sadler offered a fall graduate seminar (AHI 250, Problems in Art Historical Research) on the new structure. He wanted to approach this built object as a conundrum: “Should we look at it as a work of art (complete with the potential for aesthetic transcendence), or as a spectacle for hegemonic social and economic relations, or as a pragmatic work that reveals the intelligence of networked actors?” he asked. Or is it all those things? The seminar students researched the architects, the building’s urban environment, and the history of Postmodernism. They discussed the facility with the Crocker’s director, Lial Jones. Finally, they wrote a survey of the Crocker’s new building that will help visitors and docents to see it as a comprehensible object. You can read what they accomplished at 
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