Future students

What does art do? How do humans use art to express our diverse social, cultural, collective and individual identities? Through a series of case studies, this course examines the way visual art and culture is used to express identity and its relation ...

How has art changed the world? This course introduces students to the ways art has responded to political, cultural, social, environmental and technological revolutions over the past 250 years. We examine how art anticipates and interrogates the defi...

What does art do? How do humans use art to express our diverse social, cultural, collective and individual identities? Through a series of case studies, this course examines the way visual art and culture is used to express identity and its relation ...

This course explores the relationship between art and the environment, with a focus on art since 1968. Alongside changing definitions of 'nature' and what it means to be human, the course considers the role of art in environmental activism. Students ...

This course examines the relationship between art, politics and power in Europe from the French Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century. Topics include: the art of revolution and reaction, romanticism and subjectivity, the crisis of the Europ...

We live in a visual world constructed from material objects. Some of these objects are imbued with spiritual and cultural energies, others are ignored for their mundane presence in our everyday lives. This course introduces students to the study of v...

This course examines the role of art and vision in the formation of two globalising maritime civilisations, European and Oceanic, and in the encounters between them from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. The course considers way...

This course explores how artists responded to the experience of modernity from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It examines individual and collective efforts to develop new visual vocabularies to make sense of a world of contingency ...

This course introduces the major artists, art forms and issues to have shaped the history of art in Aotearoa New Zealand. In particular, the course focuses on the effects of Māori-Pākehā interrelations, and the role of landscape and identity as key s...

This course introduces students to a topic in art in Aotearoa New Zealand, developed and delivered by the Oroya and Melvin Day Fellow in New Zealand Art History. Co-taught with ARTH 308.

What it means to be an artist changes through history and across cultures. From medieval workshops to the artist as entrepreneur, this course looks at individual and collective approaches to artistic creation in Western and non-Western societies. The...

This course explores the changing relationship between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. Students will reflect on the way the environment is experienc...

This course looks at the work of artists, writers and critics associated with surrealism and its legacies. It will analyse the cultures of surrealism, exploring their relation to previous artistic and cultural movements, polemics within the surrealis...

This course focuses on the visual arts from the post-WWII period to the end of the 1970s. It looks at the fate of modernism and avant-garde art in an era characterised by the ideological conflict between the capitalist West and communist East, decolo...

From Hagia Sophia, and Spiral Jetty, to the Matakana War Memorial, this course traces the role of art in collective memory. We consider the shifting practices of public art, the desires of the powerful to memorialise themselves through public sculptu...

This course introduces the living planet as a site to reimagine the meeting points of art and science. With a particular focus on global intersections of art, science, technology, and environment since the seventeenth century, the course examines non...

This course examines the field of contemporary Pacific art in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Focusing on the tension between 'Island Identities' and 'Oceanic Imaginaries' – between roots and routes – the course examines the significance ...

Today, Indigenous artists across the world bring a challenging array of aesthetic, cultural, and political perspectives to the discourse of contemporary art. This course examines the ‘genealogies’ of these practices in the indigenisation of European ...

This course introduces students to a topic in art in Aotearoa New Zealand, developed and delivered by the Oroya and Melvin Day Fellow in New Zealand Art History. Co-taught with ARTH 208.

This course looks at the work of artists, writers and critics associated with surrealism and its legacies. It will analyse the cultures of surrealism exploring their relation to previous artistic and cultural movements, polemics within the surrealist...

Art actively contributes new ways to understand our world. This course examines the most important themes, concepts and debates in contemporary art, with a focus on intersections between art and global contexts. It takes a thematic approach to invest...

ARTH 401 critically examines the work of significant art historians in relation to key topics which have defined the history of the discipline. Topics will range from the construction of the artistic subject and the interpretation of meaning to the s...

Modernism is a central concept used to describe cultural practice from the 1860s to the 1960s, manifested globally in a series of extraordinary endeavours across a range of media. Often associated with canonical works in the visual arts, literature, ...

The phenomenon of collecting is universal throughout history and across every society. ARTH 406 encourages a critical reading of the literature on the history and psychology of collecting, requiring students to compile case studies related to their o...

Writing by artists conveys a specific way of thinking about the relationships between image and text, creative practice, critical thought, aesthetics, imagination and history. With a focus on artist’s writing from Aotearoa New Zealand, this course wi...

ARTH 411 investigates contemporary New Zealand art from 1960 to the present. Co-taught with ARTH 311 in trimester one, then supplemented in trimester two by a seminar programme and additional reading, requiring a deeper and more extensive knowledge o...

A research project, usually in the form of an extended essay of 10,000 words, with regular guidance from a supervisor. Students are expected to show familiarity with the literature in their chosen field, and to write a substantial discussion, engagin...

MA thesis in Art History.