A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

Rhoda Rosen

Associate Professor, Adjunct

Bio

BA, 1984, and BA Honors, MA, 1988, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; PhD, 2009, University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions: House, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago; Imaginary Coordinates, Spertus Museum, Chicago; Encounters at the Edge of the Forest, Gallery 400, Chicago. Publications: Shofar; Flaneur. Recent Conference Proceedings: "Red Line Service."  Relational Poverty Network. Conference presentation. Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, CA. March 30, 2016; "Who is Silencing Whom? Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Charlie Hebdo" February 23, 2015, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, NY. Awards: Research Associate in the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Team Teaching Award (with Billy McGuinness), SAIC, 2015. Awesome Foundation Grant, February 2015.

Personal Statement

Rhoda Rosen is an art historian and curator currently serving as adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves on the Advisory Council of the European Shoah Legacy Institute, incorporated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic on January 20, 2010 as a follow-up to the Terezin Declaration and founded, in part, to seek systemic solutions on an international level leading to restitution of immovable property, art, Judaica, and Jewish cultural assets stolen by the Nazis. Rosen is also a research associate in the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In July 2014, Rosen spent time as a visiting artist/curator at ACRE Residency, Steuben, Wisconsin, where she met Billy McGuinness. Together they founded Red Line Service, an art collaborative that reframes art as a broad social justice endeavor. She came to the U.S. from South Africa on a Rockefeller Institute Residency Fellowship to the Institute for Advanced Research and Study in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, following which she served for more than a decade as director of Spertus Museum, Chicago. She earned her PhD from the University of Illinois in Chicago and her MA and BA from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work.

The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history.

There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

1125

Credits

3

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work.

The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history.

There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

2320

Credits

3

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work.

The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history.

There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

2321

Credits

3

Description

This course surveys developments in nineteenth and twentieth century art and architecture. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical and critical issues, as well as the historical, intellectual, and socioeconomic changes that are reflected or addressed in the works of artists and architects. Note: ARTHI 1001 (or its equivalent) is recommended as a prerequisite for ARTHI 1002.

Class Number

1029

Credits

3

Description

This course contextualizes English gardens and their design features within larger ideas of land ownership at the level of private ownership, the nation, and Empire. It examines the way the design of 18th and 19th century British landscapes served the needs of early modern industrialists in England and shaped the identity of colonizer in relation to colonized subjects.

In this course, we will study examples of private gardens, early botanic gardens, and other colonial gardens, including plantations, in order to explore at the critical way plants and gardens were used to dispossess people of land and culture in Europe and abroad. In Europe, we will look at the way land enclosure might be said to have produced a British working class. In the colonies, we will look at the role plants and gardens played in extending British authority over its colonial subjects and how the deep knowledge that indigenous and slave communities had about plants was stolen, lost or engaged in that process.

There are weekly readings for this course, and a final scaffolded research paper. Although a final research paper is submitted, students are expected to submit along the way other smaller assignments related to that final research project, such as a paragraph thesis statement, a bibliography, an outline, a full draft and then the final revision.

Class Number

1049

Credits

3

Description

Maps feature significantly in contemporary artistic practice as both subject and method. In contemporary art, they often serve as a device that resists fixed borders, both national and personal. As contemporary artists collapse the idea that the map is the territory, so too do they make a radical break with the seemingly permanent boundaries of nationality, race and gender and their ideological institutions.

A variety of topics such as nationalism, migration, and the use of surveillance technology in art will be explored primarily through readings, art, film screenings, and conversations. Artists include, for example, Francis Alys, Libia Posada, Bouchra Khalili, Harun Farocki and more.

Students should expect weekly readings, in-class assignments, and the completion of a final essay

Class Number

1067

Credits

3

Description

Research Studio is designed to provide students with the skills and support necessary to generate research questions, organize conceptual frameworks, critically evaluate research methodologies and construct research design, to generate viable thesis proposals in advance of completing a Master of Arts Administration and Policy thesis. This will be accomplished through readings, lecture, discussion and workshopping activities, in conjunction with individual advising opportunities. Students will develop a research proposal of their own design, with the option to focus on preparing a proposal for a project or paper thesis. The overall concern is that students develop thesis proposals which promise to yield timely research of value to the field.

Prerequisite: You must be a Master of Arts in Arts Administration or Dual Degree student to enroll in this course, or by instructor consent.

Class Number

1205

Credits

3

Description

A master's thesis is required for completion of the master's degree in arts administration. The thesis should demonstrate a student's ability to design, justify, execute, evaluate, and present the results of original research or of a substantial project. In this class students work closely with an MAAAP program advisor, and meet frequently with other MAAAP participants in groups and in individual meetings. The thesis is presented, in both written and oral form, to a thesis committee for both initial and final approval. You must be a Master of Arts in Arts Administration and Policy student to enroll in this course.

Class Number

2445

Credits

3