ARTS 37
The Still Life as Micro-History Winter 2025

Still life painting-a genre of ancient origins-crystallized into a distinct artistic category around the 16th century. The seemingly humble act of gathering inanimate objects manages to outweigh the sum of its individual parts to convey a narrative, a quality that has enabled its ongoing status in the history of art. What can one say about oneself, or one’s respective time, place, culture, political atmosphere, and/or personal beliefs, by assembling an arrangement of personal belongings, materials, and artifacts to construct an image? In this course, we will arrange our own still life compositions and paint them, in oil on canvas, over the span of the winter term, culminating in an exhibition of the resulting works. We will also analyze the surprisingly flexible genre of the still life, looking at and talking about historic examples from the past two millennia-from excavations in Pompeii to memento mori and vanitas–as well as its use in contemporary art–particularly its resurgence feminist, queer, and other political artistic expressions that prod and challenge the genre’s ties to the patriarchal Western Canon of visual art. The course will meet three times per week to engage in dedicated studio work and group visual analysis. The bulk of the time will be spent working towards a single, polished painting to be displayed in a final group exhibition in the Spencer Art Building’s Wilde Gallery, at which time each artist will present their finished work.