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

Alice Maggie Hazard

Lecturer

Bio

I am a historian of photography, 19th and 20th century visual culture, and US cultural history. My current research examines the cultural impact of photographs of fallen soldiers taken during the American Civil War and explores how these images influenced a cultural shift in the understanding and experience of death and mourning from a private familial experience to one that took place in the public sphere in the nineteenth-century United States. Looking closely at photographs of dead soldiers taken after engagements like the Battle of Antietam and the Battle of Gettysburg, as well as the advertising of those images, my dissertation considers how the exhibition, marketing, and conversion of photographs into woodcut prints published in illustrated journals, helped to disseminate images of the dead throughout the Union and thereby impact cultural understandings. Extending the narrative to consider the photographs surrounding the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, this project also begins to consider how wartime photographs of the dead from the Civil War have had a reverberating impact on understandings of war, traumatic events, and death from the end of the nineteenth century to today. My research examines these considerations in both the art historical and the historical realm. Upcoming research explores connections between nineteenth-century images of war and trauma and the way we use photographic images to understand similar events in todays world on both a national and a global scale.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course is an introduction to art and design. Specific content varies by instructor and covers diverse ways of seeing and understanding the visual world. The course articulates connections between selected art of the past and contemporary practices. Students will gain first-hand knowledge from visits to and exercises in the Art Institute of Chicago and other collections.
Ultimately, the course teaches skills that enable students to understand their own practices better, orient themselves in relation to theories of art and design, and navigate our present moment where visual literacy is increasingly crucial.

This course introduces students to key aspects of the history and theory of art and design. Students will become familiar with selected art of the past and how it has been connected to contemporary practices.

Class Number

1455

Credits

3

Description

This course builds on the lessons of ARTHI 1001 by discussing specific issues in modern and contemporary art and design. It focuses on examining objects and concepts, addressing theoretical and critical issues. It also explores the historical, intellectual, and socioeconomic changes reflected in the works of artists and designers, highlighting their relevance to contemporary practices. Museum visits and group exercises supervised by the instructor and the teaching assistants will contribute to the important hands-on experience of works of art.

Note: ARTHI 1001 is the recommended prerequisite for ARTHI 1002.

Class Number

1030

Credits

3

Description

This course builds on the lessons of ARTHI 1001 by discussing specific issues in modern and contemporary art and design. It focuses on examining objects and concepts, addressing theoretical and critical issues. It also explores the historical, intellectual, and socioeconomic changes reflected in the works of artists and designers, highlighting their relevance to contemporary practices. Museum visits and group exercises supervised by the instructor and the teaching assistants will contribute to the important hands-on experience of works of art.

Note: ARTHI 1001 is the recommended prerequisite for ARTHI 1002.

Class Number

1046

Credits

3

Description

This course examines the photographs made in response to the shaping influences of 19th and 20th century global cultures. Our understanding of the issues guiding visual history has been sensitized by iconic as well as lesser known photographs and it is those meaningful images that are addressed across the semester. Because photography has been transformed across its history as technology altered practice and practice altered how the medium was conceptualized, the study of social and intellectual history along side the making of imagery is central if the larger purposes of photography are to be grasped and shared.

Class Number

2167

Credits

3

Description

In 1839 a new means of visual representation was announced to a startled world: photography. Although the medium was immediately and enthusiastically embraced by the public at large, photographers spent decades experimenting with techniques and debating the representational nature of this new invention. This course focuses on the more recent history of this revolutionary medium. From the technological advancements that characterized the rise of photography in the commercial world during the 20th century, and the acknowledgement of photography as an artistic medium in its own right, to the digital revolution and its social media applications, we will consider the technological, economic, political, and artistic histories of photography through selected works of art and seminal critical texts.

This course considers photography in a global context. We focus on seminal texts and images in order to explore ethical, commercial, artistic, and political issues that make photography essentially important to our contemporary visual culture. The course explores broad range of photographic practices, techniques, and approaches including the work of Hannah Hoch, Martha Rosler, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dawoud Bey, Gordon Parks, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Shirin Neshat, Wolfgang Tillmans and many more. We regularly visit the collections of AIC and MCoP to enrich our class discussions with private print viewings and exhibition critiques.

Students are expected to share an image of their choice in response to the assigned weekly reading. These images are used in class discussion. There also is a final paper, a final presentation, and an in-class test.

Class Number

1083

Credits

3

Description

This seminar considers the role of the city street in postwar American and contemporary photography and the ways in which such an approach might complicate our understanding of this genre. We will examine: key historical texts; exhibitions like Street and Studio, Strangers, and Bystander that have shaped the definition of street photography to date; and the critical practices of artists (e.g. Robert Adams, Sophie Calle, Hans Haacke, Zoe Leonard, Fred McDarrah, Ed Ruscha) and scholars (e.g. Michel de Certeau, Rosalyn Deutsche, Louis Kaplan) whose works may offer alternatives to that history.

Class Number

1093

Credits

3