In the late 1920s and 1930s, Mexican muralism enjoyed immense popularity outside of Mexico, exciting audiences and artists from Moscow to San Francisco. This class investigates the movement's enduring reputation as an aesthetically and politically effective model of public art. A close examination of works on view in the exhibition Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art will open a discussion about Rivera's particular role in shaping international opinion about Mexican muralism's aims and achievements. We will also explore the work of Rivera's two most famous contemporaries, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who likewise spent significant periods of time abroad. While examining the impact of Mexican muralism on a long list of non-Mexican artists, ranging from the Soviet October group to Americans such as Jacob Lawrence and Jackson Pollock, we will address how the movement shaped debates about the intersection of public art and politics during the 1930s and beyond.

Jodi Roberts (PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) specializes in Latin American art of the 20th century. She has taught at New York University and the Pratt Institute.

This course offers an in-depth look at the work of Cindy Sherman, one of the most influential (and misunderstood) artists to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Sherman's photographs are well known for employing imagery from popular culture, television, and cinema to raise complex questions about identity, authorship, and the very nature of representation. Frequent visits to the special retrospective exhibition Cindy Sherman will be supplemented by lectures and class discussions that situate the artist's work within the context of the "Pictures Generation." This course critically examines Sherman's practice, and the representational strategies she employed, in relation to the work of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Matt Mullican, Laurie Simmons, Jack Goldstein, and others.

William Smith is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a senior editor at the online magazine Triple Canopy. He has taught at NYU, Pratt, and Colorado College, and he regularly lectures at MoMA.

"What I do I do not wish blamed on Zen," John Cage once wrote. "Though without my engagement with Zen I doubt whether I would have done what I have done." A composer, visual artist, and teacher, Cage was one of the first 20th-century artists to reject the basic tenets of Western aesthetics in favor of an all-accepting, Zen-influenced approach to the creative process. Coinciding with the 2012 centenary of Cage's birth, this course examines the artist's conception of Zen as a technique to activate perception, which lead him to create such historic compositions as 4'33" and Water Music, and to write such influential texts as "Lecture on Nothing" and "Composition as Process." The course will also promote Cage’s credo on art as an open field of experiential immediacy; assess the contemporary relevance of Cage's work and ideas; and analyze today’s art scene from a "Cagean-Zen" perspective.

Filip Noterdaeme, a frequent lecturer at the Guggenheim Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an adjunct professor of art history at The New School, New York University, and the City University of New York.

This course explores key figures, terms of debate, and primary sites for the production and reception of contemporary art on a global scale since 1980. Students will learn how the art of today has become more heterogeneous, contradictory, and dispersed than ever before, leading to the lack of any cohesive "art world." We will explore the ways in which cultures influence one another and enter into dialogue through the transnational work habits of many contemporary artists, curators, and critics. The course is organized on a regional basis, as we look at the work of critically acclaimed artists from Eastern Europe, China, Africa, Mexico, Cuba, and the Middle East as part of a global art network. We will take full advantage of contemporary art on view in the MoMA galleries.

Mari Dumett (PhD, Boston University) is an art historian and curator specializing in art in a global context since 1960. Her articles have been published in journals and exhibition catalogues, and she is currently completing a book about the international artists group Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s.

The spring exhibition schedule at The Museum of Modern Art provides the unique opportunity to investigate two 20th-century masters of photography, Eugène Atget and Cindy Sherman. Atget’s encyclopedic Parisian documentary project was underappreciated during his lifetime, but it inspired a wide range of figures in the following generation of photographers and made him a model of modern photography. Sherman’s body of work was critically lauded from its inception, and remains virtually synonymous with postmodern photography. This five-week course begins with an introduction to the history of photography through the Museum’s comprehensive collection, after which we will begin a thorough engagement with these two figures. Reading selected excerpts from key documents will initiate guided discussions of the works on display in the exhibition galleries.

David Smucker is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. His research interests include histories and theories of photography, the history of collecting practices, and the concept of the indexical mark in its many manifestations throughout history.

In recent years, performance art has come to occupy a more prominent place in artistic practice and discourse, as well as in museum collections and programming. These developments only give greater visibility to issues that have been central to the history of modern and contemporary art. This course explores the different ways in which signal movements in postwar art have harnessed various mediums in pursuing immediate, authentic, and meaningful experience. We will focus on aspects of "performance" in Abstract Expressionist painting, Minimalist and post-Minimalist sculpture, and Conceptual uses of photography, film, and video. We will also investigate the reliance on mediation in live performance practices, from Fluxus and Judson dance to body artists and new trends in participation. The course situates performance art in relation to an art history with which participants might be more familiar, providing an alternate vantage from which to view that history anew.

Jonah Westerman is a doctoral candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is working on a dissertation about post-1989 European performance art. He has taught global survey courses and the history of modern art at Brooklyn College for the last three years.

When Pop art first brought mass culture into galleries in the early 1960s, it changed the course of art permanently by removing the line between "high culture" and everyday life. This class looks at the rise of Pop and its subsequent developments over three decades: the possibilities a new capitalist culture in Europe; explorations of Hollywood glamour on the West Coast; critiques of consumer excess in the 1980s; and its merging with the processes of everyday life in the pluralist 1990s. Artists discussed include Andy Warhol, Marisol Escobar, Claes Oldenburg, Alison Knowles, Richard Hamilton, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Gerhard Richter, Dorothy Iannone, Ed Ruscha, Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, William Leavitt, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Martin Kippenberger, Ellen Gallagher, Rikrit Tiravanija, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami.

Media Farzin is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and an adjunct lecturer at City College. Her research focuses on language-based art from the 1950s to the 1970s. She was curator, with Jon Hendricks and Marianne Bech, of Fluxus Scores and Instructions at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde, in 2008.

This course examines major artists, artworks, and movements from 1970 to the present. Students explore Conceptual art's fundamental questioning of art, the development of multimedia artistic practices and performance art, the influence of identity politics on art, the rise of a global art scene, the and recent tendencies that are still being debated and defined. During this term, students learn about works by artists such as Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Cindy Sherman, Félix González-Torres, Matthew Barney, and others.

*Students interested in this course may also wish to enroll in Modern and Contemporary Art, 1945–1970.

Heather Cotter (MA, Boston University, and MEd with a specialization in art education, Harvard University) is a lecturer at The Museum of Modern Art.

This course examines major artists, artworks, and movements that have manifested in the years following World War II. Students investigate the emergence of New York as an important postwar art center with the development of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, consider the celebration of consumer culture with the emergence of Pop art, explore the movement toward reduction and refinement in the development of post-painterly abstraction and Minimalism, and debate the politics of art of the 1980s and beyond.

Gillian Sneed is a PhD student in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and is Adjunct Lecturer of Art History at Pace University. Her research focuses on a range of modern and contemporary art practices, including performance art, participatory art, and the art of contemporary Latin America. She is a writer for Art in America online and coeditor of Magazine Forté, a magazine of sound.

This course introduces students to the key works and ideas of modern art, from Dada, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus to the beginnings of the New York School. Moving chronologically through the Museum's collection, students encounter an array of renowned and provocative objects—from paintings that challenged the official Academy and revolutionized the conventions of representation, to photographs that capture the dynamism of modern life, to modernist buildings that fill city skylines. Artists covered include Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Hannah Hoch, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalí, and many others.

*Students interested in this course may also wish to enroll in Modern Art, 1880–1915.

Lauren Kaplan (PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a specialist in art and architecture of the 20th century. She teaches art history at Parsons The New School for Design and works as an educator at the Guggenheim Museum and the Morgan Library and Museum.

Recent subprime mortgage meltdowns, an intractable recession, mounting environmental concerns, and crumbling infrastructure have forced architects, developers, and homeowners alike to reconsider the viability of longstanding housing paradigms centered on privately owned, single-family homes located in the suburbs. Built mainly for middle-class, nuclear families and responsible for sprawling geographies of freeways, strip malls, and parking lots, such communities seem increasingly incapable of engaging contemporary priorities related to environmental sustainability, fiscal responsibility, extended families, senior populations, single-parent families, public transportation, and the burgeoning health epidemics related to sedentary lifestyles.

Though deeply unsettling, the current housing crisis is an opportunity to rethink the "American Dream" for future generations, and to reflect upon lessons learned (or ignored) from previous domestic reforms. This course explores architectural responses to significant housing crises from 1900 to the present. Architects, housing typologies, and movements to be discussed include tenement reform; public health movements; Frank Lloyd Wright; Le Corbusier; Ernst May; the New Frankfurt; slum clearance, class conflict, and public housing; Title I and Robert Moses; racism, civil unrest, and gated communities; unplanned developments; nonconforming and illegal settlements; the homeless; Estudio Teddy Cruz; Rural Studio; Elemental; and more. Special attention will be paid to the upcoming MoMA exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.

Jennifer Gray (PhD, Columbia University) is a historian of modern art and architecture, specializing in the relationships between progressive social politics and the built environment. She teaches and lectures at MoMA.

The decade that marked the end of the Cold War and the rise of the New Right in the U.S., the 1980s was also a period of major shifts in the contemporary art world. This course explores these shifts through close readings of seminal works currently on view at the Museum, by such artists as George Condo, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, and many others. Classes also focus on other forms of cultural production, such as films, videos, and documents of public art. Discussion topics include the expansion of political activism and appropriation, the dominance of photography and new media, the return of painting and the emancipation of graffiti, the theoretical debates surrounding the notion of postmodernism, and the unprecedented growth of art markets and institutions.

Ágnes Berecz (PhD, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) teaches modern and contemporary art history at the Pratt Institute and in the School of Graduate Studies of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her writings have been published in Art in America, Artmargins, and Praesens, as well as in European and U.S. exhibition catalogues.

This course introduces students to the key works and ideas of modern art, from late Impressionism to the beginnings of the New York School. Moving chronologically through the Museum's collection, students encounter an array of renowned and provocative objects, from paintings that challenged the official Academy and revolutionized the conventions of representation, to photographs that capture the dynamism of modern life, to modernist buildings that fill city skylines. Artists covered include Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

Deborah A. Goldberg (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts and lectures regularly for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. She coedited and contributed to the book Alexander Archipenko Revisited: An International Perspective (2008).

This course examines major artists, artworks, and movements from 1970 to the present. Students explore Conceptual art's fundamental questioning of art, the development of multimedia artistic practices and performance art, the influence of identity politics on art, the rise of a global art scene, the and recent tendencies that are still being debated and defined. During this term, students learn about works by artists such as Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney, and others.

Andrew Cappetta (PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a specialist in European and American art of the postwar and contemporary periods. He teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and Hunter College, and is an educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Presiding from "the center of things" at her informal salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein would declare, "We all came to Paris—it was where we had to be." Using works of art in MoMA's collection, this course explores the arts—and the art of living well—in the French capital during the first few decades of the 20th century. During this era, the spectacular and still somewhat bohemian City of Light was home to numerous American expatriates and other foreigners who brought both culture and enjoyment of the city's pleasures to dizzying new heights of inspiration, experimentation, and intoxication. As we will see, the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.E. Cummings, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Cole Porter were matched by equal verve in the art and antics of men like Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Gerald Murphy, among many others.

Larissa Bailiff (PhD, ABD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a specialist in 19th-century French art and social history. Formerly an associate educator at MoMA, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at both the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute.

This course introduces students to the key works and ideas of modern art, from late Impressionism to Cubism. Moving chronologically through the Museum's collection, students encounter an array of renowned and provocative objects—from paintings, sculptures, and collages that challenged the official Academy and revolutionized the conventions of representation, to photographs that capture the dynamism of modern life. Artists covered include Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Ernst Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

*Students interested in this course may also wish to enroll in Modern Art, 1915–1945.

Lauren Kaplan (PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a specialist in art and architecture of the 20th century. She teaches art history at Parsons The New School for Design and works as an educator at the Guggenheim Museum and the Morgan Library and Museum.

This course examines major artists, artworks, and movements after World War II. Students explore the emergence of the New York School and its links to a new global economy centered in New York, Dada's revival and Pop art's flowering in mass consumer society, and Minimalism's formal refinement and emphasis on spatial context. During the course, students learn about works by Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and others.

*Students interested in this course may also wish to enroll in Modern and Contemporary Art, 1970 to Today.

Heather Cotter (MA, Boston University, and MEd with a specialization in art education, Harvard University) is a lecturer at The Museum of Modern Art.

The term "realism" often conjures illustrative, true-to-life images and direct renderings of everyday experience. However, realism in the arts includes a spectrum of radically diverse modes of representation, as artists struggle to capture both the banal aspects of day-to-day existence and, as German art critic Franz Roh suggested, "the magic of being." The tension between the realistic and the magical, the ordinary and the mysterious, the mundane and the marvelous, manifests itself in drastically different ways, from the social realist murals of Diego Rivera to the surrealist paintings of Frida Kahlo, from the regionalist realism of Andrew Wyeth to the photo collages of Cindy Sherman. These artists combine unsettling and shocking aspects of modern life with fantastic or improbable visions. Our investigation will include works from upcoming exhibits on Rivera, Sherman, and Eugène Atget, as well as MoMA's collection. We also use literary examples from writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, and Toni Morrison as points of comparison.

Mark Tursi (PhD, University of Denver) is a professor of writing and literature. He is the author of three collections of poetry and editor of the literary and visual arts journal Double Room. He has taught courses at MoMA on the sublime, Abstract Expressionism, and the artistic interchange between poets and painters.

Psychoanalytic concepts—the slip of the tongue, the unconscious, the fetish, the uncanny—have become part of our everyday language, yet rarely are these terms fully understood. This course provides a deeper understanding of psychoanalytic theory and demonstrates how this discourse has indelibly marked modern art. This influence is apparent not only in artists' practice, but also in art historical writing and theory. We will read texts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Hélène Cixous, and Avital Ronell, along with various artists' writings. These ideas will then be used to approach many different works and movements represented in MoMA’s galleries, from Pablo Picasso to the Surrealists to contemporary art. Two special exhibitions in particular—Eugène Atget: "Documents pour artistes" and Cindy Sherman—will be of particular interest, as they focus on artists from different time periods who are often associated with psychoanalytic insights on art and everyday life.

Arnaud Gerspacher (PhD Candidate in art history, Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a Graduate Teaching Fellow in art history at Brooklyn College, and an Independent Researcher in the Asian Art Program at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Recent subprime mortgage meltdowns, an intractable recession, mounting environmental concerns, and crumbling infrastructure have forced architects, developers, and homeowners alike to reconsider the viability of longstanding housing paradigms centered on privately owned, single-family homes located in the suburbs. Built mainly for middle-class, nuclear families and responsible for sprawling geographies of freeways, strip malls, and parking lots, such communities seem increasingly incapable of engaging contemporary priorities related to environmental sustainability, fiscal responsibility, extended families, senior populations, single-parent families, public transportation, and the burgeoning health epidemics related to sedentary lifestyles.

Though deeply unsettling, the current housing crisis is an opportunity to rethink the "American Dream" for future generations, and to reflect upon lessons learned (or ignored) from previous domestic reforms. This course explores architectural responses to significant housing crises from 1900 to the present. Architects, housing typologies, and movements to be discussed include tenement reform; public health movements; Frank Lloyd Wright; Le Corbusier; Ernst May; the New Frankfurt; slum clearance, class conflict, and public housing; Title I and Robert Moses; racism, civil unrest, and gated communities; unplanned developments; nonconforming and illegal settlements; the homeless; Estudio Teddy Cruz; Rural Studio; Elemental; and more. Special attention will be paid to the upcoming MoMA exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.

Jennifer Gray (PhD, Columbia University) is a historian of modern art and architecture, specializing in the relationships between progressive social politics and the built environment. She teaches and lectures at MoMA.

This course explores the work of artist Cindy Sherman, connecting her performative photographic practice to different artistic strategies and movements. By framing Sherman's subtle modes of appropriation and performance within distinct contexts each week, the course elucidates the ways in which her work is distinctly postmodern. We begin by looking at the sources of Sherman's practice in Conceptual and Performance art of the 1970s. Then we consider her role as part of the Pictures Generation, a movement of New York–based artists, including Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger, who created art by appropriating images. Sherman is also aligned with a host of contemporary artists from the 1980s and 1990s whose work explores postmodern notions of identity and the body (Lorna Simpson, Catherine Opie, Kiki Smith, Mike Kelly). The course concludes by considering the artist's work as part of the promotion of large-scale photography as a rival to painting in the 1990s and 2000s.

Andrew Cappetta (PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a specialist in European and American art of the postwar and contemporary periods. He teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and Hunter College, and is an educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The five-week course examines the practices of contemporary artists who emerged in the wake of Duchamp's readymades and Warhol's mass media–based works. Utilizing images, objects, and multimedia installations currently on view at the Museum, the course focuses on works that employ strategies of appropriation and/or rely on forms of collaboration. Topics to be discussed include questions of authorship and originality; the relationship between participatory practices and spectacle; the idea of art as a social practice; the changing roles of artistic institutions and markets; and many others. The course looks at works by such artists as Sanja Iveković, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Martin Kippenberger, Allan McCollum, Rachel Whiteread, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, SUPERFLEX, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittel, and Steve McQueen, among others.

Ágnes Berecz (PhD, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) teaches modern and contemporary art history at the Pratt Institute and in the School of Graduate Studies of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her writings have been published in Art in America, Artmargins, and Praesens, as well as in European and U.S. exhibition catalogues.

In this age of DIY publishing and the proliferation of text and images, print media has moved to the fore in contemporary art studio practices. This experimental printmaking course explores various artistic practices relating to the medium of print, ranging from traditional techniques like block printing to modern industrial silkscreening to more recent digital printmaking, as well as artists' books and zines. Experimental printmaking combines traditional formal print practices with unconventional techniques and materials. Part of the course will emphasize the use of found objects and materials, both as printing plates and print surfaces, to explore the breadth of printmaking vocabulary, and to address issues of sustainable art making and the re-use and re-imagining of material. We examine printmaking as a creative process that reflects changes in technology and artistic interest. The course will also coincide with the MoMA exhibition Print/Out, which includes over 200 print-related works, and gallery tours and discussions supplement the hands-on studio component. Artists discussed include Ai Weiwei, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Thomas Schütte, SUPERFLEX, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Materials are provided.

Katerina Lanfranco (MFA, Hunter College) is a painter and mixed media installation artist who teaches art at Fordham University. She received the 2010 NEA Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Arts Fellowship, and her work is included in the collections of MoMA, Corning Museum of Glass, and Kupferstichkabinett Museum, Berlin.

This course leads students in a hands-on examination of the materials and techniques that created some of the 20th-century’s greatest masterpieces. Two introductory classes cover the basics of preparing a canvas and mixing and applying paint, and each subsequent class focuses on a major artist in MoMA’s collection. Artists examined include Henri Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Vassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Each week students explore one of these artists through slide lectures and visits to MoMA’s galleries before painting a canvas based on that painter’s work. Combining studio techniques, visual analysis, and art historical insight, this class offers a unique appreciation of how the materiality of paint and the activity of painting affected the development of Expressionism and early abstract painting.

Materials are provided.

Corey D'Augustine is a painting conservator and an artist. He exhibits in New York and internationally.