The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of the most visited art museums in the United States, has a vast collection of South Asian art. It also has an association with the region that goes back to the late nineteenth-century. On September 11, 1893, the building that now houses the AIC served as a venue for a stirring lecture on ending religious intolerance delivered by Vivekananda, a young thinker from Calcutta. Currently, the museum has mounted Jitish Kallat's, Public Notice 3, a site-specific installation connecting two turning points: Vivekananda's lecture and the attacks on the World Trade Center on that very date 108 years later. This seminar will use the AIC's collections of South Asian art to equip students with skills for a curatorial career.

Together, we will first gain a working knowledge of art produced and consumed in South Asian art over the past five millennia. Next, we will review voices guiding the display of South Asian art in the United States over the past century. Thereafter, we will turn of our attention to a corpus of North Indian paintings of fauna prepared between c. 1650 - 1850 in the AICs collections. By comprehending their subject matter and listening to conservators' assessments of their physical condition, we will support the museum in determining which of these artworks should be displayed in a small exhibition that will open to the public in Summer 2025. Subsequently we will propose provisional object groupings, gauge interest in them, and revise groupings based on stakeholders' views. Finally, we will develop interpretive materials for these paintings in a manner that deepens museum visitors understanding of them and facilitates the interpretation and contextualization of a major work of contemporary South Asian art which will also be on view at the AIC beginning in late summer 2025.The course will include a fieldtrip to Chicago.

Textbooks/Other Materials: All students must buy the following books: James Cuno, Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Vidya Dehejia, Indian Art (London: Phaidon, 1997). All other readings will be made available either as PDF files on the Canvas website or as books on the reserve shelf of the Fine Arts Library.

Estimated Cost: $50-100

Intended Audience: Anyone welcome

Class Format: Two 80-minute meetings a week consisting of lectures, discussions, visits to museums etc.

Keywords: Asia, conservation, exhibitions, museums, and provenance

HISTART Major Distribution Requirements: Transregional and Transhistorical