Introduction to Art, Design and Culture I

FA 171 trains you to read images critically—to see art, design, and architecture not as isolated aesthetic objects but as products shaped by ideology, power, and the historical moment that made them. You'll work through theorists like Berger alongside case studies spanning Bauhaus, feminist art history, monuments, and mass media, with the workload landing in short assignments, quizzes, an oral presentation, and two exams. As a first-semester core for the faculty, it builds the vocabulary and critical reflex you'll lean on in every studio and history course that follows, so the goal is less memorizing movements than learning to ask why an image looks the way it does.