Discovering Art: The Visual Stories We Tell

Description

Have you ever wanted to know more about the wide-ranging permanent collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)? How can we begin to make sense of the various styles, techniques, and subjects presented? The Discovering Art series at the Thomas More Institute offers guidance on appreciating the works on display through lectures and museum visits, with this course focusing on the narrative in art.

There are endless possibilities to the stories that can be told through art—they can be biblical or mythological, depict a domestic scene or an historical event, have a moral to impart, or reflect a contemporaneous social or political situation. A good narrative work will raise questions not only about the scene depicted but also about what came before and what is to come. In this lecture-based art history course, we will consider the nature of the narrative form in visual art, and look at examples of how a message is conveyed to its target audience. We will examine works from a range of eras, from the 20th century to as far back as the medieval period.

Two in-person lectures will introduce the works we will be exploring in our museum visits. The week following each lecture, we will meet at the MMFA to engage directly with the art discussed. The structure of the course will thus be as follows:

Class 1 : In-person lecture at the Thomas More Institute

Class 2 : Visit to the MMFA

Class 3 : In-person lecture at the Thomas More Institute

Class 4 : Visit to the MMFA

Details