General

HART B640: Topics in Material Culture

Ornament

Term: Fall 2026

Instructor: Professor Sylvia Houghteling

Office: Old Library 232

Office Hours: Wednesdays, 10-12 p.m., or by appointment

Email: shoughteli@brynmawr.edu

This course examines histories and theories of ornament from a wide range of disciplinary, temporal and geographic perspectives, opening out the possibility that ornament can be a productively disruptive way to understand traditional art histories. The study of ornament intersects with tensions in art history about the fine versus the decorative arts that are in turn inflected by histories of colonialism, capitalism and gender. Ornament bears a possibility for agency but has also been a source of objectification and silencing. We will even look at how discourses of ornament permeate contemporary self-help and psychological literature in which behaviors of procrastination and hoarding are associated with the superfluous and the ornamental. Throughout, we will engage with “intermedial,” and intercultural transfers of ornament, exploring the ways that the decorative indeed has always moved the farthest and fastest across modes of art making.  While studying modes of exchange, however, we will also interrogate and critique the desire to see ornament as a universal language and will locate ornament in its material, geographic, and historical contexts. As a class, we will explore the hands-on processes of pattern-making and ornamentation through workshops and collections.