Introduction to Black Art

Catalog description

This course surveys global and American black art and visuality from the 18th century to the present and introduces its major figures, movements, criticisms and social, political, and economic issues. We begin with an overview of African art and global structures of slavery and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries to ask how racial blackness structures the way the modern world has been imagined and visualized, as well as how black people created art that resisted and challenged a modern mode of visuality that excluded and negated them. We then focus primarily on black art made in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on painting, sculpture, crafts, performance, photography, film, and new media in order to understand how black artists respond to and shape their social and political realities. This course examines the role that art can play in politically turbulent times and centers black artists as important critics of an antiblack world and visionaries of new life possibilities. We will use an interdisciplinary lens to understand the diverse output of black artists including the fields of art history, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and technology and new media studies. Some classes will be held in the Johnson Museum and Olin Library to work directly with visual objects and artworks.