Coalitions and Counter-Institutions: American Art in the 1970s

Catalog description

This seminar explores the history of art in the 1970s by looking at the various activist coalitions, alternative spaces, loft theaters, magazines, and other artist-run organizations that emerged across the United States, in cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Amid the decade’s political and economic crises, artists founded these platforms in order to enable collaboration, confront a lack of representation in museums and commercial galleries, and connect their individual practices to broader social objectives, including women’s liberation, Black nationalism, the Chicano movement, and post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism. Through case studies of specific organizations and the artists associated with them, we will ask how the decade’s principal aesthetic strategies—site specificity, institutional critique, body art, performance, object theater, video, conceptual photography, and craft—became rooted in both local struggles and national politics. Case studies will include 112 Greene Street, A.I.R., Africobra, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the Floating Museum, Hallwalls, Heresies, Just Above Midtown, the Plaster Foundation, and Womanhouse. In parallel with weekly readings and seminar discussions, students will spend the semester preparing a research paper on a relevant topic of their choosing.