Curating to Repurpose the Colonial Visual Archive

Catalog description

Students and professors in this seminar will work together to elaborate two imaginary exhibitions in which curating and contemporary artistic production repurpose the colonial visual archive.[1] Initial weeks will introduce museological, scholarly, and literary inspirations for treating two distinct but related corpuses in the environmental humanities and visual arts. First, works of art, manuscripts and drawings, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by European scientists, navigators, soldiers, and artists, who documented non-European ecologies, cultures, and peoples. Of special interest will be the areas of the Caribbean and Polynesia and the political function of these representations that, bitterly and paradoxically, effaced and recorded, while impactfully contributing to subjugation. We will also explore the contrapuntal field of works by sixteenth-century Indigenous people and contemporary artists who reveal and create alternative connections to and beyond what was broken. Second will be the Indigenous and deconstructive work of the queer, Canadian First Nations artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965), and his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle's decades-long traipse through art and North American, in particular Canadian, history. Students will read widely and deeply; engage in thoroughgoing visual and historical analysis; reason and write rigorous arguments for the inclusion and function of particular works of art; and carefully analyze and select primary and secondary sources for anthologies that would accompany and support the two hypothetical exhibitions. Local and regional libraries and museums may be consulted.