Native American Art History

Catalog description

This course is a survey of the Native arts of North America as an interrelated set of cultural and geographic regions. The main regional areas of focus will be the Eastern Woodlands and Mississippian cultures; the Great Plains and Great Basin; the Southwest Pueblo peoples and California and the Pacific Northwest and the Arctic. The course will conclude with modern and contemporary Native Arts of North America. The aesthetics and other ideas contributed by Native Americans hold far more interest than just as counterpoints to Western art. Along with courses in Latin American, Pre-Columbian, Asian/Pacific and African Art, this course addresses the need for a global art history, one that integrates Western visual cultures and thereby enriches and realistically balances the art history curriculum. The visual and intellectual cultures of Indigenous America, before and after 1492, have been crucial factories in the cultural development of post-Conquest America, and the world. Critiquing and contesting the notion of Native American culture as extinct or as a pre-Conquest vestige, this course will take a progressive approach to the study of Native American art as a living tradition with roots deep in the pre-colonial past. It will survey the multiple modes of expression that characterize the vast North American continent. The course will include lectures, discussions, multi-media presentations, and museum trips.