Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Now

Catalog description

This course offers a history of how mechanically reproducible images reshaped the social world. Beginning in the fifteenth century in Europe, these media connected new audiences across geographies by providing access to the same visual information. Prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising. The silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections and pay particular attention to Philadelphia activist groups and their places in these histories.