African Art, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism

Catalog description

African material culture played a pivotal role in numerous modern art movements between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. This course examines a range of 19th- and 20th-century engagements with canonical African art among modernists of diverse backgrounds. During and following periods of colonial rule, how did the presence of African art transform the expressive possibilities imagined in modern painting, sculpture, and other media while also serving to challenge notions of Western cultural supremacy and exclusivity? Formal and discursive engagements with African art may be critically investigated as forms of "primitivism," as scholars and curators have long argued. Yet these engagements also stand to be theorized as transatlantic phenomena that developed from the roaming imagination of cosmopolitanism, and that eventually accompanied various efforts to shape a postcolonial world order.