Art On and From the Margins: Questions of Race, Class, and Gender

Catalog description

This course investigates practices in New Orleans art that interrogate dominant systems of representation. It examines how artists in New Orleans rely on and devise strategies that confront, appropriate, subvert, and queer the meanings, aims, and experiences of conventional art practices. These may include shifts in the content of a work and its audience to methods by which it is produces, its formal properties, and its reception. The focus of the class will include analyses of practices of documentation, re-appropriation, abstraction, mining the archive, and camp (among others). Directly connected to questions of marginalization of certain artistic voice and art practices are—of course—inquiries into whether attempts to dislodge and reconfigure dominant systems results merely in the consumption of those works and their integration into larger system or whether they have the potential to destabilize those systems. The class will include a number of talks by New Orleans artists, visits to New Orleans museums and other art spaces.