spring 2019 courses
Mean Moms and Other Feminist Strategies
Graduate Seminar
Spring 2019
Angry, mean, cruel, cold, obstinate, neglectful and bitchy have all been used to delegitimize feminist intellectuals and the knowledge they produce. Feminists themselves have worked to reclaim and repurpose these denigrations as key strategies for research and writing. We will study feminist art-historical methods. Students can expect to engage the many shades of feminist frameworks and histories that aim to generate critique and to advance the field of art history. We will read notable scholars like Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Deborah Willis, Anne Wagner, Laura Mulvey, Mieke Bal, Coco Fusco, Jennifer Gonzalez, Nancy Szabo, Kellie Jones, and Krista Thompson, among others. Key frameworks will include “hysterics” (Bal) and “differencing the canon” (Pollock) as approaches to the archive as well as “reverse ethnography” (Fusco) and the “sidelong glance” (Thompson) as strategies of refusal. Assignments will include a detailed object-based analysis, annotated bibliography, and a final paper.
Abstraction: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Subjectivity
4000 Level
Spring 2019
Co-taught with David Getsy
Team Teaching Award Recipient
Abstract art presents a conundrum for contemporary politics and art theory. On the one hand, it provides a zone of engagement that is ostensibly free from the protocols of cultural marking that categorize and limit individuals based on outward appearance. For this reason, Black artists, queer artists, and transgender artists have, tor instance, explored abstraction as a mode of cultural production that circumvents surveillance and the limitations of visibility. On the other, however, abstraction also threatens to diffuse politics to the point of unrecognizability, leaving subjects with no positive site of identification. This course will talk about the allure and the danger of abstraction in American art of the last half century, with attention to the Black Arts Movement, Gay Liberation, transgender history, and their legacies in contemporary art that explore abstraction for both its politics and its ambivalence.
A half century on, this class examines the intersection of art, design, and politics in 1968, the mythic year of global upheaval. Nearly simultaneously, signal events erupted on multiple continents: "May 1968" in France, the Tet Offensive, the murder of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, riots at the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago, the Soviet Union?s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Mao Zedong's "Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside" movement. The course draws connections to recent events and to what we might broadly call "the contemporary." The class is team-taught by four members of the art history faculty each semester in order to draw on their individual areas of expertise, and has units that focus on the art, design, and history of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Innovative in its structure, the class begins each meeting with a shared presentation for all students that is followed by small seminars led by the teaching faculty.
Spring 2019 teaching team: Sampada Aranke, Jenny Lee, David Raskin, & Bess Williamson
Fall 2018 teaching team: Seth Kim Cohen, Delinda Collier, Nora Taylor, & Mechtild Wildrich
World on Fire
3000 Level
Spring 2019