Risa Puleo

This course takes a hemispheric approach that unites the Ancient Americas by following the trade routes that moved materials and goods including corn, turquoise, and gold, from the Arctic to Patagonia and connected this vast expanse of land. We start in 12000 BC with the migration of people to different parts of North, South, and Central America and end in 1492 with the arrival of Europeans. Along the way, we consider a diverse range of media, including architecture, basketry, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and earthworks from across the ancient Americas. Underscoring modes of both continuity and change, we will also survey responses from contemporary artists whose work continues through lines to ancient art made before Conquest.

In this course, we will explore the ways in which the idea of persistence might be said to characterize modern and contemporary Native American and Indigenous arts practices--including performance, film, video, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography, among others. The artists we will examine employ a range of tactics to engage social, cultural, economic, and political relationships as they occupy and articulate Indigenous worldviews and systems of knowledge that are often incommensurable with Settler structures and ideologies.

In this course, we will explore the ways in which the idea of persistence might be said to characterize modern and contemporary Native American and Indigenous arts practices--including performance, film, video, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography, among others. The artists we will examine employ a range of tactics to engage social, cultural, economic, and political relationships as they occupy and articulate Indigenous worldviews and systems of knowledge that are often incommensurable with Settler structures and ideologies.

This course adopts the form of Raymond Williams?s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to build a vocabulary for abolition. Each week, students will be presented with a pair of related terms that occupy different positions on an ideological spectrum or historical continuum. These keywords include: abolition and reform, punishment and restoration, justice and ethics (and aesthetics); chattle slavery and prison slavery; mass incarceration and prison-industrial complex; human and animal; fugitivity and freedom, and more, all the while learning from artists who use their work as an opportunity for intervening into the criminal justice system and reading texts that relate the history of our current justice system and present practical and theoretical alternative to it. We will also consider the difference between assessment and grading in our collective imagining of an abolitionist pedagogy and artistic / art historical practice. The aim of the course is to help students articulate their positions and investments in relation to their own work and social structures. The artists that we will consider in this course include: Josh Begley, Zach Blas, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Jamal Cyrus, Chris Burden, Martin Wong, Tirtza Even, Andrea Fraser, Maria Gaspar, Danny Giles, Coco Fusco and Guerillermo Gomez Pena, Suzanne Lacy, Ashley Hunt, Richard Kamler, Titus Kaphar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Autumn Knight, Deana Lawson, Shaun Leonardo, Prison and Neighborhood Art Project, Trevor Paglen, Jenny Polak, Carl Pope, Jr., Laurie Jo Reynolds, Sherrill Roland, Cameron Rowland,Gregory Sale, Dread Scott, Sable Elyse Smith, Tamms Year Ten, and more. The thinkers we will read include: Frank Wilderson, Angela Davis, Sadiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Denis Childs, Kelly Michelle Lyte, Michelle Alexander, Sylvia Wynters, Shawn Michelle Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Rashaad Shabazz, Simone Brown, Michel Foucault, Tony Bennett, Douglas Crimp, and more. Assignments center around the ?intervention? as a concept that links academic writing to direct action campaigns. Weekly assignments include identifying the intervention in the week?s reading and generating discussion questions in advance of class. Throughout the semester, students will also write their own definitions of their choice of keywords. Culminating assignments include a presentation and a final paper (12-15 pages).

This course will explore a subset of the canon of 'Art of the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas' —formerly known as 'primitive' art and also known as 'non-Western' art— that is considered animate in their cultures of origin from the perspective of those cultures. Katsina (Hopi), Orisha (Yoruba and Afro-Cuban), pottery and seeds considered to be ancestors; plant, animal, and human bodies held in museum contexts are some of the agents to be considered in this class. The goal off our study of these agents and writings about them is to parse indigenous ontologies from the Western epistemologies and taxonomies that framed these agents as 'fetishes' in the art, anthropology, ethnography, and natural history museums and the disciplines of art history and anthropology. Together, we will read the works of primarily black and indigenous scholars, including Kim Tallbear, Robin Kimmerer, Dylan Miner, Zoe Todd, J. Lorand Matory and more. Participants will be responsible for leading class discussion, a final paper on an object of their choice, and a presentation to the class about that object.

This course will explore a subset of the canon of 'Art of the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas' —formerly known as 'primitive' art and also known as 'non-Western' art— that is considered animate in their cultures of origin from the perspective of those cultures. Katsina (Hopi), Orisha (Yoruba and Afro-Cuban), pottery and seeds considered to be ancestors; plant, animal, and human bodies held in museum contexts are some of the agents to be considered in this class. The goal off our study of these agents and writings about them is to parse indigenous ontologies from the Western epistemologies and taxonomies that framed these agents as 'fetishes' in the art, anthropology, ethnography, and natural history museums and the disciplines of art history and anthropology. Together, we will read the works of primarily black and indigenous scholars, including Kim Tallbear, Robin Kimmerer, Dylan Miner, Zoe Todd, J. Lorand Matory and more. Participants will be responsible for leading class discussion, a final paper on an object of their choice, and a presentation to the class about that object.