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.

What was modern art? How does it relate to social, political, and economic processes of 'modernization'? What resources does it offer us now? What, if anything, might we want to make with the 'master narratives' of formal innovation, autonomy, and criticality we might think we have left behind? What will modern art be? This class is a highly selective narrative of signal works of art and important critical texts of modernism, the avant-gardes, postmodernism, and beyond, centering on these questions and making the most of the museum¿s resources to explore them. I have sacrificed breadth for depth, with the idea that focusing in tightly on particular problems and works will equip you with some art-historical skills and concepts that will aid you in investigating the many fascinating developments we don't cover.

This class foregrounds intergenerational perspectives of artists, art historians, curators, and critics through art works, exhibitions, and writings that explore the complexity of alliances with the terms: ¿Chicano/a,¿ ¿Hispanic,¿ ¿hypenated-American,¿ ¿Latina/o/x,¿ ¿Post-Chicano,¿ ¿brown, ¿mestizo/a,¿ and ¿Afro-Latinx¿ Each of these words attempt to establish a common ground and a commons for people of diverse nationalities and ethnicities whose commonality is that they share a lineage in the pre-conquest Americas. By teasing out the politics and aesthetics associated with these terms, students will nuance shifting definitions of ¿American¿ identity forged in relation to the Americas, the U.S., settler- colonialism, indigeneity, immigration, race, nationality, and hegemonic society, across six decades of art and community-building initiatives made by brown people in the U.S.
Students will engage with writings by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Mari Carmen Ramirez, Octavio Paz, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Gloria Andalzua, Arlene Davila, Ed Morales, José Esteban Muñoz, Ellis Neyra Ren. Artists considered include Ester Hernandez, ASCO, Dario Robleto, Cruz Ortiz, Rafa Esparza, Raul de Nieves, and others included in exhibition such as Hispanic Art in the United States, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicana Movement, and Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly.
In their final capstone projects, students will identify the identitarian politics implicit in a work of art, artist¿s practice, or exhibition and negotiate the possibilities and limitations that the term offers to the constituency it aims to include.