Paris acquired its reputation as a global center of art in the second half of the nineteenth century. But art-making in Paris did not happen in a vacuum. Between 1848–1900, French artists were active players in the city’s numerous crises and social transformations, including utopian popular revolutions, foreign occupation, and massive urban reconstruction projects. Nineteenth-century Paris was also the capital of an empire that stretched from North and West Africa to the Caribbean and Polynesia. The foreign bodies and objects that filled the city as a result of these imperial conditions dramatically shaped the evolution of French art.
This course explores art in Paris at the intersection of modern politics, colonialism, and capitalist industrialization. In addition to avant-garde painting movements such as Impressionism and its “post-Impressionist” challengers, we also examine Orientalism and Primitivism alongside academic sculpture, universal exhibitions, and reproductive technologies like photography and the illustrated press. Some of the artists we examine include Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Contemporary African Art
This course examines the contributions of African artists to contemporary art practice and discourse from the 1980s to the present. Students will explore the critical networks, strategies, politics, and institutions that have shaped and supported the making, circulation, and reception of African art practices in recent history. The course will strive to analyze objects from multiple vantage points, considering the ways in which the meaning and value imputed to African art practices shifts across local and international contexts. Students will gain substantial insight into the role of museum exhibitions, art biennials, publishing platforms, and transnational collaborations in defining the field of contemporary African art. We will question how artists today interrogate geopolitical power arrangements and engage issues related to gender, identity, and sexuality. We will also explore how artists grapple with the insights and limitations of theories ranging from decolonization, feminism, modernism, and globalization to ideas of Posthumanism and the Anthropocene. The course will address a spectrum of media including film, installation, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and sound.
