Session A (First 6-week session): May 28–July 23, 2013

This course examines a series of artistic formations and critiques of identity among the diverse collection of individuals, cultures, and institutions that composed the United States from the Colonial Era to the Cold War. Beginning with the hybrid material culture of Mission Dolores in eighteenth- century New Spain, we shall progress chronologically and thematically through a sequence of case studies designed to reveal a broad range of art-practical engagements with notions of individual and collective identity. Material, formal, social, and political contexts will all be considered as we address a wide range of art practices and media, including, among others, sculpture, land art, costume, mural painting, photography, architecture, and conceptual art. Additionally, we shall attend to the methods by which knowledge about the works and practices under consideration has been produced, thinking in part about the roles that those methods themselves have played in the identity politics of academic and curatorial research. 

This course statisfies the American Cultures requirement.