This exploratory graduate seminar focuses on Black Melancholia an exhibition that has taken place at the Center for Curatorial Studies NY IN 2022. The exhibition introduced Black Melancholia as a critical practice that ruptures narratives of art histories and the normalization of anti-blackness. This course opens a dialogue with traditional art-historical discourses around the representation of melancholia since Albrecht Dürer, deliberately utilizing and yet subverting melancholia as a psychoanalytical concept. In this course, we will explore artworks by painters, sculptors, photographers, and multimedia artists of African descent that challenge the dominant narrative of Melancholia in Western Art History from the late 19th Century into the Contemporary including, i.e., Edward Mitchell Bannister, Augusta Savage, William Artis, Rose Piper, Selma Burke, Charles McGee, Charles White, Roy DeCarava, Lorna Simpson, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Rashid Johnson, Ain Bailey, Alberta Whittle, and Charisse Weston. Next to an engagement with these artists, we will also discuss the role and potential of curatorial research/practice and decision-making.

This is a Graduate Seminar, but advanced undergraduates can enroll with instructor’s consent.