colored by the sea
3000 Level
Spring 2020
Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic?a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Crucial to this class is the artwork of practitioners like Jacob Lawrence, Soly Cisse, AfriCOBRA, Aubrey Williams, Faustin Linyekula, Yinka Shonibare, and Renee Green. We will focus primarily on the visual history and cultural impact of the Middle Passage as discussed through the writings of Afro-Caribbean, West African, Black American, and Black British scholars. We will work with concepts like “native” visual forms, the coloniality of painting, Negritude, and the anticolonial imagination.
“It’s Not Fair”
4000 Level
Spring 2020
The history and theory of contemporary art is shrouded with allegories of fairness. These mythologies affect visions of justice, material routes of trade, questions of authorship, and the ethics of artistic capital. We will take the “fair” as a central point of departure for this class. World’s Fairs, gendered epidermal fairness, fair trade, and transactional artistic fares, all of these histories take the realm of the visual as their vehicles to just representations. How do we reconcile fairness in the history of contemporary art and the artist? What visions of justice prevent us from actualizing ethical relationships? How are exploitation and alienation central to artistic production? We will explore artistic genres across temporalities such as the 17th Century Dutch Art Market versus the shadow archive of Dutch colonial trade routes; World’s Fair exhibits and postcolonial performance responses; Victorian photographs and gendered affiliations; and finally, the figure of the intern and (artistic) collective responses to free labor (like the Carrot Worker’s Collective).
afropessimist aesthetics
(co-taught with Huey Copeland, Northwestern University)
5000 Level
Spring 2020
Current debates in Black Studies have taken shape around interventions colloquially referred to as “Afropessimism.” Often associated with theorists Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton, the term refers to a series of political orientations that help us understand the paradigmatic antiblack violences that structure everyday Black life. These theoretical interventions have entered the popular culture, as artists, critics, and cultural producers across various contexts have turned to Afropessimism as a framework for artistic production. This class, co-taught with Huey Copeland (Northwestern University, Art History), will consider the possibilities of an 'Afropessimist Aesthetics' in the wake of such interventions. We will read works by scholars including but not limited to Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, Adrienne Edwards. Artists include Arthur Jafa, Wagenchi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Renee Greene, Glenn Ligon, Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, and Barbara Chase-Riboud. This course will meet five times per semester on the campus of Northwestern University, in Evanston. Assignments will include weekly reading responses, artistic case studies, and a final 15 page research paper.