Unsettling American Art, 1600-1900
ARHA 250
Spring 2025
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
AMST 272 |
This course examines developments in American art from roughly 1600 to 1900. Core objects in this class will range widely: quilts; maps; baskets; paintings across genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life; engravings; public monuments; daguerreotypes; and more. We will seek to understand the particular concerns and traditions animating objects across this heterogeneous span of materials, forms, and techniques. In so doing, we will also ask how artists and makers--including those whose names were never recorded--variously internalized, articulated, or examined the historical contradictions of their time, including the consolidation of settler colonialism and racial capitalism; rebellion, revolution, abolition, and civil war; industrialization and its ever-expanding and often violently lopsided acceleration of communication networks, labor relations, travel, and exchange; and the contested aim of defining a distinctively American aesthetic tradition in a land born of migration, encounter, forcible displacement, and polyphonic hybridization. Visits to area museums and collections will complement in-class work. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ART |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ARHA-MN)(ARHA)(ARST)(HRAD-MN) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Articles and book chapters from a variety of sources. A representative sample:
1. Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 2012)
2. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, `Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles, Silhouettes and African American Identity in the Early Republic, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2005)
3. Jennifer Roberts, Failure to Deliver: Watson and the Shark and the Boston Tea Party, Art History (September 2011): 675-695
4. Michelle Smiley, Daguerreotypes and Humbugs: Pwan-Ye-Koo, Racial Science, and the Circulation of Ethnographic Images around 1850, Panorama (Fall 2020)
5. Jennifer van Horn,`The Dark Iconoclast: African Americans Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South, Art Bulletin (December 2017): 133-167
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Examinations and Assignments:
Contributions to discussion forum, two short papers (2-3 pages each), research paper (8-10 pages), 10-minute research presentation. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Prospective Wesleyan students cannot visit this class |
| Instructor(s): Grace,Claire Times: ..T.R.. 01:20PM-02:40PM; Location: BOGH113; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 18 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 3 | | |
| Seats Available: 0 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 2 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 5 | FR: 2 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 15 | 1st Ranked: 8 | 2nd Ranked: 5 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 2 | Unranked: 0 |
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