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CS92PROD
Unsettling American Art, 1600-1900
ARHA 250
Spring 2025
Section: 01  
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.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ART
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ARHA-MN)(ARHA)(ARST)(HRAD-MN)
Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74%

Last Updated on OCT-04-2024
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