Museums (395-0-5)
Topic
Contesting Space in Modern and Contemporary Art
Instructors
Jessy Bell
Meeting Info
Locy Hall 314: Fri 1:00PM - 3:50PM
Overview of class
Through artistic representations ranging from urban planning materials to video art, this seminar considers how space is produced and contested. Utilizing the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, we will focus on modern and contemporary art from the nineteenth century to today that present and represent political power through spatial dimensions to better understand the role of space in shaping social relations and realities. From French Impressionism's disclosing of class anxieties through urban development to 1960s photography documenting anti-war demonstrations in the streets, we will look at artistic responses to spatial antagonisms such as gentrification, protests, suburbanization, and colonialism. While most of our objects engage with the uses of and rights to the city, this course also thinks about other contested spaces like the body as a site of transgression and resistance. Each week will revolve around connected themes—public space and belonging, protest and confrontation, imagination and utopias, for example—rather than being chronologically or geographically structured. As the course is conducted at the Art Institute, students will have a unique opportunity to work directly with artworks in the museum's collections, to develop critical skills for visual analysis first-hand, to draw connections between visual culture and spatial theory, and to gain knowledge about museum practices more broadly. We will therefore also ask questions of the museum itself as an institution that both shapes and facilitates claims to space/place and history. This course demonstrates the connections between spatial production, world-building, and visual culture in order to assess the radical possibilities of contesting space.
Class Materials (Required)
Course readings will be available on Canvas.
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area