Special Topics in the Humanities (370-6-25)
Topic
Care, Community, Collaboration in 20th -21st Centu
Instructors
Jessica Ann Hough
Meeting Info
Locy Hall 213: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
Care, Community, Collaboration: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Art
How do we make community through care and collaboration? When does collective action become art? Taking art's recent "social turn" as a starting point, this class will explore how public performance, community organizing, forms of communal care, and mutual aid constitute creative interventions. Put differently, this is a course about creative forms of relationality and relationality as a creative form. Together, we will examine projects at the intersection of artistic practice and political activism, ranging from Fluxus and Womanhouse, to the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, feminist video collectives in Mexico City, and radical pedagogies of teaching artists in Chicago public schools, to contemporary tactical media interventions and large-scale international exhibitions. We will seek to understand how the less visible relationships behind artworks, exhibitions, or community projects themselves might constitute creative practices, while taking seriously the artistic value of interventions that may not look like "art." In doing so, we will collectively investigate art historical theories of social practice and relationality. Accessible readings from interdisciplinary scholars will address themes of artistic collaboration and community action in relation to race, gender, queerness, and indigeneity. Along with participation, evaluation will be based on a short paper, a presentation, and a final project in the form of either a research paper, creative project, or community intervention, designed in discussion with the instructor. Depending on scheduling availability, we will also incorporate artist visits and/or a gallery tour.
Learning Objectives
This course will introduce students to collaborative creative practices through the history of activist art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Class readings and seminar discussion, a final project proposal, final project, and oral presentation will demonstrate students' grasp of the relevant historical and conceptual issues.
Students in the course will:
Develop familiarity and comfort with terms including "relational art," "social practice," "collaboration," "performance," and "collective"
Strengthen visual analysis skills for collaborative artworks, collective creative interventions, and community actions
Analyze the arguments, methods, and interventions of scholarly texts by closely and critically engaging interdisciplinary readings
Use knowledge of the history of collaborative art practices to imagine new creative and intellectual interventions around current social and political issues
Hone academic and artistic research skills by developing and executing a final research-based writing or creative project
Class Materials (Required)
Readings will be available as PDFs.
Class Notes
There is a waitlist link available through the ART HIST course listing.
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area