Studies in American Culture (310-0-7)
Topic
Chicago and the Making of the Modern World
Instructors
Rebecca Elizabeth Zorach
Rebecca Zorach teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation, and the multiple intersections of art and politics.
Recent articles have addressed AfriCOBRA's gender and family politics; Claes Oldenburg's lawsuit challenging the copyright of the Chicago Picasso; and the experimental art center Art & Soul, founded on the west side of Chicago in 1968 by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Conservative Vice Lords, a former street gang. She is currently completing a book on Art & Soul and the landscape of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago (late 1960s-1970s), and undertaking a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies.
Meeting Info
Block Conference Room: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
This undergraduate seminar will try—and given the enormity of the topic, undoubtedly fail—to come to grips with the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition was central to the city of Chicago's ambitions for rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but its larger importance in the project of imagining a new American role for the twentieth century cannot be overstated. 27 million people visited the Exposition (the vast majority coming by rail) at a time when the population of the United States was only 62 million. This World's Fair showcased global cultures, new inventions (the Ferris wheel, the movie theater, numerous products that have become household names), art and architecture—and the racial, colonial, and gendered ideologies of the Jim Crow era. In the seminar, within the wealth of possible topics, we will look at Ida B. Wells's crusading journalism, the founding collections of the Field Museum, Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West" show, the fair's Beaux-Arts architecture and its broader impact on Chicago, the Woman's Building, the development of the mythology of Christopher Columbus, violently racist human spectacles, political intrigues, and the fair's aftermath. In addition to working with primary visual and textual materials available digitally and in local collections, we will read literary works such as Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
Class Materials (Required)
all class readings will be available as PDFs