First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-1)

Topic

Black Portraiture

Instructors

Antawan I Byrd

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-339: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

In recent decades, portraiture of Black individuals has taken on heightened visibility, its prominence ebbing and flowing across museum collections, major exhibitions, public art commissions, popular culture, and contemporary debates about race and representation. This first-year writing seminar examines Black portraiture as a cultural, social, and political practice from the advent of the twentieth century to the present. Encompassing a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, and comics, the course will critically question what portraiture promises, what it obscures, and whose interests it ultimately serves.

A central emphasis of the course is the process of writing. With scaffolded assignments, peer review, and sustained revision, students will develop facility and confidence in articulating complex ideas about race, portraiture, and material culture in written form. We will interrogate the role of art criticism and the art market in shaping the value, reception, and institutionalization of portraiture. Through museum visits and close engagement with artworks, students will develop skills in first-hand observation, visual analysis, and the formal description of objects, grounding their writing in sustained encounters with artworks. Students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of recurring approaches to producing and theorizing the likeness of Black subjects, while also gaining insight into the cultural and political stakes of portraiture as a genre of representation.

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required