Topics Vary

Course Instructor:  Christina Knight

Fall, 2023  Thursdays 3:50-6:50 in VH001 

Topic:  BLACK OTHERWISE WORLDS: THE ART OF CONTEMPORARY BLACKNESS

This course considers the relationship between recent black art and art writing and what scholar of religion Ashon Crawley calls an “aesthetic of possibility.”
Specifically, we will examine work that imagines “otherwise” through a number of strategies: rethinking the relationship between the present and the past, crafting alternative worlds, critically examining life at the end of the Anthropocene, rethinking the Enlightenment subject, and exploring black sacred practices. The course will be a platform for reading deeply across art history, art criticism and black studies, and our concentration will be primarily on black artists working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.