ARHI178 PO

Course examines the visual arts (including painting, sculpture, photography, prints, textiles, mixed media, installations, performance, independent film and video) produced by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Emphasis on Black artists' changing relationship to African arts and cultures, the emergence of an oppositional aesthetic tradition interrogating visual constructs of "Blackness" and "Whiteness," gender, sexuality and class as a means of revisioning representational pratices. Course provides a social-historical frame for the interpretation and analysis of form, content and the production of historically situated cultural criticism. Letter grade only.