Materiality and Making in Indigenous Art from the Ancestral Americas

4 credits · Undergraduate

This lower-division undergraduate course examines selected examples of Indigenous art from South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean between 5000 BCE and the 16th century. Each week the course will explore a different medium: stone, clay, textiles, gold, jade, shells, feathers, soil, and bodily tissues, and highlight the connections between materials, making, and meaning. Engaging with theories of craftsmanship and technology, Indigenous worldviews, and human-environment relationships, the course will also examine how Indigenous forms of making challenge and expand the traditional methodologies of Art History that developed from the Greco-Roman tradition.