Black Abstraction

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

Does abstraction free us from the burden of the racialized body? For some black artists and thinkers abstraction in visual art has that potential and for others it all enables exploration of blackness’s exclusion from normative bodily form. In this class we study the work of artists such as, Norman Lewis, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, Howardena Pindell, and Torkwase Dyson to consider the way that abstraction helps us understand blackness not as a stable visible identity but as something more complex. We will study these works through the lens of black critical theorists including Hortense Spillers, Rizvana Bradley, Huey Copeland and more.