Global Modern Contemporary Art

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will study the history of art in the 20th and early 21st centuries from a global perspective, focusing on several cities and regions that were crucial to the development of modernism and postmodernism, including: Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, Zurich, London, Rome, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, Mexico City, Dakar, and Johannesburg. Spanning the decades 1907-2010, the course will examine a wide variety of figures, movements, and practices within the visual arts, situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments (e.g., abstraction, the readymade, conceptual, feminist, postcolonial) will be traced through the rise of mass-media technologies (such as photography, radio, video, and cinema) alongside the aesthetic accomplishments of the avant-garde. Exploring the forces of feminism, late-industrial capitalism, urbanization, and the global AIDS crisis, we will attempt to understand how artistic innovations fundamentally altered, negotiated, and framed the ways in which we understand and represent the world. The class will also participate in film screenings at the Browning Cinema, DPAC.