Gender in Contemporary Art

3 units

We will study artists from 1960 to the present whose work thematizes gender, including Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Mona Hotoum, and discuss how their work raises questions about representation of the body, spectatorship, and notions of identity. This course is intended to help students develop and refine their writing, and will require at least three papers. As we write and revise, we will consider how gender theory has encouraged art historians to rethink writing and research methods: the topics we choose, the structure of our arguments, our relation to our subjects, and the audience we address.