Mapping Art, Race, & Community in The US-Mexico Borderlands

3 units

This upper-level undergraduate seminar will delve into the history of border art as a category, whether in terms of public art, sculpture, installation, new media, or performance, using the U.S.-Mexico border as an extended in-depth case study. Students will collaborate to add to an ongoing mapping project of community engaged art on the border and create multimedia materials to augment or interpret the data as they see fit. As such, this course builds Digital Humanities practices and methodologies throughout the semester. Students in the course will also work to map race and population data along with their chosen artworks. In doing so, the course challenges students to think beyond U.S.-centric concepts of race and ethnicity and explore how the third space of the border shapes artistic practices and approaches to community. Prerequisites: One introductory Art History course or permission of the instructor.