Unfinished Conversations: Black Contemporary Art

Graduate / Professional

This seminar offers an introduction to the complexities, diversity, and specificity of contemporary African diasporic art. The course examines how artists across the African diaspora, specifically the UK, Germany, and France engage (and disengage) with history, identity, memory, migration, and cultural exchange through a wide range of artistic practices. We discuss the practices of a.o. Sonia Boyce, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, Ima Abasi-Okon, Rhea Dillon, Alberta Whittle, Liz Johnson Arthur, Julien Creuzet, Julia Phillips, Marc Brandenburg, James Atkins, and Philip Metz. Students consider how these practices intersect with key aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical developments within the Black diaspora. Through the close study of selected artists and artworks, the seminar explores the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that contemporary artists are proposing, particularly around questions of race, grief, belonging, displacement, and representation. We discuss how artists negotiate inherited histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration while also imagining new cultural futures and forms of expression. The seminar analyzes works across multiple media, including painting, collage, installation, sculpture, video, and photography, paying attention to both formal strategies and conceptual frameworks. Readings draw from art history, Black studies, cultural studies, visual culture studies, and diaspora studies to provide critical tools for understanding how contemporary artists contribute to ongoing conversations about the Black global experience. By the end of the course, students have a foundational understanding of the major themes, debates, and artistic approaches shaping contemporary African diasporic art, while developing the skills to critically interpret artworks within broader social, historical, and theoretical contexts. Knowledge in the history of art and Black studies is highly requested. M 1:30pm-3:25pm