Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Hunter College CUNY/20th Century African American Art (Spring 2023)

This course will survey visual art created by people of African descent from North America during the twentieth-century. Starting with W. E. B. DuBois’ participation at the First Pan-African Conference of 1900, students will consider issues of citizenship, expatriation and exile, identity, migration, race, and aesthetics amidst the Great Migration, World War I, Harlem Renaissance, World War II, Civil Rights Movement, and through the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Our focus will be on artistic as well as curatorial and institutional practices. We will take advantage of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art for both archival and object-based study. After completing the course, students will be able to identify work by familiar as well as lesser known twentieth-century Black artists; explain major aesthetic movements; produce a tightly focused writing sample. The course is organized to include lectures, class discussion, group work, writing workshops and visiting scholars.