Ctr for Art, Society & Pub Pol (ASPP-GT)

Topics: All School Seminar vary every semester. How queer is New York City? How do queerness and the city shape each other? This course crosses time and space, examining the history, politics and culture of the Big Apple. Ranging from Harlem to Times Square to Greenwich Village to Park Avenue, and beyond Manhattan to Queens, Brooklyn and Fire Island outposts, we follow people and money, high and underground culture, protests and politics. Materials include fiction and poetry, music, theater and performance, photography and film, and works of urban studies, history and ethnography. Assignments may include archival research and digital cartographic work.

This course expands the methodological, theoretical, and discursive possibilities of situating culture and the arts in relation to the political, tracking this relationship in a transnational world. By privileging analytics from anticolonial and critical race theory, transnational feminism, queer studies and disability discourse, we reimagine the issues of arts and politics in relation to questions of power and survival. Rather than perpetuating a dominant discourse of art merely being resistant to the state, we will expand other narratives and analytics that seek to complicate not only the political, but also the aesthetic. Through tracking shifts in visual art in relation to performance, social practice, and the intermedial, we will also find grounding in concepts from political economy. This course intends to introduce key analytics in critical theory to help students theorize and historicize their own practices and approaches.

(MA Arts Politics Students Only - not open to other students) This class is a core course required for all AP students. In our class we will engage inconversation while getting to know each other as a cohort. We will have field trips and guest visits with leaders in the field. We will meet with alumni on their research, practice and hear from faculty. There will be generative engagement and space for fielding questions, incubation of process, activating content and meaning, considering arts activism, and community collaboration. Since we have had a year of the pandemic, we will engage in person at site visits in New York City as classroom. Some events that will be planned is- a tour of Stonewall Monument with Stonewall National Parks volunteer, visit the recent Maya Lin outdoor environmental installation “Ghost Trees”. We will engage in participatory walks – such as rethinking memorials – with the Columbus Monument, and retracing the remains, removal and landmarks of Seneca Village with alumni Kimiyo Bremer. Artists in the field will speak about their work such as John Sims with reclaiming and burying the Confederate flag. We will also be in the here and now, with current events and spontaneous responsive activism. And be mindful of the past year – of events, loss, trauma and regeneration, recuperation, restoration and commemoration. We will work individually but also engage in projects in cooperation and collaboration. We will consider celebration as a space for engagement and activism And we will challenge our comfort zones to consider inspiration, reimagining and possibility. As part of our process, we will delineate the increments of identifying prompts to deepen and awaken our practice. There will be readings and research alongside each unit, a presentation and final reflection essay.

The spring semester Methods and Criticism II, the last core class in the one-year Arts Politics Masters Program, is a space of synthesis and possible collaboration. Students are encouraged and supported to work in pods based on shared interests and modes of working, while also benefiting from the skills and insights of the whole cohort. There will be opportunities to engage with alumni and others in the field. Students will design projects that build on the work they’ve begun or have been moving towards, or something new may emerge that’s important to develop while in the program. With support from the professor, each other, and other networks, students will also work on pathways for their practices after graduation. Conversations will build on dialogue during the first semester core classes, looking at methodologies and exploring meaningful ways to engage with each other’s work. Texts and other materials will be integrated into discussions pertaining to work in process.

This class explores the modes through which music has expanded understandings of race and ethnicity and how it has shaped the critical understanding of performance and the performative. It pays close attention to the participation of the colonial in the formation of the contemporary political and aesthetic landscape while also defining the forces that shape culture and art on a global scale. The class maintains the tension among multiple elements such as race and ethnicity but also class, gender, and sexuality to offer an intersectional perspective of the political role that ancestral and contemporary musical performance played in anti-racist activism. We will also practice simple but meaningful musical exercises aimed at giving students tools to listen in detail while also understanding how a sense of orientation and alignment resides at the heart of Black and Indigenous musical performance. Students will develop skills to write about musical performance in the broadest sense of the term. However, they will also have chances to seek, explore, and question for ethical and political modes to include music in their own artistic practice. The class is structured in a way that allows students to gain tools to engage in detailed listening. Subsequently, these tools will foreground their capacity to richly and productively describe musical performance in their writing. No musical practice or previous knowledge is required

4 points – will count toward general education requirements (Humanities) Social, political, and economic upheavals produce shattering transformations in human life, yet some of the most significant artistic works in literature, visual arts, theatre, film, and music have been created under these extreme circumstances. The focus of this course is on developing an interdisciplinary approach to an understanding of the arts, artists, and the artists’ response as a catalyst for social and political change. We will explore the history of various practical crises and examine how they have influenced art and artists. Some of the examples include the works of Czechoslovakian films during Soviet Occupation, Protest Theatre during Apartheid South Africa, Shostakovich’s Trio during Soviet Era, underground music scene in present day Iran, Cindy Sherman’s photography in the USA, Croatian artist Sanjan Ivekovic and Bangali writer Taslima Nasrin’s. We will also look at some examples of propaganda artists and their work as well, artists like Morteza Avini in Iran and Liu Wenxi of China. By investigating the artist’s understanding of political, social, and economic forces that impact upon art and their own lives we will examine this question: What are the complex dynamics that are involved in the emergence of movements in the arts?

In this course, you will develop the skills you need to write about your own work. A series of guided reading, research, and writing exercises will help you think about what your work is, what it means, and why it matters, so that you will be able to craft language that accurately and effectively represents you as an artist and thinker. We will study a variety of personal statements, project descriptions, manifestos, and other artist writings, examining them for their relative strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards gathering effective expressive strategies. You will use the writing you’ve generated in your assignments as the groundwork for several final artist statements that approach and represent your work from different perspectives. After we explore a variety of public and private sources of funding, fellowships, and residency opportunities in the US, you will identify several opportunities that would be appropriate for your work. You will then prepare applications for two opportunities of your choosing (three for graduate students). You will exit the course with writing that you might revise and reuse for many different purposes in your professional creative life.

This is a studio course. Students will perform throughout the term. However, you do not have to be an experienced performer to benefit from the class. It has practical applications, whether you plan to enter the arts, business, medicine, advertising, or professions that help people or society. The class is about how to make your narrative powerful. Good, riveting storytelling is at the core of everything we do. Smith will draw from a variety of texts and materials: newspaper articles, letters, film, television, and theater scripts. She includes guest teachers from the worlds of dance and music. One session includes an entire jazz band composed of professional musicians. Over the course of the semester, students will learn to identify what makes a story compelling, and will explore how to most effectively communicate that story to an audience. Students will perform and revise their own stories. One exercise will focus on performing the narratives of others. This course will develop your listening skills and your ability to observe. It will enhance your understanding of how your body can be a more effective tool for communication and engaging with others, whether on a large scale or in smaller settings. The course also teaches Smith’s idea of “radical hospitality.” Everyone in the class is responsible for contributing to a community where risk-taking is supported and encouraged. This is an intensive which meets on Sundays from 10/6 – 12/15 and concludes with a final performance for an audience invited by the class. Core class hours are Sundays from 1-5pm. We will occasionally meet for extended hours, especially as we prepare for the final. Attendance at each session is required.

This course examines the relationship between law and race, especially as it relates to the production of subjects and how they come to be managed. In addition to engaging case law in the construction and management of race, we will study how the humanities and arts have come to contend with this history. The larger point in doing so is to reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and political ramifications of humanistic discourse and cultural production in how they create specific visions and understandings of the law. As such, we will unpack a set of interlocking questions that ultimately highlight the stakes of placing law, culture, race, and institutional critique together: What notions of justice are achieved through artistic, cultural, and theoretical engagements with the law that exceed the law's capacity? What ideas of institutional critique can such engagements produce beyond merely being resistant to the law or “against” the institution? Most importantly, how does the legacy of liberalism overdetermine the very terms in which we understand these questions? This course will examine theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Lisa Lowe, Janet Halley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robert Cover, and Cheryl Harris, amongst others.

This course provides an overview of the field of disability studies as it intersects with feminist theory and queer of color critique. Our discussions will focus heavily on how disability functions in relation to notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class. The first part of the semester will review the field’s foundations, analyzing investments in the notion of disability from a variety of fields and approaches. In particular, we will trace the field's foundations in relation to first person memoir that have shifted towards questions around biopolitics, biopower, and populations. The second part of the course will give an introduction to some of the major directions within the field, such as the transnational/global, biopower, debilitation, neoliberalism, war, transgendered body, posthumanism, affect, invisible disabilities, animal studies, and technology. Although we will certainly engage the history of disability along with the lived experiences of real people, this course is not meant to provide a full historical overview of disability or of specific disabilities. Rather, this course is meant to analyze the emergence of the field, along with its past and developing concerns. We will engage texts and objects including but not limited to Mel Chen, Terry Galloway, Sins Invalid, Michel Foucault, Preciado, Eli Claire, Paul Longmore, Chris Bell, Robert McRuer, Sue Schweik, Susan Stryker, Jasbir Puar, Mara Mills, Georgina Kleege, and Anna Mollow.

Explores the current curatorial drive within and for the Caribbean. Critically examining the politics of visibility, the seminar addresses what goes into making Caribbean Art “visible” when facilitating a rethinking of the canon along more global lines, and breaking the silences and silos common to art practices in and about post-colonial spaces. Looking at select contemporary curatorial projects exhibited in the past ten years within the Caribbean as well as in the United States as “Case Studies,” the seminar will analyze how these projects have succeeded, advanced, failed, complicated and troubled the work of challenging stereotypical notions of Caribbean Art, while informing audiences about the region’s complexities, histories, and politics. The course will contextualize the cultural production of Caribbean Art against the background of generational movements of migration across the diaspora. As the course assignment, students will undertake a curatorial research project of their own and develop a proposal for an exhibition on Caribbean Art.

This course looks at how difference is constructed in film through reading assignments, in class screenings and critical analysis of full-length features including main stream Hollywood, independent, and international films. This inquiry will take note that while some of these films may be conventional in form, in content they challenge accepted notions of differences, or stereotypes. Our goal is to catalog films that resist accepted notions of the "other." To accomplish our goals we will deal primarily with textual analysis that focuses on story, character, as well as cinematic space and time. With the help of the required texts we will examine socially accepted notions of the "other" and see how they are derived and or challenged in and by films, thus looking at how an art form can interact with socially accepted forms of "othering." The objective of the course is to train emerging artists and scholars to engage in critical analysis that can make profound contributions to the individual's unique creative or analytical process. Another intention of the course is to delineate and occupy the space left for debate between authorship as expressed from a directorial perspective from authorship from the spectator's point of view.

This class will concentrate on research methods of art making. It has been argued that creativity has seven stages: orientation, preparation, analysis, ideation, incubation, synthesis, and evaluation. Each of these steps will be explored and researched with complimentary writing assignments and individual or group creative problem solving exercises. These seven steps of creativity will be a platform to structure the class and hopefully come to understand the mystery of inspiration, originality and invention. We will examine other related theories such as trauma and creativity, spontaneity, chance, creativity as a voice for empowerment and the function of freedom and lack of freedom to heighten artistic movement. How are we inspired? Is there a method to our creativity? Can the creative process have a formula? How does research inform the creative process? The class will utilize the archives, galleries and libraries as a research tool and NYU as research University. We will visit the Fayles library, the Tainamont library, NYU Grey Art Gallery as well as visit with scholars and artists to consider the furthering of ideas into a series of stages to a final project and paper.

Many fields have taken a transnational turn to examine locations outside of their normative purview. Although this shift could be imagined as a multicultural expansion towards the inclusion of others across the globe, this course aims to historicize this shift in relation to power, particularly formations like race, sexuality, class, gender, and ability and legacies surrounding settler colonialism, Eurocentrism, colonization, US empire, and the Cold War. Put differently, instead of imagining the world as “a small world after all,” how might we attend to the fractures and differences that continue to maintain a world order involving the biopolitical death, debilitization, and militarized policing of racialized, gendered, and sexualized populations? This course thus historicizes, questions the ethics, and tracks the methods and fields available for the emergence and future of transnational analysis. Rather than accepting the liberal consideration of other spaces as simply better for intellectual fields and artistic practice, the main goal is to more critically understand how turns to the non-West are informed by the lingering problematics yet possibilities provided by anthropology, philosophy, area studies, and cultural studies as they can be contextualized in relation to the Cold War, neoliberalism, post-socialism, and culture wars, amongst other contexts. Further, the transnational must also be situated in relation to the medial forms available for tracking and considering the non-West, such as world cinema, literature, and performance. This course ultimately situates the historical alongside medial forms to help us consider the available methods (representation, cognitive mapping, and affect) for imagining nation states and the world. Rather than focusing on a single region, this course takes the admittedly difficult task of pondering the transnational turn as a broader concern across fields and analytics. This course will examine theorists like Frantz Fanon, Jasbir Puar, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Ella Shohat, Pheng Cheah, Trinh Minh-ha, Mel Chen, Fredric Jameson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Andrea Smith, Naoki Sakai, and David Harvey. We will also situate theoretical discourse in relation to cultural production by artists like Jacolby Satterwhite, Cao Fei, Kapwani Kiwanga, Tao Dance Theater, Bert Bernally, Isaac Julien, Xandra Ibarra, and Shirin Neshat.

Creative Response: Performance Matters. This is a dynamic, generative class that will be jubilant. We are creating and making. Although we are considering performance art, creatives or curators that work in related areas are invited that wish to expand their practice. Such as film, visual art, photography, creative writing, music, technology or if you just need to explore new ground! The professor is a multi- disciplinary artist who is active in the field. This is a workshop atmosphere and the professor strives to have an educational space for trying things out and discovering together. This class will look deeper into varying aspects of performance: concept, generating content, research and staging. We will consider the strategies of subversion of form, of interruption from normative expectations. We will consider everyday experience, randomness, abstraction and performance as a space for social change. We will create rituals, appreciate lists, timing, gathering and collecting. Performing, embodiment and communicating the body: gender, race and identity.  Recovery, restoration and healing is made possible. Awareness of work in progress, process, hybrid media or site-specific. Humor and absurdity is appreciated. We will have a workshop on how we translate our performance into performance writing. We will look at performance scores such as with Fluxus. How do we construct a text, script, be online and considering improvisation will be utilized. The visual and prop aspect of performing:  such as objects, accessories, the archive, design and costume. Listening, finding voice, silence and giving and taking commands, and deviation from dominant forms of entertainment and product.  Hopefully with deeper understanding, we will seek to challenge and stimulate our own creative content to produce innovative, thought-provoking performance.  Students will present their own work either individually or in groups, write about the theory and content of their production and have assigned readings to supplement the assignments and their areas of concentration. There will be guest artists, and we will attend performances and art events. Finley will update the description closer to the course with field trips. Plans for attending the exhibit Just Above Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art is planned for now. But in past classes we have attended Skirball,La Mama, the New Museum, The Grey Gallery, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art. We will also visit the archives at NYU.

Conceptual Studio: COVID and Dystopia The border of an imagined state of a future dystopian landscape in upon us. Thinking of the rich contributions of utopian/dystopian narratives – where fact is stranger than fiction, we will consider our own dystopian world and how that functions to interpret policy, poetics and survival. We don’t have to go far from the new world order of the pandemic society for revelation. Building on themes of dystopia/utopia we will consider other portals such as alternative realities to reimagine and inspire resistant narratives. The language of the pandemic will be deepened, discovered and re-invented. Social distancing, loss, authority, humanity, control, surviving, grief, enclosure, isolation, infection, positive, anger, anxiety, and as a workshop collective -we will begin to express authentically our experience along with the unexplained. How do we find inspiration during this era of quarantine, masks, hot spots, infection, testing, positive, anti-bodies, isolation? Considering the artist as documenter of their times we will explore, research and consider historical examples of creative response and policy during times of crisis. Further inclusion with disability studies and ableism, both set against the questions of concepts around and access to healthcare. With the lens of recent and historical examples such as art activism and AIDS, anti-war, #Me2, immigration policy, and BLM movements we will begin to consider context, concept with our own practice and perspective. This class is to facilitate the development and awareness of concepts within our living history. With assignments, research, reflections, discussion and creative practice these undertakings will provide the impetus for deeper inspiration and theories in our artistic endeavors and scholarship. The professor will initiate concepts with readings and artistic examples. We will also consider artists and examine their themes and practices. Students are welcome from a variety of fields and disciplines. Guests working in the field will be vising the class with their research and experience. Students will create a final presentation and paper. In addition, this special all school seminar will be aligned with events hosted by the department of art and public policy which the class will attend.

This class considers intersectional feminism. The class will be a series of explorations of case studies, readings, events, artistic examples, and topics reflecting on cultural, social and political issues. Female Cultural Rebels his will be a space to further and deepen reflection while reimagining possibility, rebellion, resistance empowerment and expression. One part of this semester will be considering body agency. We will study and/ or meet with abortion activists such as from Thank God for Abortion, Shout Out Your Abortion and The Jane Collective, an underground abortion service from the 60's. We will monitor the recent protests in Iran and global response after the death of Mahsa Amini. We will hear from the producer of Disclosure, an eye-opening documentary on transgender depictions in film and television. We will hear from the Feminist Institute and the archive. And the drag queen story hour and recent censorship issues. We will also consider wellness, healing, spirituality, and emotions. We will examine archetypes, roles, the gaze, casting and gender stereotypes. Monsters, crones, hags, witches, the ingenue. We will also look at the rebelliousness of socially acceptable norms of being, acting out from gender expectations and going against dominant norms such as is Narcissister, Andrea Dworkin, Chantal Ackerman, Viva Ruiz, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Annie Sprinkle, Cassils, Pamela Sneed, and Ana Mendieta. Readings, discussion, lectures, and guests will be part of the class structure. The class is given regular writing assignments and to present presentations. We will work solo but also in pairs and small groups. There will be a midterm presentation that can be a creative response with a companion essay. A final project of the student’s choice will be presented. In addition to the project or presentation a paper, artist statement and historical references will accompany the project. Of course, the choice and focus will be designed individually for the student. And can be in a research project, creative project that is focused with the student’s area of interest. The professor is a feminist artist activist who looks forward to working with you.

Art and Law: Law, Performance, Parrhesia: Modes of Truth Production This course examines the methodological and political possibilities of analyzing law in relation to performance, the body, and critical theory. In placing these multiple modes of production in relation to one another, this class examines what it means to perform parrhesia, which Michel Foucault describes as speaking truth to power. We will thus examine what it means to produce truth in multiple registers, helping students develop more nuanced understandings of the relationship between law, culture, and the political. The class will explore the productive tensions that arise by placing legal and aesthetic approaches to social change together. Each section of the class is organized via different legal, “material” sites: Immigration; “War on Terror” / Guantanamo; HIV, Disability, & Sex Panics; Reproductive Rights; Intellectual Property, Gender, and Race; Anti-Discrimination Law: Title VII; Politics of Passing: Comparing Trans, Race, and Disability; Labor/Work – Then and Now; and Globalization & Neoliberalism. In examining how aesthetic production and the law respond to each of these material concerns, each section of our course will explore the dynamic intersections and differences in how politics (law, legislation, and policy) and culture (social protest, performance, and cultural production) approach such complex issues. Furthermore, in situating culture in relation to theory and legal cases, we will examine and destabilize the disciplinary boundaries around what we take/privilege to be fact, truth, ephemera, and merely interesting. What are the limits of the law and performance in describing and addressing bodily injury, pain, and power?

Art and War: Battle Lines of the Graphic Novel This course explores storytelling about war through the use of the graphic novel. Students will be introduced to both recent and historically significant comics about war. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between image and text in sequential art, and the ability to critically analyze graphic novels that deal with challenging subject matter. What are the methodological and ethical issues that arise when constructing sequential narratives of war? What are the varying strengths between war narratives that are autobiographical, documentary or fictional? Is there something unique about the format of graphic novels that enables artists to tell a different kind of war story than filmmakers, musicians or performers? How do comic books circulate culturally, and how might this expand or limit their ability to inform our understandings of war? We will explore these questions through close readings, robust discussions and careful written analysis of well-known works by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, as well as graphic novels by Keiji Nakazawa, Jason Lutes, Gipi, Emmanuel Guibert and others.

Artists and cultural workers have always engaged in critical, integral ways in advocacy, organization, resistance & re-imagining the world. Art, the imaginary, the engagement of culture; have informed, supported, translated, transformed, and uplifted movements for social change/ justice/rights. This is true throughout the world. In many places, it is understood and assumed that art and politics are intertwined and that art offers ways of understanding, connecting, dreaming, grieving, playing, and building that make even the idea of change possible, make existing conditions survivable. At the same time, when the story is told, or the “leaders” gather to challenge or make policy, artists and art in the broadest sense are still, often considered extra, even if valuable. And, where, in many places, artists have perhaps longer been recognized as central to social change, much has changed in the U.S. in the last 40 years regarding this question. New generations of activists integrate art and imagination into their work at every level, in breathtaking ways. This class will explore models of how artists and cultural workers have worked and continue to work in relation to movements, pressing social challenges, community and policy initiatives, envisioning possibility. We will study examples to understand creative forms of intervention, invention, invitation; looking also at how different initiatives emerged, were evaluated (if they were), what is to be learned, and ways of creative resistance and world building today. Students will be invited to develop a plan for a project that engages art in relation to a social, community, political reality with which they’re seeking to engage. This work will be based on a broad interpretation of the terms “art” and “politics,” opening the possibility for exploration of definitions, methodologies, and collaboration, border crossings and re shapings. We will read works by organizers, cultural workers, artists, dreamers, theorists and educators who’ve engaged in this wide field, and look at films, exhibitions and performances in relation to the work. This class is open to graduate students and undergraduate seniors and juniors with permission from the professor.

This seminar will focus on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which foreground a complex understanding of such questions as "home," "homeland," "exile," "hybridity," and "diaspora." We will examine different narrative forms of memory-making, analyzing how post/colonial authors and media-makers perform "dislocation and belonging." We will address the socio-political ramifications of the reading and writing of memory. We will also explore various genres and media including memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, film, and music video. While examining texts and audiovisual forms of memoir, we will create our own, with particular focus on language, narrative, multilateral expression of story through time, place, and context. We will look at multilingualism, and memoir as a form of resistance and survival, giving students the opportunity to write their own versions of such narratives. Through writing exercises, we will explore the relationships between ways of seeing, knowing, recording and transforming experience. As co-teachers of the class, a poet and a scholar, both historically engaged with the question of public narrative and the weaving of the single and the collective story, we will work together to probe reading and writing invoking and invoked by the multiple expressions and experiences of memory. Course requirements include readings, screenings, presentations, critical and creative writing, and workshop style discussions of students' work. A final project will be either a scholarly paper or an extension of the student's own narrative writing.

Women, Art & Activism in the 21 st Century explores the dynamic role of women artists and cultural workers globally, whose art tackles pressing gender, racial,economic justice and civil and human rights issues of our time. The artists, which we will delve into via case studies, demonstrate how women harness the power of the arts to inspire change and transformation. Examining key contemporary artistic and cultural movements across the globe, the course explores the ways in which women’s voices have gained newfound power and an emancipatory vision through the arts and through arts activism. The course will pay special attention to the impact of women’s work in the 21 st century, examining how women’s arts activism in particular geographic regions has thrived in the midst of political, racial and economic turmoil and has encouraged greater civic participation by women and girls.

How can we direct our creative process and implement to challenge, inspire and disrupt the status quo? Can art be an intervention? This is an opportunity to expand strategies in creating cultural production. We will develop our art practice and its public. How do we envision a project and follow up on the various versions that are possible? We will consider purpose, research, process, and mission. What do we define a public sphere? How do we create an installation? How can we create a meaningful conceptual practice? How do we reimagine memorials? What is our research process? How do we consider an archive? How can our art transform society? Can we consider healing in our art? For creatives working in a variety of media – from video to performance, from object making to sound works, from movement and photography to poetics, you will find an environment that will be experimental and engaging. We will work solo but also in collaboration, create collectives and awaken cooperation. What is the community we are engaged in? What is the purpose, the humanity and message of our creativity? I will plan events for our class. We will visit archives, exhibitions, meet with artists, and create our own in class exhibitions. Finley will update the description as confirmed. We will consider appropriating other mediums. We will also consider public spaces such as nightlife, disco, joy, celebration, and processions. Other possible themes: Bridges, earthworks, protest, social practice, installations, interventions and disruption, borders and memorials, homages, silence, encounters, social and new media, and time-based art will be studied. I am a multidisciplinary artist and activist who looks forward to sharing and inspiring cultural production with you. And we will discover the energy of joy within our practice, being together with support and encouragement. Guest artists and field trips are part of the class. Selected historical, theoretical readings, artist writings and case studies accompany our studies. Please feel free to contact the professor with any questions karen.finley@nyu.edu

This course provides the opportunity for students to historically contextualize the growth of the community cultural arts movement grounded in the social and cultural equity activists movements that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. The continuing mission and work of multidisciplinary community based cultural arts organizations challenge cultural and social inequities framing their creative work and organizational practices to assure equitable inclusion of the varying aesthetic criteria and expressions that reflect the multiethnic communities that are integral to the nations cultural identity. The first section of the course will take place in advocacy cultural arts community based organizations in the city. Community arts leaders in the field in collaboration with the class instructor will teach the course. This team teaching approach will afford students direct exposure and learning experiences with practitioners in the field within the communities they serve. In the second section of the course students will develop a project in collaboration with staff of one of the participating institutions. Students will have direct immersion within the community and the community organization understanding the operational and programmatic realities of the field as well as direct engagement in advocacy creative work. Students will be exposed to teaching strategies for working within communities that include readings, open discussions, as well as working on multidisciplinary collaborations in the field.

Every few years, generally in times of great public strife, articles appear in major media outlets referring to an increase in people turning to and sharing poetry to cope, soothe, understand conditions, and connect across borders and differences. A field of writing, teaching and research has developed studying the powers of poetry to sustain individuals and communities, foster communication, and imagine worlds. Gregory Orr’s “Poetry As Survival,” James Crews’ “Poetry as Resilience” seminars and the anthologies he’s edited including “How to Love the World” and “The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy,” Ross Gay’s acclaimed “The Book of Delights,” are only a few of the numerous works that have emerged directly or more broadly inviting readers (and writers) to engage poetry in the context of nurturing community, communication and offering tools for better understanding the world. A plethora of workshops and retreats exist grounded in the belief that poetry serves these purposes. Poet and wellness practitioner Dr. LeConté Dill, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, African American and African Studies, and Associate Editor of Health Promotion Practice’s new section “Poetry for the Public’s Health,” is among a group of scholars working to integrate poetry and other art forms into curricula and program initiatives focusing on health and resilience. This course will explore works of poetry and poetic projects that, broadly defined, support survival and beyond that, thrival. Students will engage in close reading and discuss the texts as literature as well as the ways the works are supportive of individual and social wellbeing. Students will write regularly and share their writing with the class.

This course will offer neither a linear, developmental history nor a comprehensive survey of feminism but a look at various dissident creative practices--sometimes disjunctive, sometimes conflicting, sometimes interlinked--from a range of contexts in the Americas. The focus will be primarily on practices that resist the modes of gendering and the gender-based relations of domination that underpin settler colonialism, racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy and by defending and/or inventing alternative ways of life. We will think about the social and aesthetic aspects of the various forms such practices take, including writing, image-making and performing, but also organizing, assembling, caring, etc. and what those forms make possible. The practices we consider can and will necessarily expand beyond the geographical frame loosely specified here to account for transnational or inter-local connections. Students will also contribute to a collective archive of feminist practices in order to further elaborate our sense of what feminism might be or do.

Following ongoing critiques of liberal humanism from critical race, Afro-pessimist, transnational, queer, and feminist studies, what alternative political projects or visions might now inform our practices and work? What should follow after we question the grounds of modernity, liberalism, and materialism? This class seeks to examine one critical possibility: Marxism, particularly Marxist humanism. Although we will define this political project, we will also question its limits. The legacy of humanism in both liberalism and Marxism becomes a problem when placed alongside recent critiques around the subhuman and inhuman. In particular, what is the figure of the human for Marxist humanism? And how does such a figure sit with and/or against the liberal subject, person, and Man that has come under critique by queer inhumanism (with a focus on objects, animals, and environmental relations), along with the larger ontological turn coming from Black studies, Afro-pessimism, trans and queer theories, and new materialism? This class examines 1) differing notions of the human and subject as informed by liberalism and Marxist humanism, 2) the political limits and possibilities of Marxist humanism, and 3) the history and the continued mediation of Marxism alongside discourses of race, the transnational, disability, queerness, sexuality, and gender. In addition, we will situate how the aesthetic has engaged these larger questions. This course will examine theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, CLR James, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, Shu-mei Shih, Fredric Jameson, Mario Mieli, and Petrus Liu, amongst others.

A class in which the intersection between the political world around us and our theatrical heritage collide. We'll look at the politics that informed Shakespeare when he wrote plays like Julius Caesar and Richard II as well as how those plays reflect and augment our understanding of politics today. We'll also examine how Shakespeare helps us as contemporary dramatists through an examination of such Shakespearean modern works as Angels in America and Junk.