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.

Methods & Criticism I supports you to identify and strengthen the methodologies operating in your practice while developing a critical framework for diverse modes of creative and political action. Weekly presentations and discussions will allow for robust engagement with one another’s work, which may include but not be limited to artmaking, scholarship, activism, curation and pedagogy. Over several weeks, we’ll also do slow, careful readings of two primary texts: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Kimmerer will guide us in considering the power of place and the more than human. What vitalities might be cultivated by holding multiple worldviews and ways of being? Butler will help us to consider how fiction – and the novel in particular – offers a space for considering what lessons lie in coalition and the multi-generational. How does science fiction envision new worlds and forms of collectivity amidst dystopian futures? Operating beyond more conventional notions of activism, agitprop or the contemporary, how might such texts help us to reimagine the political and creative dimensions of our practices? Additionally, how might critical readings and contextualization of these works impel us into new possibilities for thinking more critically about the terms and forms of our own work? Our goal will then be to apply these lessons to the professional pauses and pivots that unfold for you over the course of this one-year program. How is this current historical moment calling you to reflect, shift or lead? What are the frameworks, methodologies, tools, connections and experiences you need in order to evolve and sustain your practice? In addition to our critique sessions, analytical readings and discussions, we’ll also conduct weekly writing reflections, complete individual final essays articulating your relationship to arts politics, and undertake a group exercise to map resources, challenges, synergies and pathways. This course helps to prepare students for the research, creativity, collaboration and convening that will continue in the core Methods and Criticism II course in the Spring Semester, and across your chosen elective courses.

(MA Arts Politics Students Only - not open to other students) Colloquium: Space and Place This class is a core course required for all Arts Politics students. In our class we will engage in conversation and collaboration while getting to know each other as a cohort. In this class we will be considering space, place, seen and unseen histories as inspiration for arts politics. For our colloquium – we will be exploring New York City. We will at times visit outdoor public spaces. How do we engage and consider public art? How do we reflect on spaces of protest and memory? We will be visiting Stonewall National Park and meet with an artist activist and volunteer ranger. We will visit Columbus Circle and consider monuments, and engage in participatory walks through the early settlement of African American and Irish immigrants known as Seneca Village in Central Park. We will engage and collaborate and create our own collaborative presentations in Washington Square Park. Arts Politics faculty, Dr. Sheril Antonio will visit and speak about her research on the seen and unseen with Washington Square Park history. We will have guest artists and alumni who engage in Arts Politics in their practice. We will visit NYU special collections and consider what is an archive? The collection holds rich collections of books, serials, pamphlets, archives, photographs, oral histories, and more.

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, and the class will end with a performance for invited guests. The class focuses through practice on how to make your personal narrative powerful. Additionally, Smith posits 'performance as a way of knowing.' Performing the narrative will illuminate the narrative and, possibly, the self and other related stories. This work will have practical applications, whether you plan to enter the arts, business, medicine, advertising, law, or activism. Experience in performance is useful but not required. All are welcome. Students will learn to identify elements that make stories compelling. Through practice, students will develop listening skills and observation skills and will gain enhanced understanding of how the body can be a more effective tool for communicating to large groups and/or engaging intimately with others. Guest artists – dance and music professionals – will conduct sessions alongside Professor Smith. Everyone in the class is responsible for creating a community where risk-taking can thrive. This is an intensive which meets on Sundays from January 28 – April 21 excluding Sundays that are a part of University-declared holidays. Attendance at each session is required. For more information, contact Anna Deavere Smith – ads2@nyu.edu"

This course thinks through the relationship of art and Blackness to feminism, womanism, sex, gender, sexuality. How is Blackness rendered through gender, sex, and sexuality, and how are gender, sex, and sexuality informed by Blackness? How does art in its most expansive terms engage, depict, and reformulate Blackness? How are Black artists reconfiguring and exploring gender, sex, and sexuality and their fraught tensions? The course methods will include engagement with visual art, music, performance, film, tv, everyday life, and critical theory. Some of our course interlocutors will include: art from the 2024 Whitney Museum Biennial, other gallery and museum exhibitions; texts such as The Invention of Women (1997), Race and Performance After Repetition (2020), Frottage (2019), Black Sound (2024); videos and music from Janelle Monáe, Rihanna, Durand Bernarr, Chika, Kelela, and Tems; and films such as The Stroll (2023), Little Richard: I am Everything (2023), and Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013). Students will be encouraged to create, write, perform, collaborate, make, and think alongside, against, and around these issues, methods, and objects. For PhD Students: a final seminar-length paper is expected. For MA students: the final is a small group or individual presentation/performance/project and an annotated bibliography.

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.

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.

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.

Graduate students and undergraduate seniors with instructor’s permission: This graduate-level course examines aesthetics in hip hop culture and production from the 1970s to the present. Through studying hip hop film, music, visual art, dance, photography, and literature, we will think through what is so valuable about the aesthetic practices in the 50-year history of hip hop culture. This class is a rigorous attempt to think with critical and scholarly eyes and ears about a form many of us love. This course will concentrate on race, gender, region, generation,and sexuality as produced in hip hop culture. This course will center around performances, exhibits, and objects across NYC related to the celebration of hip hop at 50. We will also read and watch material that contextualized hip hop culture and performance in a broader Black Studies context. Possible site visits: Universal Hip Hop Museum, ongoing art exhibits; films: Wild Style (1983); “Hip Hop at 50” Instagram page; books: Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop; Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers; Graffiti Grrlz

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?

The class is to consider the depth of grief and loss within artistic responses and to inspire love and hope with our creative transformation. How does the artist process or respond to the emotions and events of loss? What are cultural heritage examples? What are ways we were taught in our families? What traditions do we wish to reimagine? Who needs to be commemorated? Is creative transformation possible? Is there a space for hope, love and joy within the complexity of these emotions? The course will have creative exercises and conceptual prompts that can be developed in the medium of your choice. We will consider creative texts such as visual, film, music, media, performance, installation, and poetic examples to broaden and inspire our understanding of ways to respond. There are other forms of expression to contemplate such as fashion, outsider art, architecture, archives, memorials, gardening, and cultural movements. We will have discussion, guests, field trips, and presentations. Is there a way to create an archive? How do we document or forget? Together we will be a collective of considering, contemplating and creating. Some of the strategies we will be considering are: metaphor, expression within nature, fairy tales, abstraction, fragments, love, celebration and the space of silence for restoration. Some of the artists /writers will be Maya Angelou, Dunbar, David Wognarowicz, Krishnamurti, Pamela Sneed, Barthes, Rilke and bell hooks. We will look at films such as the 1926 silent film, Page of Madness by Kunsuga, Let me Come in by Bill Morrison, or News From Home by Chantal Ackerman. I look forward to being your guide for the seminar, Grief, Loss , Love, Hope and Creative Transformation. Feel free to contact me with any questions karen.finley@nyu.edu

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.

Postcolonial Displacement: Memoir and Memory With the growing numbers of immigrants/refugees in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, belonging no longer corresponds to one geography, simplistically imagined as “over there.” This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in a wide variety of texts. It will focus especially on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which confront exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity” and “minorities.” How are identity and history performed in these colonial, post­colonial and diasporic contexts? What is the status and significance of the oral, the visual and the performed within the context of memory? We will examine different narrative forms of memory­making, analyzing how post/colonial authors and media­makers perform “home,” “homeland,” “diaspora,” and “exile.” How does memory become a filter for constructing contemporary discourses of belonging, especially in the context of post­independence and transnational dislocations? We will also address questions of genre, and the socio­political ramifications of certain modes of writing and performances of memory that create new hybrid genres such as the poetic documentary and experimental autobiography. We will analyze works where a fractured temporality is reassembled to form a usable past where the body serves as an icon of migratory meanings. We will also examine contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing such issues as “nostalgia” and “return” in the context of new communication technologies.

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.

Art and the Public Sphere: Other Architectures What is a public sphere and how is it activated and delineated? By and for whom? And how is private domestic life structured? And what forms of social life cannot be accommodated in either? We will consider the way such social spaces are articulated by, among other things: physical architecture and infrastructure; media and communication technologies; the economic instruments of colonial and racial capitalism; state policies and policing; and cis-heteropatriarchal and ableist moralisms. We will look at the ongoing reorganization of these spaces (through, for example, land appropriation, domicide, “slum” clearance, redlining, predatory loans, moral panics, rezoning, sacrifice zones, and the risks and restrictions accompanying the recent pandemic). At the same time, we will look at alternative formations, some found in different building traditions, some created by artists or imagined by poets, and some defined through irregular forms of movement and/or gathering that the planners did not plan for. Authors and artists studied may include Jürgen Habermas, Kristin Ross, Leon Battista Alberti, Angela Mitroupolous, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakrabarty, Veronica Gago and Luci Cavallero, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Kengo Kuma, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michel de Certeau, Maria Lugones, Sara Ahmed, Fernand Deligny, Claudio Medeiros and Victor Galdino, Hélio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lygia Clark, Park MacArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, Erica Gressman, Italo Calvino, Renee Gladman, Natalie Diaz and Zoe Leonard.

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.

Sometimes called the grandmother of Hip Hop, Sonia Sanchez is one of the most significant and prolific poet/scholar/activists of our time. In her poetry, plays, essays, teachings and activism she has been unswerving in her commitment to engaging in struggles for a more just world. The number of writers she's taught, who are now renowned in their fields, is countless. She continues to serve as mentor and inspiration for countless students. We will explore Sonia Sanchez's poetry, plays, performances, and essays, reading closely, and writing in conversation with her work. We will research her life as an activist and educator, from the Black Arts Movement to work for peace and disarmament, environmental justice, women's rights, prisoner's rights and more. She played a key role in the creation of Ethnic and Black Studies in the academy and has continuously worked directly with peace and justice campaigns and organizations. Her poetic performance is matched by her deep attention to craft and form. Sanchez is known and admired worldwide for her extraordinary contributions to literature and a more civil society, having won numerous awards in recent years. We will delve into her book, Morning Haiku, and her Peace Haiku project and invitation. The semester will include at least one zoom or in person conversation with "Sister Sonia" as she is lovingly known. Closing the semester, in late April (National Poetry Month), students will, joined by others, create an outdoor installation of Peace Haiku, with Sanchez's poems and their own, inviting others to join.

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.

This course uses some historical examples of how theater has responded to the great events of the world around them, and then examine a range of contemporary theater practices that have arisen to respond to specific issues or challenges. We will read plays, analysis, history, theory, and journalism.