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

We will return to and consider together these terms and others as ways of locating or "framing" socio-ecological life. What are the implications of understanding socio-ecological life in these terms (and/or others)? This is a broad topic that has been addressed by many scholars. This class will not offer a comprehensive history, but rather a way of understanding the specificity of the ways some contemporary political and aesthetic practices have reworked or departed from these terms. So we will review some of the history of the enclosure and appropriation of communal space made possible by the imposition of the economic framework of private property. We will also review some of the history of the partitioning, political administration and policing of space by states through the emergence of international law. And we will consider some attempts to revisit these histories in Western science and philosophy. At the same time, we will look at very different ways of understanding the ground or space or material contours of socio-ecological life that are fundamental to communal, indigenous, pastoral, and exilic/diasporic social formations, among others. Finally, will look at documentation of some recent projects—political and aesthetic—that maneuver, elude, or make use of the contradictions in these terms, or that attempt to sustain or imagine and activate other forms of socio-ecological life without them. We will consider the work of writers like: John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Samera Esmeir; Wen Liu; Anooradha Siddiqi; Renisa Mawani; Isaac Newton; John Bell; Karen Barad and Nathaniel Mackey. We will also consider work by groups and artists such as: The Freedom Farm Cooperative, The EZLN and Zapatista Caracoles; Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti; Jorge Furtado; Hélio Oiticica; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz; Julieta Aranda; Alan Lomax; Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum; among others.

What are some of the issues that impact arts, politics, and the intersection of arts & politics? There are many! This course introduces Arts Politics MA students to methodological (systems of approach to an area of study), critical (analysis, theory), and discursive (what is being talked about/discussed at a broader level) tools to engage with the selected themes and art objects for the course. The course will focus on reading, watching, listening, participating, observing, and writing in order to engage questions such as: what is the relationship between art and politics/the political? How does geography, embodiment, time period, genre, and other factors shift what politics are and how artists, art critics, scholars, and others engage with art as a political tool and a political method? How do we deploy writing, thinking, and discussion as aesthetic, civic, and intellectual responses to global politics? Sitting with these questions, the course will engage three main themes: criticism, institutions, embodiment. The course tasks consist of reading, seeing visual art work, watching films, workshopping with small groups, and writing and final paper. Readings may include: bell hooks, Art On My Mind; John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Edouard Glissant, A New Region of the World; Theodor Adoro, Aesthetics; Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’,”; nikki a greene, Grime, Glitter, & Glass; Okwui Enwezo et al. PostWar Revisited; Joseph Pierce Speculative Relations; Laura Marks, The Fold; Tina Campt, Listening to Images. There will be site visits to galleries, museums, and festivals, as well as guests to our class and invitations to attend relevant lectures, workshops, and talks. Students will write a final paper, make a presentation, and participate in a paper workshop.

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 2 credit Methods and Criticism II, the last core class in the one-year Masters in Arts Politics Program, offers a framework for synthesis, dialogue, and collaboration. Students are encouraged and supported to further deepen the work they’ve begun during the first semester and to work collaboratively based on shared interests and modes of working, while 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. The work can take any number of forms, including creating a map for a future project, developing a performance or art work, researching and designing a panel, writing, taking steps towards further study, or hybrid forms on key arts politics questions. With support from the professor, each other, and other networks, students will also identify pathways for their practices after graduation. We will discuss a limited number of texts and engage with different artistic expressions. We will meet with guest artist/scholar/activists, alumni, and visit sites of arts/politics. The intention is to make a space that is both expansive and precise, challenging and supportive, building on the work of the first semester. At the close of the semester we will curate two sessions devoted to presenting your project, your work-in-process. These offerings can be in the form of panels, performances, visual work, writing, or another configuration, and/or combination.

The Reproductive Unit: We will look at some of the history of the ideal of the nuclear family, as socio-bio-economic-affective and reproductive unit. We will consider the moral/ideological justifications for this unit and the measures taken by states and other apparatuses to promote it, however unsustainable it may be, and to interdict it, however sustaining it may be (measures that include state surveillance, management and dissolution of families or other support systems that don’t fulfill the functions this unit is meant to fulfill). We will consider the way class war, colonial war, race war, the wars against women, queer and crip people are carried out through interventions in biological in reproduction, including eugenics and population/workforce management through birth control, coerced sterilization, “one child” policies, sex-selection (now legal only in the US), and adoption as well as efforts to control pregnant people through rape, restrictions on pregnancy termination and IVF, among other measures. We will also consider the way the reproductive unit has been supplemented by paid surrogates, wet nurses and other caregivers. Course materials will include sentimental, utopian and “monstrous” representations of families as well as critical writing about reproduction in its various forms by authors and artists such as: Thomas Robert Malthus; Jonathan Swift; Jade Sasser; Michel Foucault; Francis Galton; Mary Shelly; Silvia Federici; Edward Steichen; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Jennifer Morgan; Hortense J. Spillers; Ana Maria García; Lourdes Portillo; Rita Laura Segato; Mary Pat Brady; Jennie Livingston and her many coauthors; Mark Rifkin; Joseph M. Pierce; Tsai Ming-liang; Rey Chow; W. E. B. Du Bois; Octavia Butler; Rachel Carson; Heather Davis; Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and perhaps some horror films from the 1970s.

Independent Study

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.

Sophomores, Juniors, Seniors and Graduate Students (with instructor’s permission, after video application) This is a studio class in which performance is used as a way of investigating identity. The purpose of the work is to find nuance in how one understands one’s own identity and how one understands the identity of someone or something very different from the self. This could be another person, another idea, another entity – such as family, a nation, a corporation, a university, or a natural phenomenon. For example, one assignment might be to create a five-minute performance taking on the behavior of a real person who one cannot imagine ever being. Each student will create and present an original performance for a curated audience on the final day of class. Students do not need to be performers to participate in or to gain from this class. For those with performance experience, skills will be refined, toward increased power and increased nuance. All genres of performance are welcome: theater, music, dance, interdisciplinary. The professor will use exercises she has developed over decades, both as a teacher and in her performance work as a professional theater artist. World-class guest artists are integrated into the syllabus, collaborating with the professor to help create memorable and transformative activities. The class is conducted like a workshop, and meets once weekly on Sundays* from January 25 to April 12, excluding Sundays that are University holidays. Each student is expected to take proactive responsibility for creating an incubator environment where risk-taking is supported. Students from all disciplines and all schools throughout the university are welcome. Students from other professional schools, who are not studying artistic forms, but who wish to have greater communication skills, or who are preparing to take on leadership roles, are welcome. To apply for this class, please record a one-to-two-minute video in which you explain what you believe you can contribute to a creating a supportive class community, and what about people unlike yourself is of interest to you. Submit your video to Yumin Oh by email (yumin@annadeaveresmith.org) no later than November 30, 2025. For more information, email Professor Smith (ads2@nyu.edu) and cc Yumin Oh (yumin@annadeaveresmith.org). *The dates for this class are: Jan 25, Feb 1, Feb 8, Feb 15, Feb 22, March 1, March 8, March 29, (Saturday) April 11, and April 12.

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 dynamic and intimate seminar aims to inspire and deepen our creative practice while gaining research fluency with archival materials. As part of this seminar, we will be holding 3 in- person sessions at the Special Collections at NYU. Joining us will be the Curator of the Arts and Humanities at NYU to guide and facilitate how to utilize an archive to inform our awareness and inspire our creative production. Together, we will be shown how to review and browse material from the collection, learn how to access and request archive materials and have items we requested retrieved for us to view. Finally, we will be in creative discourse to create presentations from our research. I am very thrilled about this unique opportunity. For example, one of our assignments from our visit to the NYU Special Collections will be examining the archive of gay artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. A pertinent work is his "Magic Box" which was a box of personal objects, bric-a-brac stored in a wooden box under the artist's bed. The collection of the artist will be a point of departure to consider creating our own version of a "Magic Box". In addition to the above, we will have a parallel inquiry: the 7 stages of creativity as a framework to identify the incremental steps in decisions and direction in artistic practice. These stages include orientation, preparation, analysis, ideation, incubation, synthesis and evaluation. Through studying and exploring these junctures we hopefully will come to understand the mystery of inspiration, originality and invention. We will examine other related theories such as the relation of symbolism to the unconscious, trauma and creativity, the role of spontaneity and chance as a direction, artistic expression as a voice for empowerment, and the function of freedom and agency in heightening cultural movements. Along the way we will discover insights together. Individually you will discover what interests and inspires your particular project research. There will be complementary readings, assignments and individual or group creative exercises. Besides the NYU archives the class may utilize other collections, public art, performances, galleries and libraries for reference. We may have guest artists and scholars. Students will use these resources as they consider furthering the ideas covered in class through the archive, studying a series of stages, to a final project and paper."

This class considers the multiple ways we create artistic content. How do we creatively respond to this historical moment? Do you wish to create art inspired by lived experience and offer representation to your voice? How do we artistically engage with resilience and resistance to represent stories and histories not told? How do we find purpose and meaning in these crazy and challenging times within our practice and identity? We will examine cultural examples in history, exhibitions and hear from guest speakers to inspire our vision for a hopeful future. Imagination as celebration can be a space to transcend and resist. This is a dynamic, generative class where you will be able to engage in creative production. We are creating and making. You will have your choice of mediums - performance art, installation, hybrid media, film, photography, site-specific, poetic or text based, or experimental practice. Sound work, drama or movement is also welcomed. Creatives or curators that work in related areas are invited to expand their practice to explore new ground! This is a workshop atmosphere and the professor strives to have an educational space for trying things out and discovering together. We will go on field trips to investigate art practices that will look at identity, representation, new media gender, race and activism. At the time of this writing the professor is still planning our cultural adventures and field trips for Fall 2026. Last 2025 class we attended Homage to Queer Lineage Video. at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and met with the gallery director and to The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to see Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exploring Black Dandyism, when the museum was closed to the public for an invited viewing with staff. In both of these examples students created and researched presentations / creative production inspired by the exhibits. We will have guest artists, last year we had Noa Micaela Fields who describes themselves as a trans poet with hearing aids who visited our class and discussed their practice and most recent book of poetry. We will have a research session to learn about artist archives at the NYU special collection. At the archives we will study the Magic Box by Queer artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. How do we research and document the creative process? In Fall 2026 I have been invited to bring our class to see and respond to the exhibition by fluxus artist Alison Knowles at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Finley will update exhibitions, guests and field trips in the summer. We will observe, review and research ways to expand our practice and methods. Performing, embodiment, intersectional feminism, communicating the body: gender, race and identity. Recovery, restoration and healing is made possible. Appreciating in-progress, process, or How do we give and receive feedback?. How do we translate our practice to the page? Humor and absurdity is appreciated. Introverts and ambiguity welcome. I look forward to working with you. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to the professor via email - karen.finley@nyu.edu

How do we create transformative art that activates social change? How do we create art that expresses the world we see and the world we wish to change to? What concerns do you feel passionate about that you wish to activate artistically? How can emotions, events, policy, loss, grief, hope for peace, end to war, healthcare, gender, race, cultural equity, social justice etc... become art? Can this work be abstract or diffuse or should it be direct and clear? Considering the artist as a historical recorder we will strive to develop work that witnesses, illustrates and communicates issues about which we wish to foster awareness or change. We will consider art examples, meet with artists, experiment and workshop works in progress. We will have readings, creative assignments, formulate poetic voicing and artistic vision. As we develop our own content we will begin to consider context and concept with our own practice and transformation. Intentional areas of reflection will be employed for the student to experiment and expand perspective. Units such as Architectural Methods as a Way to Unify, will include activities such as ""making"" bridges, creating windows, building foundations, urban wall murals or graffiti art. Sound and color will emerge as a way to express emotion, outrage and cultural shifts. We will consider memorials, monuments and borders. Collaboration, collectives, community practice and public art. Cultural and collaborative manifestos. Through this all we need to find the passion, courage and faith to sustain our practice and heart. Finley may share her own practice, such as with installation, sound, video, poetics, performance, memorials or Art in response to AIDS. This class aims to facilitate the development and awareness of transformative art with assignments, research, reflections, discussion and creative practice. These undertakings will provide the impetus for deeper inspiration and theories in our artistic development 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 visiting the class with their research and experience. Students will create a midterm, a final presentation and paper.

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.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the various dimensions of the cultural politics of Middle Eastern/North African cinema within transnational perspectives. We begin from the premise that representation itself is a site of contestation, with profound historical and theoretical implications impacting the subject, genre, aesthetic, and narrative framing. Drawing on various texts from diverse disciplines, including from film/media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and cultural studies, this course examines issues of representation in their various ramifications for debates over "the colonial," "the national," and "the diasporic." The course will engage in a close analysis of the films, while also taking on board the various scholarly texts written about the films and their production and reception. The course will be organized around key concepts and questions having to do with Orientalist visual culture, the imperial imaginary, contested histories, imagined geographies, gender and national allegory, diasporic identity and postcoloniality, and the graven images taboo and the theology of adaptation. The course also examines Middle Eastern/North African films in terms of image, sound, editing, and so forth, exploring the ways in which cultural representations are shaped by specifically mediatic techniques. The close study of films will be combined with the analysis of related audio-visual materials. Discussion of the readings in relation to the screening will form a substantial part of the course.

This course explores the multiplicity of communal and public gardens that populate New York City's landscape while at the same time indagating the relationship that artists, communities, scholars, and activists create with soil, communal grounds, and their territory. The course proposes an approach to these concepts that understands the performative power that resides in the multiple modalities in which people and communities establish a concrete and poetic relation to their grounds, lands, and territories they inhabit. In paying close attention to how the materiality of the soil participates in contemporary art-making, the course proposes that soil are active performers in the constitution of the communal. The course takes the case of the Amazonian "terra preta de indio" (a.k.a. Dark Earths) and the scholarship produced around it in the last few decades to understand revealing qualities of soil performance that overwhelm the paradigm of the productivity as a major factor in soil valuation. Instead, we will approach soil from the perspectival vantage point of contemporary art-making, socials sciences, and community engagements.

In many political movements, the festive emerges as a major force shaping alternative social practices, forms of gathering, being together, and moving together. These alternative modes of being in collectivity are actively redefining the political. This sense of collectivity becomes particularly evident in the aesthetics of the Global South and its Diasporas. Consequently, this course explores the festive's role in forming political movements beyond the traditional scope that reduces it to a simple byproduct of social life. Taking Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics as an initial case, this seminar engages in a detailed interpretation of performances that challenge traditional definitions of both the festive and the political. A wide range of performance practices, such as carnival parties, sound systems, cabaret shows, popular dance styles, artworks, organized slave riots, and indigenous uprisings, shape the modes students will engage in theory and practice.

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

Public Policy and African American Music is a course designed to spark critical and creative thinking regarding the relationship between art and policy. Focusing on the music birthed by African American artists and public policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Public Policy and African American Music aims to identify the ways in which public policy inspires, provokes, and motivates the artist and the music they create. Centering the music of Black America, while honing research skills, students will build presentations which offer a glimpse into key moments in our country’s history, the policies created, the African American artists, and the new music genres they produced. Public Policy and African American Music’s objective is to fine tune research abilities, strengthen presentation skills and ultimately through exploring past intersections of policy and art, offer students a space to gain a deeper understanding of their voices as artists, art creators and policy makers. As we enter into a time of seismic shift in our country’s policies on art making, arts education and art advocacy, it is vital that students have a deeper understanding of the rich legacy that has come before them. Beginning by researching socio-political moments as the spark of public policies, students will move towards the artists to understand the power, brilliance, and contribution that African American contributed to the evolution of music in America. By inviting students to enter into the world of a particular period in history, students will identify the patterns related to how African Americans utilized music to speak to their lived experiences. And in doing so, gave voice to the humanity that unifies us all. Public Policy and African American Music will require students to immerse themselves in multiple modes of research. They will be required to study the world as it exists in the time of the policy’s creation; the values, mores, beliefs, traditions held in society; how the socio-political moment intersected with the culture to create policy, the policies, the African American art makers birthing music, as well as the specific genres created. Through weekly assignments, students will utilize critical and creative research tools to holistically bring the world to life, and weave the connections between policy and art. In doing so, Public Policy and African American Music will challenge students to gain a greater understanding of the interplay of public policy, art making, and in today’s political climate, gain a deeper connection of two forces which shape our world. Field trips will include Bobst Library, New York Library of Performing Arts, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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.

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.

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.

Reading and Writing Water If we listen to the water, what will we learn? “…it is really vain to attempt to express the nature of something. We notice effects and a complete account of these effects would perhaps comprise the nature of this thing. We attempt in vain to describe the character of a man; but a description of his actions and his deeds will create for us a picture of his character…water is essentially the element of life, wherever possible it wrests life from death. It is the great healer of all that is sick and has lost its living poise; for water forever strives after balance, a living balance, never a static one that would extinguish life. It is everywhere a mediator between contrasts which grows sharper where it is absent. Thus it brings together elements hostile to one another, constantly creating something new out of them. It dissolves what is solid, rendering it back to life.” - Theodore Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos “All water has a perfect memory….” - Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory “Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you…” - Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon What are the language(s) of water… We will read and write water – as essential, as movement, as nourishment, as power, as story carrier, as cleanser, as resilience, as sensuous, as cold, as warm, as bubbling, as still, as wave, as ripple, danger and endangered, uncertain and constant, as beauty, as connector, as politicized, as mysterious, in relation to land, ownership, liberation, libation, spirituality, constructs of time; as body, as metaphor. As sacred. And more. We will attempt to work (and play), writing as water, with water, to water, guided by water. Which means a kind of fluidity. We will read, listen to, look at, watch and sense in all ways works in relation to [bodies of] water, from different perspectives, geographies, from and in varying forms including movement, film, visual art, sound. As water changes, flows, freezes/ melts; so does our writing, our making – as flood, as drought, as “fresh”, as “toxic”, as interspersing, from and in the individual body, and as from sky, from earth, as puddle, droplet, pond, lake, river, ocean and… as rain…as tears… Materials may include Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan; Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi, theory of water, Lenne Betasamosake Simpson, Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith, the work of Christina Sharpe, The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison, Water Wars, Vandana Shiva, Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the visual work of Carolina Caycedo, and more.

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.