ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Race and Visual Culture Fall 2021
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

Race does not exist. On a biological level, the idea of race as a grounded scientific category has been disqualified for decades. If it had an end, it necessarily had a beginning. One can identify this beginning in the middle ages and follow it through Renaissance as an idea of lineage; the modern intersection of race with skin color began with the early modern colonization process in the Americas and in Africa. From that time forward, the history of race and the history of art intersect. This course will try to show how art history’s tools are fundamental to understanding race as a modern category and social agency. We will focus on the raw materials of the painter (pigments); visuality as a modality of human categorization, the construction of human hierarchies or racial orders, the social efficiency of color theories and racial matrix of caricature. Course readings will privilege the wealth of recent research and historiography addressing the links between art, visual culture and race.