ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Handicraft and Contemporary Art Fall 2018
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory. In a time when much art is outsourced–or fabricated by large stables of assistants–what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, jewelry making, or woodworking? Though our emphasis will be on recent art (including the feminist reclamation of quilts, an artist who makes pornographic embroidery, a transvestite potter, queer fiber collectives, do-it-yourself environmental interventions, and anti-war craftivism), we will also examine important historical precedents. We will read formative theoretical texts regarding questions of process, materiality, skill, bodily effort, domestic labor, and alternative economies of production. Throughout, we will think through how craft is in dialogue with questions of nation-building, gendered work, and mass manufacturing. The seminar is centered around student-led discussion of our critical readings and culminates with final research projects.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 12
Class#: 1238
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: research paper, presentation
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: places for 8 undergraduates and 8 graduate students assured
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTH 400 Division I ARTH 500 Division I

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