ARTH 555
Picturing Time in American Art Fall 2024
Division I

The problem of history and the promise of the future have always shaped public discourse in the United States. This seminar explores the aesthetic and ideological operations of time in works of art and visual culture made in the U.S. context from the late colonial period through the present. From paintings of extinct animals and biblical disasters to expressions of a distinctly national art and Indigenous sovereignty, from visual records of territorial expansion and photographic motion studies to postmodern performance and Afro- and other futurist aesthetics, we will consider how ideas about time have shaped the iconography, materiality, and politics of visual representation in the U.S., with attention to the way time has been conceived in relation to concepts of progress, religion, nature, race, labor, and technology. We will explore how ideas about time are encoded in artworks through process, subject matter, and interpretation, and in relation to social systems such as slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism.