ARTH 361
Latinx Sculpture Art: From Altares to Sonic Monuments Spring 2025
Division I
Cross-listed LATS 360

What constitutes Latinx sculpture? While the study of Latinx art has revolved around two dimensional art forms, this course tackles the question of three-dimensional art and examines the development of Latinx sculpture, its socio-political impact, and its aesthetic complexity. This interdisciplinary and hybrid course consists of studying Latinx sculpture art and how Latinx artists have engaged and rearticulated popular cultural traditions like altares, lowriders, and santería in their sculptural works by engaging varying disciplines. This course also includes a studio component. We will dissect the ways Latinx communities conceive of their identity, politics, and manifest resistance and belonging in the U.S. differently through the art form of sculpture, as we study artists like Amalia Mesa-Bains, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Beatriz Cortez, Pepón Osorio, and Guadalupe Maravilla. Sculpture offers a new lens to expand our study of Latinx identity, politics, and aesthetics, via historical and contemporary theoretical frameworks in the disciplines of Latinx Studies, Chicana/o and Central American Studies, art history, museum studies, and urban studies. As a hybrid course with a studio component, students will also complete a term-long sculpture project, which will be accompanied by a research-based artist statement. In their research based artist statements, students will situate and contextualize their sculpture projects in relation to topics and aesthetic frameworks covered in the class.