ARTH 453
Native North American Arts: Objects and Methods Fall 2017
Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

This seminar explores Native north American visual arts by attending to their form and meaning, and asks what challenges they present to art history. Using an object-based approach, each session will focus on an artwork produced by a different Native community. From caribou-skin coats painted by Innu women to formline designs carved and painted on the northwest coast, these objects will be studied in their cultural contexts and in conjunction with key theoretical texts that have contributed to shape the discipline of art history. Drawing parallels with cases from Western art, and informed by interdisciplinary approaches, recent developments in the study of decorative arts, and the global and material turns, students will develop hybrid methods to expand how they think about Native arts. Questions of violence, contact, and cultural appropriation will also be examined. Students are expected to experiment with Native American epistemologies in class and in their assignments, which will require them to write a deep analysis of one object. This course fulfills EDI requirements because it enhances awareness about the effects of cultural distance, cultural contact, and power relations in the production of knowledge about Native north American arts, and explores new critical theorization for its study in the discipline of art history.