Political movements utilize protests, direct action, and symbolic visual gestures to voice dissent, raise awareness, and demand change. Politically engaged art infiltrates discourse, raises questions, and seeks new perspectives. Protests and political art often come from similar analysis and have equal amounts of fervor, but they utilize different terms of engagement. This interdisciplinary studio course examines the parallel of civil disobedience and art as responses to war and oppression. The scope of the course will focus on contemporary American history, spanning Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, AIDS Activism, Anti-War Movements, #BlackLivesMatter, #NoDAPL, and opposition to the Trump/Pence presidency. Readings by Angela Davis, Claudia Rankine, Howard Zinn, and Judith Butler will contextualize state violence and resistance within critical theory and American history. Additional articles addressing unfolding political events will be assigned throughout the semester, with particular attention to how the Trump/Pence presidency impacts expressions of dissent. Within contemporary art, this course will focus on performance, moving image, and installation that address surveillance, the rhetoric of protection, and institutional power. Assignments ask students to stage an intervention performance, appropriate documented political activity in a video or 2D work, and construct a site-specific sculptural monument. Class time will oscillate between lectures, screenings, discussion, student presentations, and critiques.

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