VISST-2000 courses develop students' visual analysis skills while providing the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the topic at hand. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created.COURSE DESCRIPTIONThe last two decades have witnessed increased institutional recognition for major African-American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the emergence of a distinct term, “black contemporary art,” coined in 2011 by blogger and museum worker Kimberly Drew (aka @museummammy). Art movement and hashtag in equal measure, black contemporary art collects under its capacious banner a new range of artists of the African diaspora, and over the last several years has increasingly shaped how black artists and their works are presented and understood.
The basic premise of the course is to look at, read and think about a small range of artists and exhibitions associated with the term. In doing so, it imposes certain boundaries. It largely examines artists who were born after the Civil Rights Movement, and largely artists whose work emerged in the 21st century. These are, therefore, artists formed as much by the Cosby Show, the identity politics of the 1990s, and social media, as by the momentous movements of the 1960s.
This means as well that these artists have a diverse (and sometimes skeptical) relationship to blackness as it was defined in the Sixties; this is part of what makes their work “contemporary.” This history therefore begins with the 2001 Studio Museum exhibition Freestyle, in which context curator Thelma Golden introduced her controversial notion of “post-black” art. A second critical moment is found in Renaissance Society exhibition Black Is, Black Ain’t, curated by Hamza Walker in 2008.
Using these exhibitions as framing devices, the course proceeds through monographic seminars focused on individual artists, including Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and a trio of younger artists (Juliana Huxtable, Martine Syms and Hannah Black) in the first half of the semester (Side 1). Rodney McMillian, Theaster Gates, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kerry James Marshall follow in the second (Side 2). We will discern their particular approaches to medium, aesthetics and art history, and furthermore locate their work in terms of relevant social and cultural contexts: globalism, the art market, pop culture, and the contemporary politics of race.

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