ARTH 4591: From Global Conceptualisms to Social Practice

Wed, 10-12:30 p.m.

This course examines the global rise of conceptual art in the late 1960s and 1970s in places ranging from North America to Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. We will consider how the role of art and artists was transformed in that period and how those changes shaped the rise of activist art in the 1980s, “relational aesthetics” in the 1990s, and the current debates surrounding “participatory” art and “social practice,” which ranges from interventions staged in museums and galleries to artists’ involvement with marginalized communities and direct activism. For their main assignment in the class, students will be able either to write an art historical paper or create an art project that responds to the themes of the class.