| Course ID: | HIST(AFAM) 4032/6032. 3 hours. |
| Course Title: | Black Skin, White Walls: African Americans and the Museum |
Course
Description: | Examination of the history of African Americans’ relationship to both art and natural history museums. Topics will include protest, institution building, and art collecting. Through a combination of museum sociology, art history, and Black history, students will gain a clearer understanding of the politics of art. |
| Oasis Title: | African Americans & the Museum |
| Pre or Corequisite: | Any AFAM or ARHI or ARTS or HIPR or HIST or CMLT or CLAS or POLS or SOCI or PSYC or COMM course |
| Grading System: | A-F (Traditional) |
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| Course Objectives: | 1. Students who complete this course will develop the skills to think critically about the politics of place and space and how the development of institutions, even their very architecture, is meant to elicit feelings of self-consciousness or belonging, surveilling others or being surveilled.
2. Students will be expected to engage critically with primary sources.
3. Students will engage in verbal and written analysis of artworks, using primary sources and knowledge from secondary sources to analyze and understand their meanings. |
| Topical Outline: | 1. Experiences and Struggles of African American Artists
2. African American Women in the Museum
3. Museum Sociology
4. An Education in Museums for Everyday People
5. African American Opinions of the Art Museum
6. African and African American Opinions of the Natural History Museum
7. The Museum and Repatriation Debates
8. Art Museums and Race
9. The Politics of Belonging
10. Integration of Mainstream Museums
11. “Culturally Centered” Museums
12. Arts of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements
13. The Black Arts Movement
14. Black Art/Artists in the South (North Carolina, Georgia, New Orleans)
15. Black Art/Artists in the West (Los Angeles)
16. “Reading” Black Art and Connecting to Larger Struggles in African American Life
17. Black Art and HBCU’s
18. Race and Science in the Museum
19. Black Artists’ Relationship to the Black Community
20. Black Artists En Vogue
21. Black Art Collectors |