Course Description
An introduction to Latin American art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular focus on major artists and movements in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba.
Athena Title
Latin American Modern Art
Prerequisite
ARHI 2000 or ARHI 2000E or ARHI 2000H or ARHI 2300 or ARHI 2300E or ARHI 2311H or ARHI 2400 or ARHI 2400E or ARHI 2411H
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
A concentrated study of major developments in Latin American modern art since the late nineteenth century. This course emphasizes advanced critical thinking skills such as visual analysis, historical synthesis, and evaluation in order to find significance and explain meaning in works of art. Lectures, small group discussion, and readings provide students with a view of Latin American artistic production that acknowledges the region's shared histories of conquest, slavery, and imperialism, as well as the diversity of experiences and artistic approaches in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba with regard to questions of nationhood, race, ethnicity, Indigenous identity, gender, language, and the colonial past and post-colonial present. In identifying artistic vanguards particular to Latin America that helped shape the history of International Modernism, from Cubism and Surrealism to the Mexican mural movement and Constructive Universalism, the course will also address the current and historical implications of defining Latin America and Modernity as concepts within the global context and in relation to dominant European traditions of modernism and art history. Course Goals: - To develop a familiarity with major movements, artists, and artworks from 19th and 20th-century Latin America. - To raise awareness of the social, political, and historical implications of the very concepts and categories of Latin America and the Modern. That is, to acknowledge the diversity of identities and histories within Latin America and their relationship to colonial assumptions about nations, development, and modernity. - To identify artistic strategies and mechanisms at work in art (i.e., formal, conceptual, political), and to consider the varying sources and outcomes of these in the context of Latin America. - To cultivate visual intelligence in each class through the critical analysis of specific works of art. - To engage critically with a variety of texts, from our course textbook to scholarly essays and primary source material. - To gain a basic understanding of specific art historical methods useful in the investigation and explanation of works of art, including formalism, social art history, and theories of feminism, Marxism, and post-colonialism.
Topical Outline
Modernity in/and Latin America Revolutions and Independence History and Genre Painting Graphic Arts and Photography Popular and Devotional Art Modernismo (Argentina and Brazil) Mexican Muralism Indigenismo Afro-Caribbean Art Communism and Art Surrealism Internationalism and Abstraction The School of the South Concrete Art Geometric Abstraction