Department of Art History

The class will focus on the emergence of African aesthetic and conceptual principles by collecting and analyzing evidence across academic disciplines and linguistic cultures (Spanish, Dutch, French, English). The class will consider a wide range of material, from the first stirrings in the early 16th century of Africans dislocated through the slave trade to the early 20th century, by which time most of the African artistic and cultural expressions were fully developed and firmly rooted throughout the Americas.

The project brings together historic travel narratives and epistles, paintings, prints, maps and other traditional art forms with contemporary work by artists throughout the Caribbean. It traces the development of a spatial and conceptual framework of African artistic practices and how they inform Caribbean artistic traits. Furthermore, it examines the location of the Afro Latin American and the Caribbean in the historical and contemporary global visual scene. The course will include close visual analysis of works at the Herman B. Wells and Lilly Libraries at Indiana University.