ARTH 610 Selected Issues in North American Art and Architectural History

• Thursdays, 11:30-14:30
• EV-3-760
• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

In exploring the role of the senses in contemporary art and cultural theory, this course asks: how do we think with the body, but also beyond dominant understandings of what a body is, and can do? While focusing on the body as a locus of meaning in discourse and practice, the course will also examine how sense and sensation are socially constructed (shaped by imperial histories; informed by discourses of race, gender, class, ability; and augmented through technological mediation). Topics will also include haptics, sound, virtuality, prosthesis, sensory architecture, immersion, queer phenomenology, among others. Our primary areas of interest will be the ways in which contemporary artists accommodate the body in their works, as well as how sensorial encounters are choreographed in public, exhibit, and institutional spaces. We will explore what it means to be corporeally “moved” by art, and what such experiences do to reaffirm and/or challenge bodily and subjective boundaries. Students will also have opportunities to critically work through the ways in which curatorial and creative practice might accommodate diverse histories and forms of embodiment.