ARTH 370 Studies in Canadian Art: Race, Racism and Resistance

• Thursdays, 11:45 am - 2:30 pm
• Instructor: Dr. Julia Skelly

Drawing on recent scholarship concerned with African Canadian Art History, intersectionality, and settler-colonial art history, this course will cover a range of visual material from the nineteenth century to the present. Case studies will include nineteenth-century portrait photographs and Montreal artist Prudence Heward’s paintings of Black female subjects, as well as other early twentieth-century white artists representing subjects of colour. We will draw on the edited collection Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2019) in order to examine nineteenth-century material culture such as dolls, depictions of slaves, and Black face minstrelsy as a Canadian tradition in popular culture. Readings will also discuss, among other topics, residential school photography, contemporary Indigenous photography, and Rebecca Belmore’s performance Vigil (2002), which mourned the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. We will also discuss early twentieth-century Canadian women missionary artists in China (drawing on the scholarship of Dr. Catherine Mackenzie) and multimedia work by contemporary Asian Canadian artists (drawing on the scholarship of Alice Ming Wai Jim). Ultimately, the objective of the course is to encourage students to think about both artistic producers and the subjects of representation through the lens of intersectionality, an analytical tool that has been adopted by some feminist art historians as a way to address not only gender, but also class, race, and sexuality, and which reminds us that whiteness must be critically interrogated as a racial identity.