ARTH 396 Art and Culture: Art and Sports/Play

• Thursdays, 2:45 - 5:30 pm
• Instructor: Dr. Didier Morelli

This course explores the relationship between art and sports, leisure and recreation, and games. Students will learn a different art history through the lens of athletics and play, from Terracotta Panathenaic prize amphoras (530 BCE) depicting the first Olympics to African-Canadian contemporary artist Esmaa Mohamoud’s iconic football-inspired installations. We will consider the potential of aesthetics, kinesthetic actions, sports iconography, paraphernalia, fandom, and embodied knowledge to engender new spatial subjectivities on the playing field, pitch, arena, stadium, and the city. Adopting an intersectional approach, students will grapple with issues connected to past and present sporting events and activities as sites of complex and conflicting power relations and social dynamics.

This course is addressed to students interested in visual cultural studies, dance and movement studies, performance art/theory, architecture and design, feminism, critical race theory, decolonial thought, as well as art history and contemporary art. Every week we will work our way through the centuries, moving across geographic regions and critical frameworks/social movements to explore how art, sport, and athletics manifest differently according to context, culture, and period. Questions we will seek to answer include: What is the aesthetics of sports and how are they enacted and represented in Art History, Architecture and Design? How have the political and social economies of athletics become a playing field for artists, architects, and designers throughout the centuries?

Considering how sports is conceived, challenged, and changed in aesthetic works and events, students will develop individual research projects that engage their own fields of interest, through reading, writing, and in class workshops. A research-creation option around creating your own sports-inspired artwork will be made available as a major assignment. Students will also use an exhibition at Artexte artist-run-center curated by Professor Morelli as a laboratory for research and writing.