AMER322

This course provides a critical introduction to the painting, sculpture, photography, and popular visual culture of North America from contact to about 1865. We examine examples of visual arts and related activities from first contact between Europeans and Indigenous people through the early Colonial, the Revolutionary, Federal, and Civil War periods. Along this trajectory, we will study some of the major developments in painting, photography, architecture and sculpture. Among the themes we will return to what repeatedly will be the changing roles of the fine arts and of the broader visual culture in constructing American identities; the role of visual culture in defining the meanings of race, class, and gender; the key ideological frameworks of American antebellum culture, from Enlightenment-based conceptions of nature and natural history to abolitionism to Manifest Destiny. This course is cross-listed with ARHT 322.

Arts, Humanities and Education

CA-School Core as of 2014 fall (CASC), MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express (AMRA), MJ-Amer-Artistic Expression (AM17), OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA (GNAM), WRITING INTENSIVE (WRIT)