PHIL325

This course provides a critical introduction to the painting, sculpture, photography, and popular visual culture of the U.S. from 1865-1945, a period of unprecedented modernization and change. We'll begin with the generation of American artists active during and immediately after the Civil War in the late 1860s, and end with the transfusion of American artistic trends into industrial design and consumer culture of the late 1930s. Central to this course's investigation of American art will be the study of the impact of the following historical phenomena--immigration (both internal and external), WWI, industrialization, urbanization, economic crises, and radical politics--on American art, and also how American art contributed to the production of specific racial, classed, and gendered American subjects.