ARTH 001N. First Year Seminar: Indigenous Art, Land, and Environment.

This first year seminar introduces students to the ways that Indigenous art and cultural traditions center diverse relationships to the environment, land, and place. This course will examine how Indigenous artists of the Americas model and visually express a relationship to place as something inhabited equally by human and non-human beings across present and ancestral time. Throughout this seminar, we will examine maps, land art, monuments, and other visual material through an expanded field, considering other practices such as beading, pottery, and carving alongside contemporary Indigenous art as expressions of land relations that reframe the mainstream history of Euro-American art and environmentalist movements. Students will be asked to consider and evaluate art and the present landscape in terms of colonial histories, ancestral timescales, and changing Indigenous traditions, including a critical evaluation of the land and place upon which Swarthmore College is situated. This writing course will introduce students to forms of art writing such as the art review, the personal response essay, cartographic interpretation, and the research paper.

Art and Art History: Art History
Writing course.
1 credit.
Fall 2022. Green.
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/art-history

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