HAD-456 Topics in African Art & Design

3 Credits

A Survey of African Arts deals with three primary ideas: Africa (the place), Art (human expression, its creation, use and interpretation) and History (over time). The course will look at the forms, function and contexts in which arts have been created and used in African societies, and how that body of material has been observed, described and collected by people foreign tot the Continent. The intention is to describe and assess the style catalogue, to inspect the constraints and opportunities that informed the creative processes of the Continent, and then to use the most useful varieties of information to describe and analyze the forms, social engagement and agency of arts in Africa. Materials or bodies of art will be viewed in a geographic pattern that moves across the Continent. Those materials will be selected to illustrate themes and issues that inform the study and understanding go the general body of African arts. The course will reflect a growing shift in the literature and in the professional discourse of the field of non-western and post-colonial studies toward a focus on the performative and holistic interpretation of artistic expression, and the impact of a global post-colonial experience that engenders a world-art perspective. This sort of transcendence of place and race as defining elements in the organization of art studies gains sharper focus in the consideration of contemporary arts, certainly in Africa, and in a global art market. The reinterpretation of the colonial experience and impact on human expression is of increasing importance in the survey as well as in more specialized areas of inquiry in art history.