ART 585, Performative Painting and Painterly Performance

This course considers the history and ideology of the painterly gesture as it informs and is informed by performance. Thinking through and beyond the black figure in Western painting, the vexed histories of blackness, and abstraction that announced the entrance of Europe on the scene of its modernity, we look for traces of the brush, touch, and traces of the flesh. A grounding in performativity is preferred for participants in the seminar, although we are also interested in shifting that ground from the theoretical to the ethical, thinking with communities of black feminist refusal that enjoin us to wander and wonder beyond the precincts of the human.