ARTH 368 - Studies in Contemporary Art and Architecture

• T - 09:00 - 11:30
• EV-1.615
• INSTRUCTOR: ELIZABETH CAVALIERE

The “metropolitan thesis” proposed by historian Harold Innis suggests that the driving forces of Canadian history – politics, commerce, resource, and industry – are rooted in the nation’s metropolitan centers. This course proposes that metropolitan centers have also played an important role in contemporary Canadian art. Leaping from city to city, this course will place regional movements within the broader trajectory of contemporary Canadian art and cover a range of media as they create identities for different cities. For example, what conditions precipitated in Halifax during the late 1960s that made it central to the flourishing of conceptual art in Canada and on a global stage? Or, what is it about Winnipeg that draws artists to the darker-side of things? In addition to exploring a diversity of perspectives and identities that constitute the city, this course will explore how contemporary art and artists issue challenges on the homogeneity of a city’s citizen constituency as well as on the dominance of the metropolitan center by exploring alternative narratives of Canadian art and the anti-local. Through weekly lectures this course will develop the relationship between the city and contemporary art. Students will have the opportunity to deploy this knowledge by actively viewing contemporary art in the gallery space. Students will come away from this course with the ability to situate contemporary Canadian art within histories of the city, of identity, and of the art institution.