ARTH 396 - Art and Culture: Contemporary Indigenous Art in Canada

• W - 15:00-17:30
• EV-1.605
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. HEATHER IGLOLIORTE
  

In this survey course, students will be introduced to the diversity of Indigenous contemporary practices across the land now known as Canada, in such medias as painting, photography, video, performance, and installation. Our course will also provide an introduction to Indigenous theories and methodological approaches which contextualize these current practices, including resistance, resilience, sovereignty, self-determination and survivance. In this course we will analyze how artists engage with concepts such as "traditional," "modern" and "contemporary" in their artworks, as well as how they negotiate other issues such as stereotypes and the "hollywood Indian," cultural appropriation, and settler colonialism. Recognizing that the discipline of Western art history has been complicit in the processes of colonization over centuries, and also that Indigenous peoples have, by infiltrating these institutions over the last five decades, begun the processes of decolonization and indigenization throughout Canada, this course is framed by the study of not only significant arts and artists but also the colonial legacies of art museums and other Western institutions and the corresponding decolonizing strategies. By studying the pivotal moments in the dissemination, collection and display of contemporary Indigenous art from coast to coast to coast, we will come to understand contemporary Indigenous art in terms of its production, circulation, and consumption today.