ARTH 450 - Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Making and Remaking Archives in Contemporary North American Art and Design

• T - 18:00-20:15
• EV-3.760
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. MAYA OPPENHEIMER

This seminar focuses on contemporary, critical approaches to archives as sites of making, remaking and mediating history. As powerful and political frames for understanding histories, identities and politics, archives are also material entities that are produced and consumed. As such, they can (and must) be challenged through acts of intervention and mediation. We will explore methods of intervening in archival collections from artists in Canada, the US and Mexico ranging from national and institutional projects to local initiatives, artist-run centers and studio-based projects. Part of the work of this course involves understanding frames in which archives are made and to critically assess who compiles them and for what purpose. The course will also explore agencies of archival practice and examine how artists and designers are bridging and re-imagining the politics of presences and absences within national, private, commercial and personal archives. Examples of archival critiques will range from performance to fictional documentary practices, craft activisms and re-enactments and include Panya Clark Espinal, Nadia Myre, Stan Douglas, Allison Smith, Kent Monkman, James Luna, Sara Diamond, Lisa Steele, Theaster Gates, Rebecca Belmore, Carlos Motta, Sophie Calle, Demián Flores, and Tanya Bruguera, to name a few.