ARTH 370 – Studies in Canadian Art: Issues of Race and Intersectionality

• Mondays, 15:00-17:30
• EV-1-615
• Instructor: Dr. Julia Skelly

Drawing on recent scholarship concerned with African Canadian Art History, intersectionality, and settler-colonial art history, this course will cover a range of visual material from the nineteenth century to the present. Case studies will include Montreal artist Prudence Heward’s paintings of black female subjects, as well as other white artists representing subjects of colour. Readings will discuss, among other topics, Rebecca Belmore’s performance Vigil (2002), which commemorated the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and contemporary textile and performance art by queer feminist artist Allyson Mitchell. Ultimately, the objective of the course is to encourage students to think about both artistic producers and the subjects of representation through the lens of intersectionality, an analytical tool that has been adopted by some feminist art historians as a way to address not only gender, but also class, race, and sexuality, and which reminds us that whiteness must be critically interrogated as a racial identity