ARTS 250 The Art of Resistance!

African American, Latinx, Asian, Feminist, GLBT, and transnational artists catapulted by liberationist desires and responding to questions of social transformation  are the focus of this hybrid art making, history, and theory class. The course will focus on Los Angeles-based 20th and 21st century artist led efforts that critically engage issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and class both historically and within the present. The course will begin with an investigation of questions related to historiography and memory as they relate to politically engaged art practices through critical texts, a site visit to the Southern California Library, an independent archive of local Los Angeles movement history in South Los Angeles, and a workshop that will share research methodologies employed by my own collaborative artistic project, the Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible Histories to contest dominant historical and artistic canons. Through a workshop format, local contemporary artists such as Dewey Tafoya, Shruti Purkayastha, will provide students with tools to develop projects that respond to dominant cultural narratives through graphic, performative, and interventionist strategies.  Finally, students will learn how artists shake the foundations of various established institutional worlds and the definitions of art itself by moving away from these very institutions and spheres of practice and by creating their own structures for critical thought and praxis: building collectives, artist led spaces and in the case of School of Echoes, becoming community organizers.