This course will  be an historical survey centered on key
artists  and episodes  in the history of African-American art from
mid-19th century to the present.  Areas of special attention will
include the Harlem  Renaissance  and  the development of the “New
Negro,” the  participation of African-American artists in the WPA
and their creation of paintings devoted to American history, the
strategies employed by African-American artists in the post World
War II period to negotiate a place within the mainstream of
American  art, community  murals and other protests against art
world racism in the 1960s, development of a Black aesthetic, the
role of folk tradition, spirituality, and outsider art.  In the
final weeks of the semester we will look at a wide range of work by
contemporary African-American artists  who deal with issues of race
through strategies that include performance art, photographs
representations  and deconstructions of blackness, the appropriation
of stereotypes, and paintings that incorporate humor and parody.