ASRC 6506

Black Abstraction and Conceptual Art

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This seminar brings together work in critical black studies and psychoanalysis with recent black art histories to examine black abstraction and conceptualism. Blackness can be understood as a concept made material through the violence of racialization. This concept is endlessly mutable and variously signifies a wide range of psychoaffective phenomena associated with difference, Otherness, abjection, dependency, and much more. We will track the permutations of black conceptualism through conceptual art and visual abstraction, investigating the pressure blackness places on the assumptive logics of conceptual art as well as the potential the genre holds for understanding black being differently. Artists and thinkers will include: Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, W.E.B. DuBois, Huey Copeland, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Senga Nengudi, Steve McQueen, Cameron Rowland, Robert Morris, Clement Greenberg.

Prerequisites one previous History of Art or Africana course.

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