ARTH 4515

Black Abstraction

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

Abstract art poses generative problems and possibilities for thinking racial blackness. Some accounts posit a turn from figurative representation to visual abstraction of blackness/black experience as a move toward freer artistic expression, unburdened by confining cultural markings of race. We will question the supposed freedom of this turn to abstraction and explore the conditions of violent exclusion from normative bodily and representational form that confine blackness to abstraction. Modernist abstraction’s move to dismantle illusionism and emphasize materiality enables an understanding of blackness not as a stable, visible identity category but as free-floating trace, concept, formlessness, and obdurate materiality. This course analyzes practices and theories of abstraction in the twentieth century to the present, from the racialized contours of the Western avant-garde and black abstractionists.

Prerequisites one previous History of Art or Africana course.

Distribution Requirements (CA-AG, LA-AG), (ALC-AS)

Last 4 Terms Offered 2026SP

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