2023-2024 Academic Catalog

May 08, 2024

2023-2024 Academic Catalog

ARTH 245 - Urban Art and Society in Jazz Age New York

This interdisciplinary seminar explores avant-garde artistic practice and the thriving metropolis of New York City through the lenses of race and gender in the decade and a half after World War I. In this period, New York was home to (or the inspiration of) some of the nation’s most innovative visual, literary, and cinematic works. The city offered independence and anonymity for those who chafed at the racism and reactionary gender conformity that governed social life in many parts of the U.S. At the same time, the sheer size of the city meant that many who rebelled elsewhere found communities of like minds within its thousands of gridded blocks. To be sure, artistic life in New York in the 1920s still carried within it elements of chauvinism and white supremacy, but the gathering of powerful minds and talents fostered art that spoke out against such attitudes in ways not seen before.

Individual classes will be devoted to subjects such as skyscraper architecture, paintings of city life, photography, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, art deco furnishings, the Harlem Renaissance, and flapper movies. Through a mixture of secondary literature and a wide range of primary sources, we will explore broader themes such as the changing boundaries between “low” and “high” culture and the construction of an urban American identity as inflected through race, gender, and class.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered periodically