ADFA 2150 Modernism and the Avant-Garde

This introductory course unpacks crucial episodes in art of the first half of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on Europe and North America in a global context. We will cover Italian Futurism and manifesto writing, Dada and the invention of the readymade, the " marvelous" in Surrealist painting and photography, De Stijl and the pursuit of abstraction, the Harlem Renaissance and cross-disciplinarity, and Mexican muralism and public display. We will explore how these avant-gardes sought to trouble the distinction between the making of art and the making of life itself, inventing ways of sliding aesthetic experience into the everyday lives of people on the street, at home, and in the factory. Why, our artists ask again and again, must art be siloed in privileged gallery spaces that uphold repressive models of gender, class, sexuality, and race? What new utopian futures are opened up when these spaces are negated or left behind? And what, finally, is worth maintaining?