Rewriting History: Queer-Feminist Art fr

In 1987, the queer-feminist Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa reflected on the politics of writing and rewriting histories. Mobilized by the social revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s, Anzaldúa sought to intervene in contemporary history, arguing that the act of retrieval—mining and sifting through our past—is necessary for sensing and creating uninhibited possibilities. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s understanding of the stakes of historiography, this course explores how artists have sought to reimagine queer-feminist pasts and enact latent futures. It focuses on the period from the 1970s onward, when the proliferation of mnemonic, time-based media, such as video, sound, slides, and photography, as well as ephemeral forms like performance and participation, emerged as significant material and conceptual foci for artists. Artists’ engagements with institutions crucial to the creation and circulation of history, memory, and knowledge—such as universities, the mass media, AI companies, and museums—are examined alongside enduring queer-feminist themes of education, motherhood, family, home, exile, kin, and futurity. Students will become cognizant of how contemporary art influences cultural, political, and social traditions and institutions, and how “old” and “new” ideas co-exist and conflict. The course offers an art historical perspective on contemporary art, mapping its relations to late modern art, while also foregrounding the question: how can we, as “contemporaries,” engage with art and art history in a way that responds to the demands of the present? Artists we examine include Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, Magali Lara, Jenny Holzer, Emily Kame Kngwarray, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, D. Harding, Simone Leigh, and Jesse Darling. Writers include Anzaldúa, Rosalyn Deutsche, Tina Campt, Aileen Moreton Robinson, and Ruha Benjamin.