PUBLICS, COMMONS, AND COLLECTIVES: ARTS

A public is an imagined thing, mediated by architecture, urban planning, art, visual culture, and rhetoric.  This interdisciplinary course surveys key ideas and histories of publics (and counter-publics), commons (and undercommons), as well as collective living projects. Throughout, we will train focus on how art, design, visual culture, and media condition the making of shared life, in an expansive, critical history of public space and art. We will tangle with the limitations of these concepts and representations, and interrogate their historic exclusions. We will be out “in public” at key sites and artworks that ground this history in New York City, including parks, museums, and libraries.