Sunshine/Noir: Minor Histories of California Art [Travel Seminar]

What would the history of American art look like if we turned west instead of east, and focused on artists living in Los Angeles and San Francisco instead of New York? This seminar asks students to examine art since WWII as it developed under the Southern California sun and the Northern California fog. Moving away from a traditional auteur-driven narrative focused on individual artists, curators, critics, or works, this seminar will also focus attention on pivotal exhibitions, events, performances, and catalytic encounters that happened on the peripheries of, and often, in opposition to, traditional institutional contexts like the gallery and museum.
Utilizing the immense archive assembled by the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative as both a foundation and a point of departure, this seminar aims to evaluate and question the relevance of established taxonomies, categories, and criteria emerging from New York-centric narratives—for instance, the modernist preoccupation with medium-specificity—for the study of West Coast art. Topics covered will include: Bay Area figurative painting, California assemblage; craft hierarchies in fine arts production; Finish Fetish and Light and Space; art & technology; art & political activism; the role of art schools and collectives; experimental film, video and music; and the emergence of post-studio practice.…