HISTART 497.001 and 689.001, meets with AMCULT TBD

How can art serve "the people" in their neighborhoods and on the street? Our class will investigate this question as we develop a public history website. During the 1960s Detroit emerged as a center of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements. All of these were challenged by the urban Uprising or Rebellion in the summer of 1967. Soon, in neighborhoods hit hardest during the Uprising, rose some of the first Black Power murals created in the United States. None survive today but their story should be better known. The Detroit murals' design and context, how they communicated, the organizations that funded them, and their impact forms the subject of our course and our project. To document these lost works of public art, our class will create a public history resource that will present original research and make this story available to a wide audience.

Over the course of the semester we'll investigate the histories of

• urban migration and labor in Detroit
• Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals that helped inspire a later generation of "people's art"
• Issues of public art and its publics
• the racial geography of Detroit neighborhoods and other factors leading into the 1967 uprising
• Debates within the Black Arts movement
• the subjects of Detroit's Black Power murals: from ancient history to the Bible to contemporary "he-roes and she-roes" including Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Nina Simone and Muhammad Ali

In workshops and brief assignments, students will develop skills in

• Structuring a website
• Archival and historical research
• Visual analysis of art
• Conducting oral history interviews
• Writing and revising text for a general audience

Requirements: Informed participation in class discussion including readings in advance of class (25%). Brief assignments that contribute to the website will be scaffolded over the course of the semester (40%); a research project prepared in stages throughout the semester including draft and revision (35%). Students are required to attend two day-long field trips which will include a bus tour of the city as well as time to begin research in Detroit libraries.

This class is an approved elective for the undergraduate minor and graduate certificate in Museum Studies.

Textbooks: all readings will be in Canvas. Cost of materials: $0

Category for Concentration Distributions: D. Europe and the United States, 4. Modern and Contemporary.

Intended audience: students interested in modern cities, art history, Black history, public history and public art, willing to take on challenging readings and contribute to class discussion. Graduates of the Semester in Detroit program, at any level, are welcome.

Advisory prerec: some background in art history, design, American studies, history, African American Studies, museum studies, or urban studies is helpful but not required; a commitment to learning more about Detroit is essential

Questions? please email rzurier@umich.edu to learn more about the class.