Meets with RCHUMS 334.020 (Home department)

What can we learn about Detroit through studying its art? What does it mean to study Detroit from outside of it, and particularly, from Ann Arbor? What do we miss when we're not immersed in a specific place, community, and/or moment in time? This course will explore central patterns and themes of Detroit-based art and consider what happens when we take art out of its original place and context to put it on display elsewhere.

While this course will ask students to engage critically and analytically with the Detroit art we'll see at UMMA, we will just as often consider what we're not seeing in front of us, what's missing, what's outside the frame. Blending methods and strategies from cultural studies, history, critical theory, literary studies, gender studies, art history, and museum studies, we'll bring an intersectional lens to the art we take up.

Assignments: Likely to include weekly readings and informal writing, visual and literary analyses, and a final cumulative project.

Intended Audience: while open to any U-M undergraduate student, this course is affiliated with the Semester in Detroit (SiD) program. Students interested in this class and other course topics on Detroit should consider exploring the full SiD program at www.semesterindetroit.com.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: Europe and the United States, Modern and Contemporary.

Images:Ups and Downs and Dotty-Wotty House by Tyree Guyton