Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2024
Professor: Alan Corbiere
T, TH - 1:30pm to 2:45pm
This class focuses on Indigenous art from the pre-contact era to the modern day, concentrating on the Great Lakes area and its peripheries. The course will explore enduring iconic symbols used by Indigenous people through time and space to communicate stories, teachings, and information. Attention will be paid to the transference of symbols from one medium to another, such as rock faces to birchbark, quillwork to beadwork, leather to cloth, vermillion to acrylic paints. The art will be viewed from an Indigenous perspective, employing a decolonial methodology to explore issues of identity, artistic movements, inspiration, influence, commodity, art as critique, art as response, and art as survivance (survival and resistance). Some of the artists to be featured include pipemakers, rock painters, scroll creators, mapmakers, weavers, quillworkers, beadworkers, wampum belt makers, Pwaaganiked, Abonwaishkum, Dennis Cusick, Ernest Smith, Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau, Robert Houle, Isaac Murdoch, Michael Belmore, Shelly Niro, Sam Thomas and others. Art, symbols, techniques, forms, icons, archetypes, stories, motifs, and media will be analyzed and situated diachronically and synchronically within an Indigenous cultural and knowledge revitalization paradigm.
T, TH - 1:30pm to 2:45pm
This class focuses on Indigenous art from the pre-contact era to the modern day, concentrating on the Great Lakes area and its peripheries. The course will explore enduring iconic symbols used by Indigenous people through time and space to communicate stories, teachings, and information. Attention will be paid to the transference of symbols from one medium to another, such as rock faces to birchbark, quillwork to beadwork, leather to cloth, vermillion to acrylic paints. The art will be viewed from an Indigenous perspective, employing a decolonial methodology to explore issues of identity, artistic movements, inspiration, influence, commodity, art as critique, art as response, and art as survivance (survival and resistance). Some of the artists to be featured include pipemakers, rock painters, scroll creators, mapmakers, weavers, quillworkers, beadworkers, wampum belt makers, Pwaaganiked, Abonwaishkum, Dennis Cusick, Ernest Smith, Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau, Robert Houle, Isaac Murdoch, Michael Belmore, Shelly Niro, Sam Thomas and others. Art, symbols, techniques, forms, icons, archetypes, stories, motifs, and media will be analyzed and situated diachronically and synchronically within an Indigenous cultural and knowledge revitalization paradigm.