This course surveys Indigeneity in visual arts across the Americas, known in the Kuna language as Abya-Yala: Land in Full Maturity. The main objective of this course is to introduce participants to critical concepts of how aesthetics and cosmology function and are manifested in Indigenous and indigenous-influenced visual art throughout crucial moments in history. This course aims at broadening our perspective and fostering open-mindess by complementing a robust corpus of visual art and material culture produced before and during colonization coupled with readings of Indigenous and Indigenous-centered cosmology and contemporary critical theory. The survey will touch upon visual arts throughout the continent, focusing on non-western cosmological perspectives as a reference for analyzing Indigeneity in historical material culture and contemporary art. It will also grapple with the tensions permeating the post-colonial history of modern nation-states and Indigenous communities and their cultures' resistance, survival, and current renaissance as Environmental policy and ecocultural leaders. We will receive the words of Indigenous writers and philosophers such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Nemote Nenquimo, Ailton Krenak, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, amongst many others. The critical theories of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Louise Pratt, Marisol de la Cadena, Stefano Varese, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, amongst others, will function as interlocutors between Indigenous cosmovisions and Western epistemologies. This theoretical frame will guide our survey of the great arch of Indigeneity in Abya-Yala and help us appreciate how visual art embodies the multiplicities of its histories and present.
- Teacher: Juan-Pablo Cardenas