Instructor: Kate Alexander
Mon/Wed | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM | In-Person
Spring 2025
Art reflects and shapes how people encounter, and understand, their world. This course takes an expansive view of "art" as a network of interconnected expressive cultural forms that gain meaning from their shifting social and cultural referents. Through visual art, music, dance, and architecture, students will explore the varied meanings and manifestations of borders as physical, political, conceptual, emotional, and imaginative cultural spaces with which humans interact. Synthesizing the methods, concerns, and perspectives of art history and ethnomusicology, this class uses direct engagement with expressive cultural media like houses of worship, ritualized musical genres, and public murals to give students facility with the critical language to discuss and evaluate art, and a foundation in critical theories that help frame understandings of expressive culture as integral to the formation of our culturally-embedded selves.