This course is an introduction to both Museum Studies and its politics: practical, historical, and theoretical. To take full advantage of our location in Washington D.C., we will focus specifically on the organizational hierarchies and histories of the federal museum system (the Smithsonian Institution's 21 museums) and national funding agencies (NEA and NEH) as well as examine culture as a historical form of “soft power,” that morphed in a strategic campaign to consolidate political power during the Culture Wars of the 1990s, and again more recently, over the last ten years. The content of this course consists of lectures, class and group discussions, readings and one optional field trip.
About the instructor: Jenni Sorkin writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. Her recent is Art in California (2021), written for Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed World of Art series. As a state, California is the site of tremendous diversity in the visual arts and has been at the forefront of cultural production throughout the 20th century. Her first book, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examined the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics. Recent projects include the essay “Affinities in Abstraction: Textiles and Otherness in 1970s Painting,” in Outliers and American Vanguard Art. Lynne Cooke, ed. (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2018) and “Alterity Rocks: 1973-1993,” Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now. Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino, eds. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). She has published widely as an art critic, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Art Monthly, East of Borneo, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Frieze, The Journal of Modern Craft, Modern Painters and Third Text. In 2004, she received the Art Journal Award. She currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Modern Craft, and has served as a member of the editorial boards of Art Journal and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture.
Requirement for ALL semester students:
The last four weeks of the semester (March 27 to April 17) will be spent in a special topics module taught by Professor Marc Sandalow on Wednesdays from 6:30-9:30p.m. This module will account for 15% of the core seminar final course grade. Please contact Professor Sandalow (marc.sandalow@ucdc.edu) with questions.
Your selected seminar will begin the week of January 9 and your seminar instructor will officially be your instructor of record for the term, responsible for computing and submitting final course grades at the end of the term.
**NO additional registration required.