ARTH337

Cities and the Arts, as taught by different faculty members in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, will investigate the urban environment and visual culture(s) of one or several major centers. The class will consider how a large city's culture absorbs, transforms, and utilizes multiple external sources in developing a particular local brand defined as its "identity." It examines the visualization of ideals of local coherence as well as the arts of fragmentation and competing internal cultures. Cities and the Arts considers how a large city's interface with an expanding external world, even a global one, allows for appropriations and the rise of discrimi-nations; it examines how exclusions form within the city itself, and how social groups visually articulate identities that may run counter to the larger urban mythology.