School
Global narratives from 1900 to the present.
Art history was never neutral. It was written from a small set of European cities, and it called itself the world. This course is the institution's longest correction. Twenty-four lessons, taught by twenty-four art historians from twenty-four different vantage points on the same century.
You will not be told that the Bengal School, the Caribbean avant-garde, the Baghdad Modern Art Group, Mono-ha, or Las Arpilleras were derivative. You will be shown that they were primary, and that the canon you were taught was the local one.
— from the course frame: "Rather than treating these narratives as peripheral or derivative, the course positions them at the center, using art history itself to reveal and address broader cultural and social processes."
The 1910s and 1930s are usually told as a story of European invention — Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism. The same decades are also when the Bengal School answered Tagore's question of what a modern Indian image could be, when the Harlem Renaissance was rebuilding the figure of the Black artist on its own terms, when Mexican muralism took the wall back from Europe, and when the Caribbean and Andean avant-gardes were writing their own modernisms in parallel.
This module places those movements alongside the European ones, on the same timeline, with the same stakes. The shape of modernism changes when you do.
The Cold War is usually narrated as a contest between two centers, Washington and Moscow. The course shows what was happening in the rooms the two centers were not watching. The Baghdad Modern Art Group writes a manifesto on the figure of the Arab horseman. The Hurufiyya movement turns Arabic calligraphy into abstract painting. Gutai stages its first happenings on a beach near Osaka. Mono-ha leaves stones where they fall. Brazilian Neo-Concretism rewrites Constructivism so that the body can hold the work.
None of these movements were waiting for permission from New York or Paris. They were the work, not the periphery.
The 1960s and 1970s are when the canon's authors stopped pretending to be invisible. Feminist art names the studio. Black Arts names the museum. Las Arpilleras stitch the names of the disappeared into cloth and ship them out of Pinochet's Chile through Catholic backchannels. Aboriginal Australian painting moves from sand to canvas. The Pacific names itself a region. Political video is invented in eight countries at once.
This module traces the networks — feminist, anticolonial, queer, Black, Indigenous — that worked across borders before the word "transnational" was in art-historical use.
The 1990s and 2000s are when the biennial replaced the museum as the form through which contemporary art is made visible. Havana 1984 was first. Johannesburg 1995 followed. Sharjah, Gwangju, Istanbul, Dakar, Kochi, Lahore. Each one was an argument that the next history of art would be told from somewhere it had not been told from before.
The module reads what those biennials produced, what their commercial market did to them, what the Documentas and Venices borrowed back, and what was lost when the work that had been made in Lagos or Beirut was framed as "emerging" by buyers in London.
The course closes on the present and the next ten years. The Anthropocene reframes the artist as a witness in a geological court. AI rewrites who an author is. Indigenous land-back movements are not metaphors; they are the actual return of the river and the forest to the people who lived with them before the colonial ledger.
The two final lessons ask what art history will look like in 2050 if it is told from the rivers, from the displaced, from the synthetic, and from the children of the artists this course has just made central.
They are art historians, curators, museum directors, biennial curators, and writers from Vienna, Singapore, Bologna, Bombay, Harare, Hanoi, Mexico City, Tokyo, Cape Town, Manila, Beirut. Each of them lectures on the period and the region they have spent their career thinking about. You meet a different one most weeks.
— and others who join individual sessions as guests.
There are four ways. The full course is the one most people take. Single sessions are a way to test the cohort if the dates do not all work. The reduced rates are the institution's commitment to keeping the course inside the reach of the people it is for.
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Six surfaces, one place. Use whichever is closest to the question you arrived with.