The following courses related to the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics are offered through the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts in collaboration with other campus departments. View full course details through Princeton’s Office of the Registrar.
ART 573 / HUM 537 / MCM 211A — The Chromapolitics of Visuality
This seminar explores the politics of color in the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who create or engage images in ways that challenge us to see color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead as portals that allow us access to powerful social and cultural dynamics. Our emphasis will be on the multiple resonances of dark colors, especially the varying intensities of blacks, blues, and violets, as well as deep red-browns. We will also consider their extended manifestation in shadow, night, blur, blind fields, and color adjustments.
In Spring 2024, guest participants included Madison Moore, Keisha Scarville, Stanley Wolokau-Wanambwa, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman and Joseph Pierce.
VIS 424 / ART 479 / AAS 424: Radical Composition
This seminar examines the radical possibilities of collaboration as fundamentally a process of radical composition through which collaborators bridge different modalities of creative expression – textual composition, artistic composition, speculative composition, among others – that span multiple media, forms and practices. By modeling and exploring collaboration as radical composition, this course seeks to reframe it as more that a dynamic of participation and coordination, and to recognize it as a generative methodology for producing critical scholarly and creative work.
In Spring 2022, guests included Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, Onye Anyanwu, Cameron Rowland and Saidiya Hartman; in 2023 guests include Ekow Eshun, Nico Pareda, Christopher Harris, Elisabeth Subrin, Amie Siegel, Torkwase Dyson and Christina Sharpe.
ART 571 / ENG 590 / AAS 571: Frequencies of Black Life
The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life’s frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life’s irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?
Guest participants for Spring 2023 include Ekow Eshun, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Vanessa Agard Jones, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin and Torkwase Dyson.
