SFSUAFRS 312 – Kalifia: The Black Heritage of California--Mighty Real: The History of San Francisco Bay Area Black Artists
Draft Description
AFRS 312
" Kalifia: The Black Heritage of California--Mighty Real: The History of San Francisco Bay Area Black Artists"
SPRING 2017
Meets Fridays, 1:10-3:55 PM
This course is an upper level course for students who enjoy historical writing about visual art.
Students will research, write, and publish in this subject area--an understudied one. Assignments will include archival research, conducting interviews with Bay Area historians of African American art, and collecting oral histories that would be the content for a public learning resource: a blog (audio or video) or an app documenting black artists' work held in area collections, such as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, and some private collections. As an SFSU-based resource that could expand beyond Academic Year 2016-17, these tools would serve College of Ethnic Studies courses and may attract future students and scholars to our campus.
Off campus meetings will take place at the San Francisco Art Commission which administers the Washington HS mural made by Sargent Claude Johnson in 1942. The class will also visit the previously mentioned museums, Bay Area Black Historical Societies, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. There will be visits to the Collections Center of SFMOMA, an institution that collects and exhibits work made by living black artists.
https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/230990?token=OUTgVeAweA
Contact: francis@sfsu.edu
Course Website: https://webapps.sfsu.edu/public/classservices/classsearch/detail/2173/REG/10648
Course Blog - SFSU AFRS 312 ("Mighty Real: San Francisco Black Bay Area Artists"--Spring 2017) at Geo. Washington H.S. (Feb. 10, 2017)
Yesterday afternoon, we had a great visit to GW High School in San Francisco's Outer Richmond neighborhood. At GWHS saw the monumental Athletics (1942), a mural by African-American artist Sargent Claude Johnson (1888-1967) on the school's ball field. Inside the main building were the provocative Life of Washington murals (1935) by Johnson's contemporary, the Russian-born Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979), and a response to them by contemporary African-American artist and San Francisco Institute of Art Professor of Fine Arts Dewey Crumpler (born 1949).
Thanks to GW Principal Susan Saunders, Librarian Marianne Philipp, and the GW student body for making us feel welcome and at right at home!