The Art of the American West - A six week lecture series on-line

2nd Session is on Monday, 1/29/24. There is time to join and a video of 1st session available.

This is a lecture series provided via the Zoom platform. Each session is recorded so participants can review each session.  Links are provided for each session and the recordings. The series is comprised of 6 sessions, starting on January 22.

This is the description of the new course.

Since the first Europeans came to the Americas, the subjects of the “new world” has greatly influenced artists.

In the U.S, the grandeur of the landscape and the attitudes, esthetics and crafts of its indigenous inhabitants served as great subjects to painters and sculptors, writers, photographers and film-makers.

Many American artists who studied in Europe saw our West as the home of an exoticism and a light that European found in the East and North Africa, fanning the foundations of modern art with its acceptance of “primitivism”.

A particularly exciting nationalistic subject turned into the creation of a huge mythology based on those visions.

We will explore the who, when, and how of this phenomenon, by considering the art created from both sides: The Euro-American approach, and the Amerindian subject and its art, so different from zone to zone ( from the northeast woods to the Mississippi culture and the Southern Seminoles, the center-plains hunter-tribes, the northwest, peoples and Californian natives, the Eskimos and Ojibwa of Canada, but most popular and painted amongst artists, the Pueblo, Athabaskans and the Southern raiders). This phenomena lasted two hundred years, but peaked from right after the Civil War to the 1950s.