New Orleans as Method: Time, Tradition, and the Art of Black Cultural Production (ARTSINST 136)

This interdisciplinary course approaches New Orleans not only as a place but asa method, a living archive of Black creativity, resistance, and survival. Throughart, music, dance, performance, and storytelling, students will explore how Blackcultural production in New Orleans has marked time, carried tradition, andresisted erasure from the city's founding to the present. We will trace the city's African and Caribbean roots, examine its unique role as a site of cultural continuity, and consider how creative practices such as masking, second lines, and spiritual rituals operate as acts of memory and resistance. Students will use interpretive and critical modes of inquiry to analyze aesthetic and cultural practices, examining how expressive works articulate responses to displacement, survival, and belonging. Through readings, discussions, and experiential learning, students will learn to interpret and analyze cultural objects and traditions as complex responses to historical and contemporary conditions of power. The course also centers on questions of difference and power, inviting students to examine how race, geography, and history intersect in shaping artistic expression and social identity. The spring-quarter immersion trip to New Orleans will allow students to engage directly with artists, scholars, and community institutions, gaining first-hand insight into how Black cultural practices both reflect and resist systems of oppression. After returning, students will engage in a form of creative autoethnography, using art-making as a language to articulate what words cannot. Through material exploration, reflection, and experimentation, students will learn how creative practice itself becomes a valid mode of inquiry and knowledge production. Students will create community-engaged projects that translate their experiences into creative, critical, or collaborative forms, bridging classroom inquiry with lived practice, and present these works in a community exhibition early in the spring quarter. Through this process, students will come to see art as both archive and method: a way of keeping time, carrying tradition, and reimagining collective memory as sites of knowledge and resistance.