Imaging Change: Art & Politics

SINY 146 - Imaging Change: Art & Politics

This course examines the opportunities and the limitations of artistic production amid social and political upheaval. With a special emphasis on projects created within recent years, students will learn about artistic responses to political issues such as gentrification, labor, immigration, economic and racial injustice. This course will examine some of the people, collectives, and organizations that use the realm of the visual to address and advance human rights and social justice. How have artists working through this time sought to teach history, resist oppressive regimes, create new narratives, and develop broader social inclusion? We will explore the artists, activists, and arts organizations who are surfacing politics in their work, and how they continue to work under all kinds of circumstances. The class will include visits from working artists and other cultural producers, and field trips to New York museums.

This course fulfills the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry (A-II) and Exploring Difference and Power (EDP) WAYS requirements. 

Meet the Instructor(s)

Danielle Jackson

Danielle Jackson is deeply committed to bringing discrete people, ideas, and disciplines together. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center, an internationally-recognized gallery and educational space that uses photojournalism and documentary film to create conversation on social change.  Formerly, she ran the cultural department at Magnum Photos NY where she coordinated a range of lectures, traveling exhibitions and retrospectives for museums, universities, and photo festivals in more than a dozen countries. Her observations on cultural practice can be found on Twitter @Makerthinker. She holds a BFA in Film and Television and MA in Africana Studies from NYU.