2025 Fall

HISTART 89 001 - LEC 001

Materiality and Making in Indigenous Art from the Ancestral Americas

Aug 27, 2025 - Dec 12, 2025

Mo, We, Fr

02:00 pm - 02:59 pm

Genetics & Plant Bio 103

Class #:33559

Units: 4

Instruction Mode: In-Person Instruction

Offered through History of Art

Current Enrollment

Total Open Seats: 45

Enrolled: 2

Waitlisted: 0

Capacity: 47

Waitlist Max: 5

Open Reserved Seats:

38 unreserved seats

7 reserved for Art History Majors

Hours & Workload

9 hours of outside work hours per week, and 3 hours of instructor presentation of course materials per week.

This lower-division undergraduate course examines selected examples of Indigenous art from South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean between 5000 BCE and the 16th century. Each week the course will explore a different medium: stone, clay, textiles, gold, jade, shells, feathers, soil, and bodily tissues, and highlight the connections between materials, making, and meaning. Engaging with theories of craftsmanship and technology, Indigenous worldviews, and human-environment relationships, the course will also examine how Indigenous forms of making challenge and expand the traditional methodologies of Art History that developed from the Greco-Roman tradition.

Class Description

This lower-division undergraduate course examines selected examples of Indigenous art from South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean between 5000 BCE and the 16th century. Each week the course will explore a different medium: stone, clay, textiles, gold, jade, shells, feathers, pigments, resins, soil, and bodily tissues, and highlight the connections between materials, making, and meaning. Engaging with theories of craftsmanship and technology, Indigenous worldviews, and human-environment relationships, the course will also examine how Indigenous forms of making challenge and expand the traditional methodologies of Art History that developed from the Greco-Roman tradition.