This document announces a seminar course titled "Art in Motion: Mobility, Materiality, Modernity" that will examine how American visual culture moved through space from the late 18th to 19th centuries. The course will consider art that literally moved, represented mobility, and spread ideas. It will discuss how art transmitted information and mediated cross-cultural encounters, as well as how concepts of circulation, mobility, and modernity were visualized. The instructor is Janine Boldt and the course is offered at William & Mary in the spring 2016 semester.

1. ART IN MOTION:
MOBILITY, MATERIALITY, MODERNITY
AMST 470-02 / ARTH 489-03
Spring 2016 u MW 3:30-4:50
One of the features of modernity is the global circulation of people,
objects, and ideas. Beginning in the early modern period, objects circulated
on an increasingly global scale through trade, smuggling, exchange, gift-
giving, and collecting, often crossing cultural and political borders. This
seminar examines mobilities of American visual culture from the long
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will consider art that literally
moved through space, materialized mobility, and set ideas in motion. Some
further questions we will discuss: How did art transmit information and
construct meaning? Did people see and think globally? How did people use
art to mediate cross-cultural encounters? How did ideas about circulation,
mobility, and modernity manifest visually and materially?
Contact Instructor Janine Boldt at jmyorimoto@wm.edu for more information
Image credits: Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, 1656 - William Harnett, detail from The Artist's Letter Rack, 1879 - Eadward
Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878 - John Singleton Copley, Boy with a Flying Squirrel, 1765