Elaine O'Brien

Art 111 :: Latin American and Latino/a Art

Map games for Latin America

Exemplary Reading Response paper

PBS Video (Sept.2010) When Worlds Collide

Ph.D. dissertation by Ella Diaz (Festival of the Arts speaker):“Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: The Ongoing Politics of Space & Ethnic Identity”

Course Description: This course is a sweeping overview of the history of Latin American and Latina/o art. After a survey of ancient cultures with selected readings, documentary films, and discussions of Mesoamerican and Andean cultures, our focus shifts to Spanish and Portuguese colonial art, then to art of the independence era in the first half of the 19th century, the rise of modernism across Latin America in the 1920s, and finally to contemporary Latin American and Latina/o art, with a focus on regional Chicana/o art. We will look briefly at the art of the African diaspora, focusing on the former French Caribbean colony of Haiti. A trip to see Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural at the Ocean Campus of San Francisco City College is assigned as is an exhibition of Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) posters in the University Library Annex Gallery in April. The expansive geographical and historical breadth of the course allows us to ask what (if any) identifiable forms, attitudes and concepts characterize “Latin American and Latina/o” art.

Note: This is a Writing Intensive Course with a prerequisite of upper-division standing and the completion of the University’s Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement. 
University expectations for Writing Intensive Courses:

1. The course must build on the basic skills and knowledge acquired by students in their foundation courses in General Education or the major.
2. The course must expand students' knowledge by examining complex issues.
3. The course must expand students' abilities to reason logically and to write clearly in prose.
4. Students must be required to write not less than 5,000 words of clear and logical prose (not to include simple narrative or diary writing).
5. Instructors must work actively with students to sharpen analytical abilities and to improve their writing styles.
6. Writing assignments must be spread over the entire semester (with at least 3,000 of the 5,000 words due before the last two weeks of instruction).
7. Instructors must provide timely responses and evaluation of each writing assignment, and evaluations and comments must not only be about the subject matter content but also about writing skills.