Elaine O'Brien

Art 111 :: Latin American and Latino/a Art

Map games for Latin America

Pre-Conquest map quiz

Latin American modern countries map quiz

PBS Video 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 an 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 Latin American 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. 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: Art 111 is a General Education course in Area C-1 (the Arts). It is also GE Writing Intensive Course with prerequisites of upper-division standing and the completion of the University’s Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement.