English 246 - Hoodoo Is What We Do: Black Poetry, Poetics and Spiritual Practice

Visionary London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner “sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo. This course of interdisciplinary reading and writing explores “how Black people have thought through, imagined, and articulated freedom through artistic and cultural production,” an idea central to Wales Bonner’s Artist’s Choice exhibition, Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection. How is spirituality defined and activated through contemporary art and poetry? How do Black artists innovate and improvise beyond the realm of organized religions? The class works toward a practice-based poetics, where creating is a way of working through these questions to arrive at new ideas. Enrollment limited to 30.